Predestination doesn’t mean that we don’t have a say in our daily lives.
I think I read somewhere to imagine that you are walking along a level road. You approach a curve. You of course cannot see around the curve until you come to it.
On the side of the road is a large hill. Picture God, standing on the hill. From the top of the hill, God can see you, the road, the curve, and WHAT IS BEYOND the curve.
But God does not make you go around the curve–you choose to do so. When you get to the curve, you see that there are two forks in the road, each looks exactly the same. You choose one. God did not MAKE you choose that fork. You chose it.
So, God SEES all the possibilities and He KNOWS what steps we will take, but He does not move us along like little chess pieces or little robots. And the “time” experience is different, since He is “out of time”; He does not experience, as we do, past, present, and future, but only an eternal NOW, so He is not planning to “do something to us” in the future, for example.
Does that help?
And what God’s plan for us always IS would be that we love Him, serve Him and be happy with Him–but what we ourselves freely CHOOSE might NOT be that plan. I mean, as a mother I WANT my children to choose the right path, and I do everything I can to help them, but even so, they might still choose the wrong path, and while that would certainly not be my PLAN for them, it would not be that I 'predestined them" for evil because I gave birth to them.
Even if it looks like a person just was a terrible force for evil and should never have been born (Hitler), this does not mean that God was wrong in creating Him, or did not realize what could happen. . .even though from our human perspective it looks as though NOTHING good, or at least nothing that compares to be as equally GOOD opposed to the horrible BAD of Hitler could be–from God’s perspective, something Good, that more than made up for the bad, has or will occur, something that we are just not capable of seeing. We’re on the road. We can only look behind us and just as far as we can see ahead, we are at best three dimensional, while God is infinite and eternal. Trust in Him.
) etc-what can we do? What I’m trying to ask is, God has a plan for us-but how does this differ from predestination? If everything happens for the best, how does this not make life pre-planned? What say do we have in what happens to us?