If we all have a choice, we all have a choice. If God sees that choice in advance and then does not create those who “chose” (in the future) hell - and does not indicate that He is doing this to the others who are choosing heaven - then the choice for Heaven remains a very real choice.
It only feels real to them. In reality, everything they “choose” was already chosen for them. They only choose it because God chose it for them first. That won’t be in their minds while they choose what God foreordained them to choose, but the fact that they can’t perceive it for themselves doesn’t mean it isn’t occurring.
Perhaps I can explain better by getting into the illustration you offered.
An illustration: You get married and God reveals to you that you will have seven children and six of them will turn out well. The seventh will end up choosing to become and die as a drug addict. Knowing the future, you decide to use artificial birth control when the time comes to conceive your seventh child, to make sure they never come into existence (“They’re better off that way,” you reason.) Does this mean that children number 1 through 6 never had the chance or option of becoming drug addicts themselves? No, not at all.
From their
perspectives, they have a choice to become drug addicts. Their perspectives are limited, though. In reality, you are behind the scenes choosing their fates by deciding whether to use birth control or not. You are manufacturing their destinies by using your foreknowledge to determine who your children will “choose” to become. When you only choose to allow people to come into existence who do what you want, their choices were already chosen by you and the people (whether they know it or not) HAD to take them. You actively chose them rather than passively allowing the people to decide for themselves. If there’s no possibility of failure, there’s no real success. Only the false perception of success (and in God there is nothing false).
Let’s say the father decides to allow all seven to survive, while foreknowing what they’ll choose because God told him. In this case, he has foreknowledge, but he is not using it to predestine the futures of his children. He does not choose their futures before they “choose” them, so their “choices” are not really his choices. By allowing one of his children to choose to become a drug addict, rather than using his foreknowledge to prevent that child from existing, everyone’s choice becomes a real choice of his or her own. The Dad is not secretly controlling the outcome, but is allowing it to come out as everyone wills.
They were entirely free to do as they pleased and turned out the way they did because of a free choice to do so, not because they were not free. You, knowing that your seventh child would freely choose to go astray, decide out of “compassion” not to allow him to be born in the first place. Thus, the seventh child (Who now doesn’t even exist in the first place) may not have had the “free will” to choose in the end, but the other six certainly did.
Did they? If one of the other six would have chosen differently, the Dad would have not made that one. By restraining one from existence rather than let him disobey, the Dad assumes control of the choices of all seven.
When the Dad only allows his children existence if they would choose the future he wants them to choose, the choices of all of them become only choices from their perspectives, and the real decisions are all coming from the Dad.
Imagine the six and the Dad die and go to Heaven, and the Dad confides in them there, “There wasn’t actually any risk. If any of you would have chosen to be a drug addict, I wouldn’t have let you exist in the first place!” Suddenly all his sons will feel both their efforts and their lives cheapened. They realize that while it had felt to them as though they faced and overcome real danger, from the Dad’s perspective, they had never been facing any danger. They could not have actually chosen anything the Dad didn’t want them to choose, even though they felt as though they could. So their efforts are cheapened by the lack of having endured any real danger. But not only were their efforts cheapened- their lives are cheapened by the fact that their Dad would have kept them from existing rather than allowing them to make real bad choices for themselves. Thus their lives only have value if they turn out the way the Dad wants.
This is very different from the Dad who goes to Heaven with his six sons, while the seventh goes to Hell. There, the Dad says, “I knew you’d do it! God told me that you would make it, and I knew you could do it, but your choices were your own and the possibility of deadly failure was real.” The efforts of the six do clearly deserve reward because they could actually have chosen what the Dad didn’t want, and their lives are shown to be enormously valuable, for even if they chose Hell and did what the Dad didn’t want, they still would have intrinsic value.
By preventing the existence of the seventh child, the Dad eliminated the reality of the choices of the other six. For by eliminating the seventh child, he eliminated the reality of the possibility of failure. If there was no possibility of failure, there was no true reality of success, even though his sons felt that there was a possibility of failure while enduring trials. I understand that the Dad did not actively force his existing six children to do the good they did (though one might argue he did, because if God told him he was going to conceive a son who would only do a little good, why wouldn’t he prevent that one from existing too, and only allow those that would do a lot of good to exist? We can take this scenario further), but the Dad did eliminate the reality of the possibility of any of them failing, so even if they wouldn’t have failed if the dangers had been real, they’ll know that their efforts and successes were ultimately cheap because they were decided for them (by them being allowed to exist, as they fulfill the Dad’s will).
It is also worthwhile to understand, here, that God’s relationships with his people are based on truth. So he won’t create everyone and allow them to go through their lives and all come to Heaven, and never learn either on Earth or in Heaven that he had prevented them all from having any possibility of failing, and that he had chosen both their goodness and their successes before they were conceived by choosing to create only great and perfect people. So that would eventually come out, and when it did, it would show that God’s predestination rules everything, and humanity is only what it was made to be, not what it chooses to be, for it only chooses to be what God chose it to be, so God’s choice is the only one that counts.
