The 50-year lens

Recently I had a 28 year old person try to correct me on the matter of God's predetermined will for people and His omiscience. I still resist the idea that I have tried to reconcile all my life. My 20s decade is the last decade of my life to really entertain the thought that God might have some predetermination in history. I just cannot believe that is how it is. God works with people no matter their condition. I have seen that over and over.

People in their 20s have not seen God work in people's lives very often, much less their own. So they may hypothesize, but I don't think they have the ability to see so clearly. Of course, their usual response to my rejection of their idea of predetermination is God's omniscience. I can't buy that either if they mean God is all-knowing by it. I think it is a little convenient to concoct the idea that God can see the whole time continuum of one's life so that people can think God is in control. Free will means that God has given up that aspect of control to his creation. I have seen God pull people from some pretty seedy places in life and give them hope. I have seen others slip slowly away into nothingness and never reach out to God. But I have not seen people who have walked with God who think it was because God willed it to be so before they were born.

We have a creator that is magnificent and certainly more powerful than humans. We have a creator that loves his human race so much that he gave his only son so that he could offer them a life that never ends. We have a creator that works with us to lead us home to him.

We do not have a creator that knows our every move before it happens because he predetermined it. No way. That would surely have impeded his great care for his human race. Which he wiped out once in anger—except for one person and his family. Which he abandoned after he tried to fashion a certain man's descendents into a nation that would acknowledge him. But which he agreed to work with in a nurturing way after letting his son seal a new agreement with them. But that's looking through a 50 year old lens. And I like it a whole lot better.