Total predestination is incompatible with a God of love.

For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dies, says the Lord GOD - wherefore turn yourselves, and live. (Ezekiel 18:32)

And we have known and believed the love that God has to us. God is love; and he that dwells in love dwells in God, and God in him. (1 John 4:16)

There are many people in the world who believe in what I call “total predestination”. This is the belief that all of everything that happens, from the first moment of creation, has all been predetermined by God. He knows exactly what I’m going to do next before I do it, and He knows what I’m going to do twenty years from now. It doesn’t seem too unreasonable at first glance - one might even think that an omniscient God would have to know what we are going to do and what’s going to happen ahead of time.

However, a closer look reveals that total predestination doesn’t actually work, from both a Biblical and a logical perspective. The pure logic is complicated (first prove that there’s a God, then prove objective morality, then prove that God is love, and then you can disprove total predestination - this works, but takes way more than one post to fully explain), but the Biblical argument against total predestination is relatively simple. In fact, all it takes are the two verses quoted above.

If God has already decided everything that is going to happen before it happens, that means that all of our actions have been predetermined. This is a problem when you look at history. Look at Pharaoh. Look at Hitler. Shoot, look at who we were and are right now! If you’re anywhere near as messed up as I am, you can see that we all do things that are outside of God’s will. And things that we do that are outside of God’s will harm the innocent. Harm eventually leads to death. That means our sin leads to death.

This makes sense when we’re just looking at humanity, but, if God has predestined everything, that means He knew that we were going to sin in the ways we did. Furthermore, if we are locked into what God already knows we’re going to do, that means that God is writing what we do. If we can’t make choices outside of what He knows will happen, then someone must have made that choice, which means that God made that choice (since He is all-powerful). If He’s writing the future, and He’s making our decisions for us, that makes Him responsible for our sin.

If God is responsible for our sin, then that means that every single death was determined by Him so that His final perfect creation would occur just the way He wanted. That means that He does, in fact, take pleasure in the death of him that dies.

Well that contradicts the Ezekiel verse above about as directly as you can contradict it!

Furthermore, nothing loving takes pleasure in the death of its creation. I mean, look at a mother cat protecting her kittens. Even a cat can figure out that their creation should be protected. If God’s ways are higher than our ways, then most certainly His ways must be higher than the cat’s ways, not lower. That means that, if total predestination is true, God must not be a God of love. That contradicts the verse in John.

This means that one of two things is true:

1) God is not a God of love, and the Bible is false.

2) Total predestination is wrong.

The Bible has a lot more evidence for it than total predestination. We have to just assert that total predestination is true - that’s all the evidence we have for it. We have evidence of the charred top of Mt. Sinai, the split Rock at Moreh, Noah’s Flood, and Jesus’ resurrection. If we chuck the Bible just because we assume that total predestination is wrong, we could have just as easily chucked it by asserting that God does not exist. An assertion without evidence cannot beat a history book with evidence behind it.

Total predestination does not align with the Bible. Since the Bible has a lot of evidence to prove that it is true, I think we can say with certainty that total predestination is false.

Thanks for reading!

Peace to you. May love light your path.