“In order for everything to happen as God knows it will, we must make those choices that enable God’s plan to reach fruition, right?”
No, I don’t think so. I mean, it would seem that way at first glance, but you are thinking from a human perspective, saying things like “God knows it will”, as if He is sitting in the past, looking at the future. That’s not the case at all, since He is past, present, and future all at the same time, or perhaps the past, present, and future is all the same to Him.
Take this example, think of time as a dimension of space, like Einstein and Minkowski did. From our perspective, we are stuck at one point, moving in a single direction along a plane of time. We can’t see what is ahead of us, or behind us (we can only store what is current in our memory, and then approximate the past from that information). However, a being in a higher dimension could look at the dimension of time, like we view a flat 2-dimensional object laid out on a table, and see the entirety of it at a glance.
Now, God is not in a higher dimension, but rather, He is higher than all possible dimensions. So, if a being who is able to perceive merely one dimension higher than us can conceive of time and things like determinism in a completely different manner than we, then how much more superior must God’s perspective be? Knowing that, how can we presume to use our limited reason to judge how those things truly function from his perspective? We aren’t even equipped to concieve of what a physical object that was four dimensional would look like visually, and yet we would presume to reason our way to knowing how God percieves things? It’s a fool’s errand.
All we can really do, is say that God has told us that he knows all, including the future, but He has also told us that we have a free choice to make to determine our future. Since God has told us both of those things, then they must both be true, whether or not they appear to create a paradox from our perspective. It seems most reasonable to me to simply assume the paradox is an illusion, even though we are in no position to know exactly why it is a false paradox.
I guess we just believe differently.