Monday, November 06, 2006
So, a very astute student of mine has asked me a very important question about free will. I'll need someone to help me answer this better. Her question is, "how is it free will when God already knows who will/won't accept His gift?" Help me answer that for her intelligently. Thanks in advance, Guys! (BTW, "Guys" is an all inclusive term for men and women)
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5 comments:
robert...
i'm a friend of jim whaley, and he sent me the link to your post. i’d like to try and help you answer your student’s question if I may…
to me, the crux of the matter is the distinguishing between "predestination" and "foreknowledge." predestination makes no allowance for free will. man has no say in the matter. in fact, some hardcore predestinationists would say that even if a person had never in his entire life heard the name Jesus, if he has been predestined to be saved, he is going to heaven. this of course flies in the face of acts 4:12, which tells us there is no name under heaven by which man can be saved except for Jesus.
in ephesians chapter 1, paul does a lot of talking about being predestined, but a close reading of these verses shows that it’s those who “HOPE in Christ “ (v. 12) who are the ones that have been predestined to be holy and blameless in His sight. my understanding of this concept of predestination is that its not certain individuals that have been chosen at random, but rather it’s any individual who has put their “hope in Christ.” verse 13 goes on to tell us that we are included in Christ when we HEAR the word of truth and BELIEVE. salvation, therefore, involves some action on man’s part; some response to the offer of the free gift of God’s salvation. the gospel message is preached, we HEAR it and we BELIEVE. romans 10:17 tells us that faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ.
so free will comes into play upon the hearing of the message of the gospel of Christ. once we have heard the gospel, we must choose for or against Christ. in acts 24:24-25, is the story of paul witnessing to felix, the governor of caesarea. after paul had spoken to him about faith in Christ, felix sent paul away, and told him he would send for him again when it was convenient. there is no record of felix ever accepting Christ. if indeed there were no such thing as free will, then paul would have preached the gospel and felix would have instinctively accepted. surely paul of all people, would not have wasted his time and his breath on felix if his eternal destination was already a foregone conclusion, especially when paul had better things to do with his time, like plead for his own life.
so what do we make of God’s FOREKNOWLEDGE of our lives? simply this… God is all powerful, all present and all knowing. the fact that He already KNOWS doesn’t mean that chose our lives for us. if foreknowledge of our eternal destination translates into God CHOOSING our eternal destination, then he most assuredly has foreknowledge of every detail of every day of our lives, and therefore he has CHOSEN every detail of every day of our lives. if this were true, why bother making any decision at all? why even live life? why didn’t God just create a race of people that live forever in heaven with Him from the moment their existence begins?
why did Jesus give His disciples the Great Commission in Matthew 28? if the Father had already chosen who would live with Him forever in heaven, and who would spend eternity in hell, why did Jesus even come into this world and suffer and die? one needs to look no further than John 3:16… “for God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that WHOEVER BELIEVES IN HIM shall not perish but have eternal life.” of all the evidence that exists for man’s free will, the necessity for one to CHOOSE TO BELIEVE is the greatest of all.
thanks for the opportunity to share.
in Him,
dean cirelli
Thank you, Dean. I believe that will help her (and me) a great deal. :)
Great job Dean-o! Hope his helps Robert.
Wow! That was one long explanation of the doctrine of predestination. I'm sorry I missed out on it.
I think that to get around the problem of divine foreknowledge, one must recognize God as existing outside of time and space. If, indeed, God is the creator of time and space, there is good evidence that he does exist outside of it. Otherwise, God would be self-created.
The simple answer to the freewill dilemma then, is that God's ability to perceive "our" future has nothing to do with knowing what "will happen." God does not perceive these events chronologically as we are forced to. The end of our lives are not in His future. So, the whole problem of God knowing what a person "will" choose is a false dilemma.
That's an explanation from a philosophical persepctive anyway.
When children are taught to walk, do their parents know they are going to fall down? Yes. That is foreknowledge. Did the parents push them down? No. That would be predestination. That's my own very simplistic explanation and I'm sticking with it!
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