The question of free will vs. predestination is a curious one - I suspect that there's an inverse balance to it: a lot of people have spent very little time worrying about it, and a very few people have spent a lot of time worrying about it.  If you're one of the many - and playing the odds you probably are - then I apologise for drawing you into this discussion, but our reading this week from Ephesians 1 doesn't really leave me a choice (which may or may not be ironic): it's a passage that's replete with the language of predestination.

The basic argument, then, is around the question of whether - particularly in a universe governed by cause and effect - we have any real freedom at all, or whether all our thoughts and actions are simply the outworking of the myriad causes that lead up to them in any given moment.  Can we make choices, or are our lives predestined? 

In Christian theology the argument has been stretched further still, and drawing on notions of eternal life - and eternal damnation - has headed off to explore whether our eternity is as predetermined as our lives on earth.  Has God, in short, picked some people to live with him in glory, and others to barbeque forever? Such a conclusion being supported, of course, by verses just like these.

With the humility of recognising greater minds than mine have worried about these things, the fact we've asked that question is made more concerning to me by the fact we've dreamed up the notion of a God so capricious he would create people just to torture them. (Perhaps that capacity of human imagination is also at the root of many of the atrocities conducted in the name of this same fictitious god?)

Might it be, though, that the mistake under all this is the basic assumption that this passage is in any way about our agency, our potency, our capacity to choose?  Is it not, rather, about God's?  Might it not be that if, like in so many things, we can get our gaze off ourselves and back on to him that something beautiful, hopeful, and affirming emerges rather than something worrying?

In doing so, we discover a God whose existence, power, and choices extend from "before the foundation of the earth," who has a "plan for the fullness of time," and who possesses the absolute power to achieve it. This God reveals His plan through Jesus Christ, working towards the redemption and reconciliation of all things in heaven and on earth. He is a God overflowing with forgiveness and mercy, lavishly bestowing His riches upon His creation and establishing its inheritance.

If this is about agency, it's about God's; and if it's about humanity it's about identity - our identity - as God's: God's loved, included, and chosen.

God has done all this not out of necessity, need, or compulsion, but by choice. Above, through, and beyond all of creation, we find a God of ultimate power and authority who has chosen to bless and include—and by the inescapable force of His will, He has specifically chosen to include you.