I’m interested in how one holds the concept of making choices with the concept that all choices are predetermined at the same time. It seems to be a life of cognitive dissonance as well as lacking in meaning.
“I’m interested in how one holds the concept of making choices with the concept that all choices are predetermined at the same time. It seems to be a life of cognitive dissonance as well as lacking in meaning.”
This assumes that your idea of “free-will” actually exists. None of the Reformers ever denied that mankind has a “will,” and the scripture does not say we have no will either. But, it certainly isn’t a “free” will, as it is either described as being under bondage to sin, taken in “the snare of the devil, who are taken captive by him at his will” (2 Tim 2:26) or held captive in the will of God who “works in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure” (Php 2:13). So to even utter the phrase “free will” is ridiculous. It is a mere figment of the imagination, an illusion projected by a corrupt nature that does not know itself. So you say that your life can have no meaning unless you have a free-will that simply doesn’t exist. In that case, you should, perhaps, find a new meaning for your life instead of fables!
The Reformists who fought against the Papal empire did not teach that we are brought to God by compulsion, kicking and screaming, or that we reject God by compulsion, but rather by mere necessity. And by this we mean, as Luther explains it, “for Will, whether divine or human, does what it does, be it good or evil, not by any compulsion but by mere willingness or desire, as it were” (Luther, On the Bondage of the Will, Sec. 10). It is God who has “given us an heart to know Him,” and with this heart we desire to “return unto God with our whole heart” (Jer 24:7). So we are not, by compulsion, made to act, but we act willingly, though this will is given to us by a new nature, which wars with our old one. And while the providence of God is absolute, so that our every step is ordained, yet we make these steps willingly, which in the case of sin is by permission for to teach us, and limited in its results by the will of God, or in the case of good works, worked within us, so that we by necessity should do them.