God's plan and Predestination

God’s Plan and Predestination

In Revelation I think it’s clear that John is saying God has a plan and that in that plan eternal happiness is prepared for those who are saved.

When I say this I often hear that that sounds like predestination. I don’t believe in predestination. I do believe in free will. Think of a football coach who has a plan for how his team can win a game. He has an expectation that his passer will throw accurate passed, his receivers will catch the ball and his blockers will protect the passer. On any given play any one of those players may not do their job as well as expected but that doesn’t mean the plan was bad or even that it isn’t working.

Suppose that you are the offensive tackle for that team and for one play you get tired and don’t put in full effort so you miss your block. Maybe someone will put in the extra effort and block the person you missed or maybe the play fails and you lose yardage. That doesn’t mean the plan was bad or that the overall plan will fail in the end. Heck, the plan may be for you to make lots of blocks during the game and you get injured on the first play so someone else has to fill in. Just because you got injured doesn’t mean it was a bad plan or that the plan still won’t work and it sure doesn’t mean that the coach planned on you getting injured. In fact the coach probably feels as bad about your injury as you do.

If you had a perfect coach and perfect players on your team every play would work. Fortunately in life we do have a perfect coach but our coach is working with imperfect material and a pretty good coach on the other team working to destroy the plan and the players.

I know some people will read this metaphor and say that it doesn’t explain a lot of things about predestination like how can God know the end result and still say we have free will. I can only say that we are humans living in a physical world limited to using physical examples to explain an omnipresent, omnipotent, all knowing perfect spiritual being and any metaphor we use will have holes in it. I can only hope that this story helps your understanding of what I mean when I say God has a plan.

Comments

Add New

RSS