8th March 2025 question-box

Tonight’s question is:

How are we to understand free will / predestination? As Christians, how are we to respond to claims that life is deterministic and that God is evil as a result?

So, last week I answered a question about God and time. We considered how we make real choices, but also God has a plan, and we all reach the destination God has planned for us. The bible uses the word “predestined” to describe this: “…In love He predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ.” (Ephesians 1:4–5).

But I guess what tonight’s question is getting at is that if everything that happens is part of God’s plan, and yet sin happens, does that make God the author of sin? The bible teaches that the answer is “no.” Let me give two examples:

• Example #1 is Joseph in the Old Testament. Do you remember the story? Many evil things happened to him: he was sold into slavery by his brothers, and later sent to prison for something he didn’t do. And yet because of that experience rose to a high position in Egypt, which meant that his family was saved from famine. And at the end of it all Joseph said to his brothers: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good.” (Genesis 50:20). Can you see that in the same event there were two intentions: a good one and an evil one? The brothers made a sinful choice, but it was part of God’s plan for good.
• Second example is Jesus. In Acts 2:23 it says: Jesus “was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.” In the same event humans were acting on their wicked choices, and yet God was bringing about the greatest good ever.

See, when we say that God predestines people, I don’t think that we should imagine God sitting there with a remote control making everyone’s choices for them. We often talk about God being “in control” but it is more accurate to say that He is “sovereign”, that he rules over all things. Sometimes he makes the sovereign choice to take his hands off and allow people to follow their own evil desires in ways that he knows they will… Sometimes he makes the sovereign choice to intervene, and to motivate us to choose what is good. And he does it all in such a wise way that the end of the story is that he has accomplished great good.

And so God is not the author of sin, because has a different relationship to good and evil events. He more directly causes the good, but he permits evil … and even then only for a time. There’s obviously a lot more I could say about that, but if you want to know more – put another question in the box.

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This question was originally answered in our evening service on 10 November 2024. I’ll aim to post another question and answer next week. You can read about how our question box works here.