If God knows everything, God knows the future. If God knows the future, how can there be free will?
Question: If God knows everything, God knows the future. If God knows the future, how can there be free will? If the future is already known, then it can’t be changed, and therefore there cannot be free will. And why does God get angry about events when he already knows what is going to happen?
Answer:
The OUTCOME of the future is already known. By “the future” I am referring to the totality of the future. God knows who will win the final war. (He allowed there to even be a fight!) God knows when our sun will die and even when our entire Milky Way galaxy will expand into nothingness. Unless of course, God intervenes at any point and changes these timelines. He is known for stepping into our limited timeline and impacting events.
We have free will to choose our own fate. God pre-determined a judgment day. He pre-determined many will be saved, many will face the judgment, and many of those won’t have a good verdict. We still get to choose which of these categories we fall into.
I know some of the future. I know that sometime in the next 70 years I’m going to die. So since I know this outcome does that mean I don’t still have options within my free will? Of course not. I can still choose today if I want to die of natural causes, or suicide. Either way, I can still choose to finish writing this response first. Does God foresee that I would do this? Maybe. But He allows us to have the choice anyways, whether we choose wisely or not.
The purpose of existence is to glorify God. God allows evil to exist (for a set amount of time), even though He hates it, for two primary reasons:
- It brings Him glory to exercise His own perfect grace and mercy and be the redeemer and reformer of created beings that were once evil to becoming good.
- It brings Him glory to exercise His own righteous justice and wrath and be the punisher of evil doers and avenge those who had evil done against them.
God is infinite. He has and always will exist. The “future” is not out of God’s reach because He is timeless. “Space-time” exists in our dimension because we are finite creatures. He merely allows us TO CHOOSE TO LOVE HIM OR NOT. The rest of our choices flow from this foundational decision. He is completely in control of the entire story. He has invited each of us to willfully participate in our own small part within the larger story. We all will anyways, whether we want to or not. We either participate in being (a part of category #1) or participate in being (a part of category #2).
