God Predestines From Heaven
Our Father, who dwells in heaven, is very involved in the affairs of mankind here on Earth. YHWH (the name of God-given to Moses) is not, as agnostics believe, unknowable or even aloof. Rather, God cares deeply about His creation.
The Lord God is guiding mankind back to our pre-fallen state of sinless perfection. To accomplish this goal through many divine interventions, great and small, to lead back to the garden.
The first divorce changed everything
For example, in the beginning, after Adam and Eve had strayed from the fist law and ate of the forbidden fruit, God banished them from Eden. He did this so that they and their descendents would not live forever in sin. When the first world government became totally evil God brought a flood to cleanse the Earth. Mercifully, through Noah, God saved eight souls alive to repopulate the world.
Essentially, God erased 1600 years of pre-flood civilization and started over. Again, when the descendents of Noah organized themselves for evil at the tower of Babel, God confused their languages. It was not time for mankind to centralize, but rather to multiply and spread over the face of the Earth. All these interventions demonstrate that when mankind strays too far from the predetermined plan of God He intervenes and corrects the course of history to His liking.
God imagination predestines our future
In view of these examples and many more, perhaps God’s foreknowledge is based upon His plan for mankind rather than actual knowledge of the future. If you are all-powerful and decide a certain thing will take place, of course you know what is going to happen. Consider this: does God know that things will turn out a certain way because of precognition or does God guide the events of mankind towards a predestined future of His own design? Maybe this is what predestination actually means: God foreknows because He predestines people and events towards a certain outcome that He intentionally foreordains. Therefore, because God’s ability to predestine (make events turn out a certain way) is perfect His foreknowledge of the future is perfect too.
God’s hand is firming molding and shaping our lives
God is intimately involved in each one of our lives too. He predestines us to conform to the image and likeness of His Son Jesus Christ.. Many times we are not aware of God’s hand, because we are so focused upon our natural circumstances. People tend to be oblivious to the grace that God gives us through His interventions.
I once I fell out of a tree. After I caught my breath, I only suffered minor busing. I could have, if natural minded, just chalked it up to chance and good fortune. However I realize it was the hand of God that saved me when, by all the laws of physics, I should be dead. Subsequently, I went to Africa and worked in the ministry for many years. God predestined me to preach and teach His word in so when I fell He saved me.
God says,
” The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
2 Peter 3:9
Though God guides, we all have a choice
Whether we will choose Heaven or Hell is not written in stone, but is a product of our free will. We have a choice and we are not chained to a future that we have no control over. We are not called to be fatalists. This is the central fallacy of the doctrine of predestination as it is taught in many churches today. They think because we are predestination we are bound to an unalterable future. The truth is though that we are predestination according to God’s foreknowledge of events, He determines what will come to pass. Our decisions have already determined our future in God’s mind and that is why He speaks of each one of us as predestined. YHWH simply knows what is going to happen because He is going to make it turn out that way.
Don’t fight like hell to resist God’s will
The only way any of us is going to be cast into the lake of fire is if we stubbornly refuse to allow God to save us. In actually God has predestined everyone to be saved and people will have to fight like hell to resist Gods will. No one will look back upon their life during the opening of the books at the great white throne judgement and be able to say they never had a chance. No one will be able to say there is nothing they could have done to accept Jesus. In fact, those who are going into outer darkness will do so with the full knowledge that they worked very hard to get there.