Why would God send His Son to pay for our sins if He already knew who would accept Him and who would reject Him based on foreknowledge (omniscience) and His unquestioned ability to offer universal salvation (omnipotence) if He so chose? Beyond a Sunday School answer, I (we) don’t know. There are many things I (we) must accept by faith to be a Christian. The big one begins even before Adam was created. Why did God allow Lucifer to become Satan, which started the whole ugly process of sin germinating from a place of non-sin?

Beyond the unending debate over salvation being either foreknown, predestined, or a free-will decision of man, what about everything else in life? Are we automatons, predestined puppets under the control of a puppet master, God? I just don’t think so. Is God the watchmaker who set everything in motion at the point of creation and has backed off, just watching our time run out? Nothing in a unified view of Scripture would suggest that.

God gave us a brain to think and reason. He gave us a heart to love and experience both joy and pain. There are many carnal Christians, agnostics, and atheists that perhaps place human thought on too high a pedestal, arguing our ability to reason exceeds God’s authority. Said more clearly, they believe we should ignore the Bible, assume it was written by flawed, centuries-old men, and consequently do what we think is right based on the conditional morality of today’s society.

In my view, there is a balance between God’s will and our free will. I believe God gave us free will, not to use our brains to reject His instruction manual for life, but to love Him by adopting His words (the Bible) into our lives. I think God does, at times, take His hands off the wheel of our lives, already knowing that what we will do next fits into His perfect will. He allows us to make decisions that form the illustrations in our lives which help in our sanctification as we get ready to serve Him for eternity. If that was not the case, there would be no need for an instruction manual written by the Creator of the universe.