You’re mistakenly mixing God’s undoubted omniscience into our free will. God knows all things, and knows each and every action we will ever make, and knows all of them from all eternity. BUT WE DON’T! Therefore, we have true free will to accept or reject His grace, to eat or not eat that steak, to accept or reject blue as our favorite color. We are not robots; we can make real choices. God, in turn, offers His grace to all of us, but does not force us to accept it. This allows us to exercise our free will, even in our responses to God. Therefore, all of our choices with respect to God are free, and all of the consequences of those choices, good or bad, are based on our own wills, and thus deserved.
This is the only way to view creation with any type of sanity. Total predestination makes no sense of creation, as nothing has a purpose. We are merely programmed robots, and nothing can really be done to God’s glory. Why, then, does ANYTHING exist? If nothing in creation has any choice but to play out its fate, how does grace really come into the equation? It can’t. You might say that the person was predestined to accept the grace, but that merely masks the problem. Why would not God simply save the person as foreordained straightaway, without the flummery and facade of “offering” grace to a being that has no foreordained choice but to accept it? Life itself is meaningless in such a scenario.
We are here to tend God’s vineyard. The events playing out in that vineyard DO redound to God’s glory, because true faith and subsequent free acts of goodwill show the result of His grace being efficacious. He respects our free will to reject that grace, too, because even that redounds to His glory. While God is sufficient unto Himself, and doesn’t strictly NEED anyone or anything to manifest His glory, nevertheless, He has chosen, in His infinite wisdom, to establish His creation anyway, and that creation does, in fact, serve to manifest His glory. This can only be so if that part of creation created in His image and likeness (intellect and free will), namely, angels and mankind, CAN ACT ON GRACE in a way that has a true purpose. In other ords, they cannot be mere machines or automatons. Grace itself is meaningless in such a universe. God’s “glory” is a mere shadow in such a creation. No. We have true freedom, and only within that reality does God’s grace have any true meaning.
In the end, yes, God already knows the outcome of all events, good or evil. To that extent, it is true that evrything is “predestined” in a way. But, by way of analogy, God has not set up a chess game in order to move all of the pieces around Himself. It’s more along the lines of His setting up the game, and then allowing the pieces themselves to move around on the strength or weakness of their own free and true choices. His only “intervention” is to offer all of the pieces His “advice” (grace) as to what constitutes the best move. Having given them the tools to respond to His “advice” (intellect and free will), He lets the pieces make real, actual moves. This latter type of creation can manifest God’s glory, the former type, where all of the pieces have no free will, really cannot. We are truly here for a reason, we are not the product of a sick joke!
Therefore, in the context of this thread, men may make real, honest CHOICES with respect to God’s call. Their vocations are heartfelt, and not merely imposed. Their free offering of themselves has far greater merit for themselves, and manifests God’s glory in a far superior way, than if they had no real choice in the matter, and they were merely inserted in their roles through God’s will ordained from all eternity. Again, there is a real PURPOSE to our being here!
Of course we don’t know what our future choices will be, but I believe that man only believes he has free-will. If God truly knows what each of us will do, then our choices can only be what He knows we will choose. I believe He created each of us, knowing exactly what our ‘freewill’ choices are going to be.
Just because we must view creation as humans, doesn’t mean that is the way it is, it just means that is what we are limited to seeing. It may make no sense to us, why should it? We are just men. What is wrong with following God’s program? It’s not as if we couldn’t anyway. How could we do anything other than what God knows we will do?
Why do you feel that we humans should or even could know why anything exists? To me that sounds a little arrogant.
I too believe our pupose here is to fulfill God’s will.