Providence and free will

Everyone’s familiar with the question . ‘ He knows what we are going to choose before we ever choose it . Then , how can we choose everything freely . And if it has been determined from eternity that i will choose one path rather than another , there is really nothing for me to genuinely choose ‘ .

When we say that God’s knowledge is eternal or that he knows from all eternity the choices we are going to make , we don’t mean that He knows at a time in the distant past what you will do in the future and that this knowledge determines you to do it . Instead , it means that the kind of knowledge God has is not limited in any way by temporal constraints as our knowledge is .

Time is the measure of moving , changing beings or in other words , time is a creature every bit as much as these things are . God , our creator , however , is beyond such measure . His being transcends time and all such temporal categories .

Hence , although we naturally think of God’s eternity as if it were a temporal extension stretching infinitely back into the past and forward into the future because our language reflects the kind of being we have ; finite , changing and time-bound , God’s being cannot really be like that . He sees us in a single and eternal act of vision with all our free choices as they really exist , embedded in their times and places as well as circumstances .

Such potential cannot be an impediment to our free acts . Just because we can’t have freedom if He didn’t create us doesn’t man that we don’t have freedom because He has . God never contradicts Himself . He wouldn’t have created us with freedom if He wanted to take it away at a later date . It would have been easier if He left us as cows and let us spend our days grazing away without the ability to think for ourselves .