Does God give us genuine free will?

Hey everyone, welcome back to TUC Talks.

I'm Nick, I'm the youth worker here, and today we are joined by um the wonderful Lee, our um kids' ministry worker, and we both preached yesterday, and we're going to be talking a little bit about the big question that we've been answering.

Lee, what was the question we were trying to answer on Sunday?

Okay, so it was a long question.

The question was put forward by Phil Rogers, who's one of our elders, uh, goes more to an eight o'clock service.

And the question was does God give us genuine free will?

And if um free will is genuine, does it follow that God's got no control how we use our free will for good or for evil?

And does it follow that there are some things that God cannot control?

So it's this question about human agency that has all of these metaphysical and philosophical implications.

And then it also brought a predestination in the uh where it becomes the problem of free will because uh with predestination, that's meaning that God already knows who's been saved and who's been damned.

It might be good, and you'd be an amazing person to do this because you've got um a super um reformed background, I guess.

Um, it might be good to give a quick overview of what predestination is for the listeners if they don't know.

Well, that's like I just said, that's what predestination is.

It's um God knowing, already knowing what lies ahead.

Uh come the end of days, who's going to be saved and who's not going to be saved.

Yeah.

I feel like who's been selected for salvation and who's been selected for damnation.

Yeah.

That's my understanding of it.

I think that's how I've I've usually heard predestination, right?

It's a question of salvation, who is saved and who's not.

And it's this idea that um I guess there are some people who from birth are destined to be saved and some people who are destined to be damned.

And I've always really struggled with that idea personally.

Um, but I think that there's also um kind of an interesting question inside there.

Like you mentioned, um, does God know that things are going to happen?

And in my sermon that I did on the weekend, I sort of found myself in this place where I was like, I think God definitely knows everything that's going to happen.

I think God is omniscient, I think God knows all things.

I think that God has total awareness of all things that are going to happen.

But I don't necessarily know that God has willed them all to happen in that way.

I think that we do still have genuine free will, even if God is aware of that outcome.

And I'd be really interested to ask you this question.

So one of the things I was thinking about was um the experience of um, you know, knowing someone really well.

But in the example that I used, um, the example of a parent who knows their kids really, really well and might know exactly how they're going to respond on an emotional level when something happens.

You know, if if you give them some good or some bad news, or if you know the day's going a certain way.

And you can know someone so well that you know exactly what's going to happen, you just have this knowledge of how they're gonna respond to something, but on an emotional level, there's still some surprise there.

You're still affected by the outcome, whether it's your kids or whether it's a friend that you're giving some bad news to.

And I feel like maybe that says something about our relationship with God.

God actually wants to be affected by us, and God wants to be in relationship with us in that way, not in maybe what we sometimes do, which is we reduce God to sort of this computer that just knows everything and does everything, but isn't necessarily a um a spiritual being.

We we almost think of God as like a mechanical one sometimes when we talk about these questions.

Uh gosh, there's a lot in that what you've just said.

So um getting back to the relationship side of it.

So, in what I preached about yesterday, is I chose the prophet Jeremiah to help me answer the question of free will, especially free will.

And what happens to the people of Israel is exactly that God's people, and God giving them um Jeremiah being the prophet, and he's there to guide the people and to show them this is what you're doing, is not the right way.

If you keep doing something bad, is going to happen.

And then um Jeremiah um continues telling that people, and this goes on for decades.

So Jeremiah's just delivering this bad news, and people are just not listening.

So it's the same as like with a parent, like you've brought that analogy up, just telling your child the same thing over and over and over and over.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And they just don't listen, they just don't get it, and that's what happened to the people of Israel.

Yeah, then the bad news happens, temple falls, the people are led into exile.

Now there can be the finger pointed and going, I told you so, I told you this would happen if you don't listen, which is what a parent offered, but God doesn't.

In their darkest moments in exile, they amongst a nation um of people that are probably not warm and welcoming to them, probably treating them really poorly, they're in the unknown, they don't know what's gonna happen.

Yeah, there's lots of worry and concern.

You just don't know what we're in a strange place, they're surrounded by strangers, they're surrounded by a strange culture.

This is the people are going through a difficult time.

And then there's obviously that it's easy to go, I told you so, this is what happened, but God doesn't.

God gets down there in with them and says, This and this is what we're gonna do.

We're gonna we're gonna work, we're going to plant plants, we're going to marry, we're gonna have kids, we're gonna have grandkids, and I want you to pray for the nation that's taking you to exile.

And that's like to me, that's like, wow, you know, these people are treating us so badly.

God's saying, everything's gonna be okay.

I've got a plan.

God shares the plan with people.

These people need hope, they need something comforting, something to hold on, something otherwise they're just gonna fall apart.

So Jeremiah gives them that this message from God saying, everything's gonna be okay.

Just move forward.

Uh uh have families, grow in numbers.

Everything's gonna be okay.

I'm gonna be here with you.

If you prosper, if the nation around you prospers, sorry, if the nation around you prospers, you will prosper.

So pray for that nation.

Yeah, yeah.

So in that, it's just this I want to be a part of what you're going through.

I want you to be part of my plan.

Yeah.

And I and God's saying, I still want you to be, I still want to be with you.

That's all um really interesting, and I love that you mentioned hope in there.

That something that came up in my sort of research this week.

Um if we don't believe in free will, there's almost something kind of hopeless about that.

Like we can feel sort of doomed to our choices, and to me, it's a horrible thought that all of our bad choices are choices ordained by God, right?

Um to me, I sort of feel like there is one ultimate will, and that will is God's will, and God's will is always the same, and at every moment in our lives, there is a choice that we could make to fall in step with God's will.

Yeah, but we're people, so we, you know, our free will brings us out of it.

And I think that the the beauty of our free will is that it allows us to choose God.

Um, we're not forced into loving God, we're not um uh coerced into loving God.

Um we get to choose that of our free will, and that also means that you know the the bad things that we do we also choose, but those moments that we choose God are entirely of our own volition.

And I think that's so much more amazing than taking on a view that uh almost leaves everything up to you know the decisions made at the creation of the universe.

Um yeah.

Uh there's a lot of love in it, though this the story of Jeremiah and how much God loved the people.

And we we can hold on to that because that that love has spread across the world now.

Yep.

And I brought up another reading later on in the sermon about um Paul writing a letter to uh Philippians, yeah, and Paul talks about how amazing the people are, and he speaks about the joy of uh the people and how wonderful it is that they are walking with Jesus and following Jesus and things like that.

And he's just like this, it's that deep, deep joy of knowing a really powerful relationship with God.

Yep.

So I brought that up because that's that's what we are choosing.

We are choosing something amazing, we are choosing to love God, and we are choosing to have that joy in our lives, which means that during the roughest days of our lives or during the days that we are celebrating, God is going to be there with us.

You know, he's gonna stay there with us, and that's in exile.

God stayed with people in exile, he didn't leave them, yeah, didn't go anywhere, he stayed with them in exile.

And God's will is always there, ready for us to choose it, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So, and I I just have to be a little bit airy about it because it was like that's a beautiful thing, that's a joy, yeah, that's a joy in our lives, and I feel blessed to have chosen to follow God and to work every day of my life for God.

And I did bring up a lot of personal things in the sermon as well, like personal experiences, like I have experienced a time where God wasn't part of my life, and uh in the darkness where things were really bad, that's where God found me in the darkness and showed me the way back.

Absolutely, and I was able to come back back to God and back to his love, back to his open arms.

So even though I'd done all these terrible things, I still felt loved and the warmth and all of that.

And then I spoke about how I chose to move to Australia.

That was my decision.

It was the most difficult decision of my life because I was following someone I barely knew, because Noel and I, although we'd been together a few years, we're still getting to know each other.

Yep.

I was choosing someone over my family who I deeply loved.

So it was a I was taking a huge risk.

Now, 10 years later, I'm like, yeah, I know I made that decision.

But then there's people that I meet in my life, and especially at Terrigo Uniting Church.

And I named a few yesterday of these people that I've met, and I just can't have help but have this feeling like I was meant to meet these people.

I was meant to meet the people at Terra Gold Uniting Church that they were supposed to be in my life, that I was meant to be placed there.

Then I'm going and I'm going, oh, so was it actually my choice, or did just God want me there to begin with?

So that does make it more interesting.

It is so interesting, and like I I I love that story, and I love um I love your conclusions because on the one hand, I love the idea of free will and I love the idea of choosing God, but I also don't believe in I guess what you would call like a deist God.

Um deism was a very popular school of religious thought, um, especially in the United States in um the 18th century.

And basically their their view was it's it's not atheism, they believe God is 100% real, God created the universe, um sort of everything, uh everything like that.

God set everything in motion, but then he took a step back and and we just sort of sought ourselves out.

And that's that's the deist view, is that God doesn't intervene in our lives at all.

And I don't think we can go there either.

I think free will free will is true.

I think we do have free will, but that doesn't mean that God doesn't significantly influence the course of our lives.

Well, if you put it this way, it could be um looked at as God convincing us to become to join his plan.

Yeah, yeah.

Join me.

So I'll go back to Jeremiah.

So the start of the book of Jeremiah talks about Jeremiah's call.

When God first called Jeremiah, Jeremiah actually goes, Whoa, I'm too young and I cannot speak.

And then he talks about how God reached out and touched his lips and said, Okay, now you're able to speak.

So it was like Jeremiah going up and going, Oh, I don't want to do this, and God intervening is the word you use, but more I would say giving um Jeremiah the confidence and the ability to do what God needed him to do.

Yep.

And in that giving him confidence, it's also convincing him and saying, come be a part of this.

Absolutely.

And we all have God moments, right?

Um we we all have God moments in our lives.

Sometimes they're really little things like um just making a decision or meeting a new person in a day, and sometimes it's something huge, like um I I'm sort of getting the impression that when you moved here, it was only later on that you sort of thought of that as a as a God moment.

And that those are my favorite things when you look back on something in your life and you're like, wow, I really I I really got some help there.

You know what I mean?

I I was talking to I hope she doesn't mind me naming her, but I was talking to Sharon French.

Yeah, yeah.

She's one of our elders as well.

And while I was talking to her, I was just like, I feel like this conversation is a God-ordained conversation.

Like just what she was telling me, and she was giving me words of encouragement.

And I was just like, I felt like we were supposed to have this conversation.

So just those, and then you just it's like an aha moment, like aha.

Okay, I heard you there.

I heard you're part of this conversation, and that God was part of that conversation between Sharon and I.

Yep.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

That's so great.

Um, I love that.

Um, I want to quickly touch on um the second part of the question.

So is the existence of free will something that uh implies that God's power is in some way limited?

Well I didn't completely answer that question.

Me neither.

That's why I'm asking you.

In the in the book of Jeremiah, in the passage that I chose, it does talk about how um God says things like what's gonna happen to the people who don't listen and who continue living their lives far away from God.

Yeah.

And these are the people that are worshiping the idols and just involved in adultery, adultery, all of that.

And then um the message saying for those people that have stayed behind in Jerusalem, for the people that have um that aren't going to continue and follow me, this is what's gonna happen to them.

War, famine, disease, all of that.

And then you go back to when I was reading that, I was going, oh yeah, that sounds familiar for the the Egyptians when they wouldn't when um Pharaoh wouldn't let the people go.

Frogs, boils, uh disease, yeah, all of that.

The nasty stuff.

The nasty stuff.

So can God like is there some control there?

Yes, there's definitely control because we may not see it as clearly as uh a disease or boils or frogs or locusts.

Although every time I see a locust, I think, oh, is this gonna turn into something?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think for me, um I I tend to agree with the idea that God can do absolutely everything, but not the logically impossible, because like logic is not a question of God's power, it's just logic.

And so when you know, there were all of those um sort of snarky questions that people were asking at the turn of the 20th century, like people like Bertrand Russell and people like that, um, asking things like, Can God create a square circle?

And can God create something so heavy that he can't lift it?

Um, and these sort of like contradictions and stuff to call into question God's power.

And I think the answer to all of those questions is no, because that's just logically impossible.

Like what you're what you're just describing is just like nonsense, like it can't be overcome by the biggest force in the universe.

Um I think that we have genuine free will.

That doesn't mean that God doesn't have knowledge of who we are, but I think God is open to relationship, and I think that's how we can square that away.

Oh, um that comes back to the aunt and did you watch so uh Richard recommended to us to watch the episode?

Is this Ocket Myers?

I did watch that, his um his video on predestination, which you guys can check out on YouTube if you like.

Um it's from the big question series during COVID a few years ago, I think.

That's correct, and it's on our website under What's Happening, we got big questions, and it's episode six.

Cool.

And going back to something he mentioned in there is that so um instead of us call calling us the chosen, you know, or we are the saved, you could say it's we are the loved.

Yeah, and it just all in a nutshell, that's something that everybody should just remember that just go back to the basics that we are loved by God, and God wants to wants us to be a part of creation, wants us to be part of his big plan that he has for us.

We can't see that big plan, it's much bigger than any of us.

And this is how closed my sermon yesterday is I said, Imagine.

So you've I don't know if you've heard the saying about witnessing a sunset with someone you love is far better than witnessing it all by yourself.

I I it rings a bell, it rings a bell, yeah.

Uh, I try to find the exact saying, I just couldn't do it, but it's something wrong with lines.

But then imagine this God's completed his plan.

Wait, wait, wait.

Okay, way in the future, and you're standing there with God, looking back, and you're going, Oh, look at this beautiful, amazing works of God, wonderful, and you're standing there with God and you can actually say, I was part of this.

Yep, I decided to be a part of this.

Isn't that far better than deciding not to be a part of it?

So true, so true.

So, even though there is this big question around free will, I love that God loves me and wants me to be a part of his plan.

Yes, yep, and his will for the world, and just that is enough to get up in the morning and say, okay, I'm ready to get to work and do this.

Yeah, no, that's such a great way of just viewing your life in general.

That's fantastic.

Yeah.

Well, we might finish up there.

Is there anything you want to add?

Um, and then we'll maybe do a couple of notices.

No, there's nothing I'd like to add.

I just uh friendly reminder that if anyone wants to have a look at that question on predestination, uh Ock and Meyer, it's definitely worth watch.

I watched it about four times afterward, which I thought was that good.

I've been watched it.

Ok, it's my teacher at the college um for one of my classes this semester.

Oh he's very good.

Very fortunate.

Very fortunate, he's very good.

Um, our kids and youth program goes back this week.

Um, so that's on uh this Friday, this coming Friday.

And so we've got our 412 kids and our junior youth from four to six, and then our youth program from six to eight.

And we're looking for some more volunteers as always.

So just people to do all sorts of things, help prep food, help us to supervise, um, even little things like clearing up cobwebs.

Um, and if you're interested, if you've got a little bit of extra time, it could really be a little bit of extra time, not much at all.

Please get in contact with Lee.

Is there anything you want to add to that?

Uh I guess playgroup's back tomorrow, and I am still looking for someone to help me on a regular basis with setting up Playgroup.

That would be amazing.

So Playgroup runs from 9.30 to 11:30 on a Tuesday, and I'll start setting up at about 8:30 and all.

Fantastic.

All right, well, thank you so much, uh Lee.

I think that uh this week Richard is back from Leave, so he'll be preaching again uh this coming Sunday, and we hope to see you there.

All right.

Thanks, Nick, for your time.

Thank you, Lee.