Category: Predestination/Free Will

Q. Do you think our lives were determined by God the day we were born? Is it a fixed destiny regardless of the twists and turns? Or is changes from time to time?

I think the discussion in this earlier post will largely address your concern:

Does the “sovereignty of God” mean that God is responsible for everything that happens?

That post responds to a question asked from the perspective of God, rather than from the perspective of human experience, as your question is but the answer is really the same either way. As I say in that post, God is not the only free moral agent in existence, but God is able to work through the free choices, both good and bad, of human moral agents to accomplish His purposes.

So I would say that our lives are not determined the day we are born; God has built a beautiful but terrible freedom into the moral universe that allows us to make choices by which we might bring joy and blessing to ourselves and to others, or by which we might cause great suffering. But God hasn’t left us alone to make those choices and to deal with their consequences; rather, God is an active free moral agent right in the mix, and with His infinite wisdom and power, He is constantly at work to help us make our choices work out, if we will live in fellowship with Him and depend on Him. So we should pray for wisdom and strive to develop godly character, so that we can cooperate with God in his plans for the created universe.

As I say at the end of that post, I picture God out there saying, “Let’s see what happens next. I’m sure I can do something with it.” We should respond, “Please do, and let me know how I can help!”

Q. Some people say you have freedom of choice, however, if you believe that God knows all things, then he knows what you are going to choose. People think they have a choice but if you really think about it, you really don’t. If you say yes you do, then you don’t believe God knows all things. We may think we have a choice, but he knows what you are gonna choose. Yes or No. Peace to you. Oh, by the way, back in the ’60s when I asked this question I was slapped in the face.

First of all, let me say how sorry I am about the experience you had when you asked this question before. Though it was probably fifty years ago, I’ll bet it still hurts, physically and emotionally. I call this blog Good Question for a reason. I honestly believe that questions like yours are good. They allow us to probe more deeply into what we believe, to see what we can understand better, and to recognize that there are maybe some other things we just won’t understand in this life. But there’s no such thing as a bad question, if it’s asked out of a genuine desire to learn and understand. May God give you grace and peace to deal with the memory of that slap. It should never have happened.

Your question is one that has actually been asked before on this blog, from a number of different angles. For example, one person asked how God could ever have created Satan. Even though he began as a glorious angel (Lucifer), didn’t God know that he would disobey, fall, and turn into a monster who would wreak havoc on the earth for all of human history? In my response, I rephrase the issues this way:

“How do we explain the creation and continuing existence of Satan?  Is God not all-knowing?  (He didn’t realize Satan would rebel?)  Or is God not all-powerful?  (He thought he could stop Satan but then wasn’t able to?)  Or is God simply not all-good?  (He doesn’t care whether his creatures are destroyed?)”

I think you’re getting at some of these same issues in your question. So here’s what I say in that other post:

“I think the solution to this problem lies in appreciating the radical nature of the freedom that God has endowed each of His intelligent creatures with.  It’s hard for us to understand this because we are created and finite, but an eternal and infinite God can make creatures who are so free that their moral choices are not predetermined and so cannot be known in advance.

But isn’t God supposed to be omniscient and know everything, even the choices that we’re going to make?  No, it is no failure in omniscience not to know what cannot be known.  And the freedom God has given us is so radical and profound that the essential moral choices we will make cannot be known in advance.”

I develop these thoughts further in that post, and in a follow-up that deals in more detail with the issue of how our freedom can be reconciled with God being all-knowing. At the end of the first post there are links to some other related posts as well. (As you can see, many people have this same question!)

I hope that this blog will always be a place where you and others feel comfortable and safe asking any questions you want.

Q. I’m reading a book that says names are not added to the Book of Life, they are blotted out.  The book refers to the place in Exodus where Moses prays, “But now please forgive their sin, but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written,” and God replies, “Everyone who has sinned against me I will blot out of my book.”

I’d always thought our names were added to the Lamb’s Book of Life when we accept Christ as our Savior (as in the hymn, “There’s a New Name Written Down in Glory”).  However, if our names are already there, it seems to make more sense.  After all, it is not God’s will that any should perish.  Names would only be blotted out if a person refused forgiveness of their sins.  This would explain why infants who die and the mentally handicapped are able to enter heaven: they have not attained the capacity for accountability, therefore their names have not been removed.  It also explains why the whole human race is the beneficiary of what Jesus did.  Salvation is provided for all, but only becomes an individual reality when a person asks Him for it.

A. I find the idea very appealing that God writes everyone’s name in the Book of Life when they are born (or conceived), in the hopes that they will embrace salvation, and only blots people’s names out of the book if they definitively reject salvation.  Since none of us humans can ever really tell whether another person has done that, we can keep hoping and praying and reaching out friends and loved ones, patiently inviting them to embrace the love God has shown to them through Jesus.

In addition to the Scripture passage you mention in Exodus, the letter to Sardis in the book of Revelation seems to support the idea of names being blotted out, rather than written in, based on a person’s response. Speaking of those who do not deny Him in order to save their lives in this world, Jesus says, “I will never blot out the name of that person from the book of life, but will acknowledge that name before my Father and his angels.”

Moreover, in Psalm 69, speaking of those who are his “enemies without cause,” David prays, “Do not let them share in your salvation. May they be blotted out of the book of life and not be listed with the righteous.”  Interestingly, a couple of passages from this psalm are treated as Messianic in the New Testament.  John says that when Jesus cleansed the temple, “His disciples remembered that it is written: ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.'” And John later says, “So that Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, ‘I am thirsty,'” and he was given vinegar to drink.  This seems to be an allusion to another statement in Psalm 69, “They gave me vinegar for my thirst.”  All four gospels actually record this incident, and Luke specifies that the vinegar was given mockingly.  So if we see David as a type of the Messiah, then the enemies whose names he asks to be blotted out of the book of life can be associated with those who definitively choose to reject Jesus, to mock rather than accept the salvation he accomplished for us on the cross.

I would observe, however, that the case is not entirely clear-cut.  Some other Scriptures seem to suggest that names may be written into rather than blotted out of the Book of Life.  For example, there are a couple of different ways we might interpret Paul’s comment in Philippians about the co-workers who “contended at [his] side in the cause of the gospel,” that their “names are in the book of life.”  On the one hand, it doesn’t seem necessary for him to describe their genuineness this way if being written in were the default, and that nothing short of a definitive rejection of Christ would blot someone out.  On the other hand, he may be contrasting them with the people he has just described, who “live as enemies of the cross of Christ” and whose “destiny is destruction.”  In that case, Paul would be saying that his co-workers, by contrast, have not been blotted out like these people.

One more reference to consider is the one in Revelation that says the beast from the abyss will impress and terrify “the inhabitants of the earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the creation of the world.”  This seems to suggest that not everyone’s name is written in from the start.

So how we might resolve this difference?  We should admit that it’s unlikely that there’s an actual physical book somewhere in the spiritual realm into which names are entered in ink, or blotted out with ink. Instead, we should perhaps understand the Book of Life as a metaphor that biblical writers use for salvation, speaking either of names blotted out (most commonly) or written in (in a few apparent cases).

Nevertheless, this metaphor represents a genuine spiritual reality.  As Paul put it in his second letter to Timothy, “God’s solid foundation stands firm, sealed with this inscription: “The Lord knows those who are his.'”  In other words, the Book of Life, however physically or spiritually we understand it, exists somewhere, somehow, as a representation of God’s sure knowledge of those who are His.

That may be one good takeaway from this investigation:  If we have genuinely trusted in Jesus, we never have to wonder whether He knows that and will honor it.  As He said to the people of Sardis, “I will acknowledge that name before my Father and his angels.”

And I do have to say that I personally come down on the side of your statement, “Salvation is provided for all.”  If pressed to choose one understanding or the other of the Book of Life, I’d say that all names were written in first, and they would only be blotted out in cases where a person understood but definitively rejected God’s offer of salvation through Jesus.

Q.  I recently heard it said that the “sovereignty of God” means that nothing ever really happens by chance; rather, God is responsible for everything that happens.  What do you think of that?

The notion of “sovereignty” has to do with freedom to act.  We speak of a nation as being “sovereign” if it can conduct its own affairs without being restricted by outside powers.

Consequently in the Bible the “sovereignty of God” usually refers to God’s rule over all the kingdoms of the world, as expressed, for example, in the statement repeated several times in the book of Daniel, “The Most High is sovereign over all kingdoms on earth and gives them to anyone he wishes.”

In Christian theology, this idea is applied more broadly to God’s unrestricted freedom to act to accomplish His purposes.  For example, in his book The Attributes of God, A.W. Pink explains, “Subject to none, influenced by none, absolutely independent; God does as He pleases, only as He pleases, always as He pleases.”

Personally I have no problem with this.  (In fact, I find it very reassuring!)  I would be careful, however, of extending the idea, as you heard done, to claim that because God can do anything He wishes, then God is responsible for everything that happens.

One website I came across in writing this post claims, for example, that “the sovereignty of God is the biblical teaching that all things are under God’s rule and control, and that nothing happens without His direction or permission.”  I agree with the first half of that statement, but not the second, which I don’t feel follows necessarily from the first.

Why not? For one thing, there would be a serious moral problem with God being responsible for the many evil and tragic things that happen all around us.  It would be very difficult to reconcile that with the Bible’s portrayal of God as good, loving, and just.

But there’s also a logical problem.  Just because God is an agent with unlimited freedom and power to act, that doesn’t mean that God is the only free moral agent in existence.  Humans and other spiritual beings, I believe, also have at least some freedom to act, so that what we encounter in our lives may be the result of their activity.  I think that God is able to work through the free choices, both good and bad, of moral agents to accomplish His purposes—that’s one important way I see God exercising His sovereignty to bring about His desired ends.  This gives us hope that even in the troubles and tragedies of this life, God can be at work for our good and for the ultimate advancement of His kingdom.

Beyond this, some of what we encounter in life may be simple chance.  I think God has built enough freedom into the world that this can be the case.  The Bible seems to talk about this at times.  There’s this famous statement in Ecclesiastes:

The race is not to the swift
or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
or wealth to the brilliant
or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all.

And Jesus himself invoked the concept of chance in his parable of the Good Samaritan:  “Now by chance a priest was going down that road . . .”

However, the way to make the case that the sovereignty of God doesn’t mean that nothing happens by chance isn’t by collecting individual statements like this from throughout the Bible.  Rather, as I said before, we may simply observe that just because God acts with unrestricted freedom, that doesn’t mean that God is the only moral actor in existence, and that God may have built so much freedom into the creation (as a reflection of His own attribute?) that things really can now happen “by chance.”

I picture God out there saying, “Let’s see what happens next.  I’m sure I can do something with it.”

Q. Does God know who are to go to heaven (those with His seal)? Or it is an individual who makes a choice between light and darkness?

You’re asking a question that thoughtful people of faith have wrestled with throughout the centuries: What ultimately determines whether a person is saved, God’s sovereign choice of them, or their response to God?

I believe that this is one of those mysteries of our faith that we must respond to by embracing both sides of a paradox.  If we let go of either side, we lose something essential.

We need to hold onto the idea that our salvation is entirely the work of God, because none of us human beings can save ourselves.  This principle would extend even to the act of choice:  we are not even capable of choosing to be saved because of the deeply imprinted effects of sin on all areas of our being, including the will.  So God must choose us.

However, we must also hold onto the idea that we are morally responsible in some way to respond to the overtures that God makes towards us, that is, to the gracious influences that God brings into our lives to lead us to salvation.  Our inability to save ourselves does not absolve us of the responsibility to seek salvation and to accept it when it is offered.

I believe that the Bible teaches both divine sovereignty and human moral responsibility—sometimes in the same breath!  For example, Peter told the crowds in his Pentecost sermon, “This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God [divine sovereignty], you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men [human moral responsibility].”

So we need to embrace both sides of the paradox to have a full understanding of where our salvation comes from.

It’s been said that as you walk towards the gates of heaven, you see written above them, “Whosoever will to the Lord may come.”  But after you walk through the gates, you look back and see written above them, “Chosen from the foundation of the world.”  I think that about sums it up.