QUESTION: How could God predestine everything that will happen and yet also give us a free choice? Aren’t these two ideas mutually exclusive?

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ANSWER: One of the great truths of the Bible is that God is able to know and be in control of all that happens, and yet still give us free will and individual choice within that plan. Of course, it looks to us as if that were impossible. But that´s why God is God... and we´re not!

One picture that has always helped me to understand these twin truths of God’s sovereignty and our free will is that of two ropes hanging before you and extending through the ceiling above your head. One is marked “predestination” and the other “free will.” If you were able to look through the ceiling you could see that the two ropes are actually one, hanging on a pulley above the ceiling. God can see in ways that we cannot see the ways that these seemingly contradictory facts are actually one powerful truth. Our free choice cannot violate God’s sovereignty and God’s sovereignty cannot violate our free choice.

The other way that the rope picture helps me is in a reminder that I can’t lean more heavily on one of these two truths than the other. If I lean too far in the direction of the fact that we have a free will I become humanistic, thinking that because we are given a choice we are somehow in control. If I lean too far in the direction of predestination I become fatalistic, thinking that since God has it all decided nothing I do matters anyway.

Struggling to understand truths such as this reminds me of how great God really is. If I were able to completely understand Him, He wouldn’t be the awesome God that He is!

Romans 8:29-30 - "For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified."

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• Written by Tom Holladay