Free will can be a scary thought. For one thing, it brought humans to their ultimate fall in the Garden of Eden, when Adam decided to believe the lies of Satan and eat the forbidden fruit. It’s almost hard to understand how free will works, because God is supposed to be omniscient and omnipotent, which means he should know every move that you will make in life, and that it is all under his ultimate sovereign control. For Calvinists, the belief is that God has already chosen those to whom he will grant salvation. They use the verses Ephesians 1:4 “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight” and also 2:8 “For it is by grace you are saved, through faith, and this not of yourselves, it is the gift of God,” to back up their claims. But for me and most other Christians, we are supposed to believe that God has given us human’s choices in life- that we have the power to choose good over evil, or ultimately grace and salvation or eternal damnation. That God is all-knowing in that he knows what we will choose, but that the choices are still up to us. If God forced the world to be perfect, then we would all be perfect little servants that worshipped God without question and all lived happily ever after. Sounds good, doesn’t it? That’s exactly the way many of the ancient civilization’s gods behaved.
For instance, in the Mesopotamian creation story, the god Nammu gave birth to the earth and the heavens, while the god Enlil gave the heavens to An and the earth to Ki. An’s children were called the Anunnaki, and they were unhappy, hungry, and without clothes. The god Enki approached Enlil and they decided to create cattle, sheep, plants, the yoke and plow as well as the pickaxe so that the Anunnaki could ...