Our Free Will

Have you ever been told that we do not possess a free will and that God preordains everything?  Our Calvinist friends believe in Double Predestination which holds that God predestined some for heaven and others for hell.  If this were the case, why do they bother to evangelize? Didn’t Jesus tell the apostles to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all” (Matt. 28:19-20)?

As Catholics, we believe that it is our choice as to whether we wind up in either place.  Just as with Adam and Eve, our response to God's call is an example of our free will. We can either accept the grace to believe or reject it since it is a free gift. If his grace if forced upon us, it no longer remains a gift but a sentence.
 

The Bible warns us over and over that we can have a full, experiential knowledge of Christ and yet, we can fall away because we choose to follow our own will instead of God’s (Matt. 7:19-23, 24:13, Rom. 11:22, 1 Cor. 4:4, 9:27, Hebrews 10:26-27, 2 Pet. 2:20-22, Rev. 3:5).

The Church teaches - as does the Bible - that we have a free will (Matt. 7:19-23, 10:22, 23:37, 24:13, 25:31–46, Luke 12:46, John 15:1-6, Rom. 11:22, Heb. 10:26-27, 2 Pet. 2:20-22, 1 Cor. 9:27, Col. 1:21-23, 1 Tim. 1:18-20, 4:1, Heb. 3:6, Heb. 3:12-14, 6:4-6, 2 Pet. 3:17, 1 John 2:24, Rev. 3:5,  22:19). Whereas some events and people may have been predestined for good - nobody has been predestined for hell, as God cannot be the author of evil.

When the Scriptures speak of God's “foreknowledge” or “predestination”, we must remember that he is out of time and is not bound by the same constraints that we are. To say that God foreknew something is simply a human explanation of describing that he ALWAYS knew. With God - everything is like a finished painting that he has always seen and continues to see for eternity. This, however, does not mean that he ordained everything that is in that painting because his will is not always followed.

One proof of this is 1 Tim 2:4, which states that God wills the salvation of ALL men. We know that not all will be saved because they exercised their free will to reject him. Jesus tells us so in Matt. 7:13-14 "Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruction, and those who enter through it are many.  How narrow the gate and constricted the road that leads to life. And those who find it are few.” This is our choice.