More than 2,500 years ago, Greek dramatist Sophocles wrote a play, Oedipus Rex, about King Laius and Queen Jocasta of Thebes, who were given a distressing prophecy: their infant son would grow up to murder his father and marry his mother! Horrified, the father had the infant taken away to be left outside to die of exposure, guaranteeing that the prophecy would not be fulfilled. The servant who was assigned the task, however, instead of leaving the child to die, gave it to a shepherd from the neighboring city of Corinth, where the childless king and queen, Polybos and Merope, adopted him as their own. Oedipus grew to manhood believing that Polybos and Merope were his parents.
Then, the young man heard from the gods the prophecy that his biological parents had heard years earlier: Oedipus would kill his father and marry his mother. Fleeing from Corinth, from Polybos and Merope, whom he believed were his real parents, Oedipus fought with a stranger over the right of way on a road and, in the fight, killed him—never knowing that the victim was Laius, his real father. Oedipus then ended up back in Thebes, where, having saved the city from a plague, he was given Jocasta, the recently widowed queen, as his wife, and they begat children.
Then another plague hit Thebes, and the gods told Oedipus that it wouldn’t be lifted until the murderer of Laius was found. Seeking the killer, Oedipus discovered that it was himself, that he not only had killed his father but that Jocasta, his wife, was also his mother! Horrified, Oedipus gouged out his eyes and died in exile.
And the moral (if you want to use that word) of the story is . . . what? No matter how hard everyone tried to avoid it, the prophecy was fulfilled anyway, which raises the question: Are we, like Oedipus, fated for a certain end, predestined for a specified fate, and—regardless of what we do, or what choices we make—that fate is assured? Do we even have free choice, or is it only an illusion? And if we don’t have free will, who or what then determines not only our choices but also our destiny? Are we all at the mercy of chance alone? And not only as individuals, but what about humanity as a whole? Is it doomed, as many believe, or is there some kind of escape hatch for those who choose it—that is, if they really do have free choice in the matter, anyway?
Christianity and free will
The Bible itself seems to reveal the reality of human free will, of human free choice, at least in a moral sense. Back in Eden itself, why was the first couple warned against eating from the forbidden tree (Genesis 2:17; 3:2, 3) if they did not have the free choice to do it? (Genesis 3:6). Why did God years later say to the nation of Israel: “I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19)?1 These words are nonsensical apart from the reality of human moral free will. And then there is Jesus weeping over Jerusalem: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!” (Matthew 23:37). This, too, makes no sense without free will.
Also, if the Bible teaches anything, it teaches that people will face judgment for their deeds. “For God will bring every work into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or evil” (Ecclesiastes 12:14; see also Matthew 12:36, 37). Certainly, a God who is not only loving but just will not punish people for deeds they had no choice in to begin with—right?
On the other hand, the existence of an all-knowing and all-powerful God does raise interesting questions regarding free will. For example, Jesus knew that Judas was going to betray Him even before Judas did it. “Most assuredly,” Jesus warned, “I say to you, one of you will betray Me” (John 13:21). In fact, according to Matthew 27:1–10, the prophet Jeremiah had hundreds of years earlier predicted the amount of silver, thirty pieces, that Jesus would be betrayed for. Was Judas, therefore, predestined to do what he did, with no choice of his own? If so, would that not raise fair questions about his own moral culpability? Or, when Jesus told Peter, “Assuredly, I say to you that this night, before the rooster crows, you will deny Me three times” (Matthew 26:34)—did Peter really have any free choice when, indeed, before the rooster crowed three times, he had denied Jesus (verses 69–75)?
Meanwhile, if God is all-knowing, then God knew a million years ago that you would be reading this article in Signs right now. Did you, then, have no free choice in the matter, even if you believe that you are reading it of your own free will?
physics and fate
By the mid-seventeenth century, the question of free will and free choice became even more complicated. Isaac Newton showed that all masses in the known universe, from the stars to the tides, followed precise natural laws that could be described by mathematical formulas. A century later, French polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace, based on Newton, argued that if there were a genius demon (think today of a supercomputer) who knew the position of every particle in the universe, then in principle he could know every event, every choice, everything that would ever happen long before it did. In 1751, Julien Offray de La Mettrie wrote a book called Man, a Machine,which basically applied the broad principles espoused by Newton to the human body as well.
Where was free will now? If from what went on in our brains to the motion of the stars were determined solely by physical events that followed natural law, then a man’s choice to kill his neighbor was (for instance) no different from his liver secreting bile. Both were beyond his control.
By the early twentieth century, however, quantum physics overthrew this idea of a “clockwork universe,” showing instead that, at the foundational level, reality was statistical, built on chance alone. At first, people thought that this idea of “quantum indeterminism” saved free will. It didn’t. Everything based on chance alone left no more room for free will than everything based on immutable natural law.
free will, foreknowledge, and love
Why, then, do we have such a strong sense of free will, of free choice? It’s because, as Scripture showed in Genesis, we really do have free will, free choice. God made us that way because it was the only way that we, as humans, could love. Love, to be love, has to be freely given, or it’s not love. So God did create us as morally free beings, even though He knew, “before time began” (2 Timothy 1:9; Titus 1:2), that humans would violate that freedom and that He would have to go to the cross to save them. Yet His foreknowledge of the Fall didn’t mean that it had to happen, any more than Jesus knowing that Peter would deny Him meant that Peter had no choice but to deny Him.
What does this mean?
Fifty years ago (a true story), John married Sue, despite the objections of Frank, who—close to both—knew that the marriage would not last. It didn’t. Did Frank’s “foreknowledge” predetermine their marital disaster (they had moved to the other side of the world, completely out of contact with Frank)? Of course not.
Now, if Frank’s partial knowledge allowed him to know the future, what about God’s perfect knowledge—a knowledge that no more predetermines what happens than did Frank’s knowledge predetermine John and Sue’s divorce? Similarly, if it were true a million years ago that God knew you were going to read this article, it is only because He knew a million years ago that you would freely choose to, that’s all. If you had decided not to, then a million years ago, He would have known that you wouldn’t choose to. Likewise, Jesus’ foreknowledge of Peter and Judas’s actions simply reflected His perfect knowledge of, and not His predestining, their choices. If, after Jesus had said that Peter would betray Him, could Peter have changed his mind? In principle, yes, but Jesus knew that he wouldn’t, which is why He said what He did. Had He known that Peter would do differently, Jesus would have spoken differently.
free will and the end
Even if, yes, we do have free will, and God’s foreknowledge of events doesn’t determine those events, there are many things in this world and in our lives that we do not control, whatever our free choices are. In fact, many of the major factors in our lives (our parents, birthplace, genetics), which greatly determine the course of our lives, were totally out of our control, just as are many aspects of the world as a whole, including its end. Some worry about climate change; others, nuclear or biological war; others still, about asteroids from deep space. There’s really little, if anything, that we can do about these things because they are far beyond our control.
But not God’s—and so, yes, though one day this world is going to end, that will happen only after the second coming of Jesus, an event that the Bible depicts like this: “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat; both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up” (2 Peter 3:10).
It doesn’t sound as if there’s much we can do about that, does it? There is, however, one choice we can make. Using the free will given to humanity in Eden, we can accept Jesus as our personal Savior and claim the promise of eternal life that is promised to all who accept Him. That is, it is promised to all who, using their free will, choose to accept Him. “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek” (Romans 1:16).
Regardless of the choices people made, Oedipus was fated for his tragic destiny. But that’s not how God’s world, the real world, works. Yes, some things are beyond our control, but they are not beyond God’s control. Whatever happens, we can trust Him. But also, and perhaps more importantly, by using our own free will, we can choose our long-term destiny, which will be eternal life with Jesus in a new heaven and a new earth.
Clifford Goldstein writes from Tennessee and is a frequent contributor to Signs of the Times®.
1. Scripture quotations in this article are from the New King James Version (NKJV).
