Is Free Will Compatible With God’s Decreed Divine Appointments?

I grew up in the occult. My adoptive Mom was the practitioner and a raging blackout alcoholic. It was not the dark satanic sacrificial worship type. Unlike people I have known, I never killed anything, nor was I sexually abused. It was more along the lines of Wiccan witchcraft, occultism, voodoo, and black magick. My childhood was filled with demonic encounters in the spirit realm, so much so that they were everyday experiences until my mother died of cancer just after my eleventh birthday.

My Dad remarried a year later to someone who was a devout Episcopalian, and we began attending her church. The following year, I went to a YMCA camp on Catalina Island off the west coast and had an experience with God that opened my heart to Him. One year later, after another week's stay at the YMCA camp, I watched TV late at night while babysitting a neighbor's kids. There were only a few channels to choose from, and I clicked on the ending of a Billy Graham Crusade when he turned to the camera and pointed to the TV audience, asking if they wanted to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior. I can't explain exactly how or what happened next, but I said a genuine 'yes' in my mind and heart, and at that very moment, I had a radical supernatural experience with Jesus. The heavy darkness of sin within me and the demonic presence around me were replaced with the brilliant light of God. I felt clean from the inside out and light as a feather for the first time.

Well, needless to say, that changed EVERYTHING moving forward. The demonic encounters began to lessen dramatically, and I began to seek after knowing all about Jesus both experientially and intellectually. That passionate, burning desire has never ceased to this day, 55+ years later. The more I seek Jesus, the more I love Him. Absolutely nothing in this world satisfies like Jesus.

My experiences throughout life and how I got to the place of receiving Jesus as my Lord and Savior raised questions about libertarian free will versus the divine sovereignty of God's will.

- Were these experiences' Divine Appointments' I was destined to make or just accidental?

- Did I freely make the choices that led me to Jesus, or did He predetermine them according to His providential will and lead me to make them?

- God has foreknowledge, so does that mean He lets human beings choose their courses of action?

- Does God know the future, observe how it will unfold, and then proclaim His eternal plan after reviewing actual history? Isn't that fatalism, and how could it be compatible with human freedom?

- Could it be that God directly determined my visit to Camp and my night of babysitting when I became Born-Again? Was that libertarian free will, or did God make me choose it by 'Divine Appointment'?

- Is humanity free but also a slave?

- Are human beings entirely unable to choose equally between good and evil?

- Does a Born-Again Christian have the external option to choose or reject Jesus but does not because they really do not have free will?

- Does God take steps to guarantee that someone will freely select one course of action over another and is incapable of any other method of action?

- How do we reconcile human free will with divine sovereignty?

It is an empirical fact that God desires all people to come to repentance and be saved.

"This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth." (1 Timothy 2:3-4 ESV)

"The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance." (2 Peter 3:9 ESV)

- Do these verses mean God makes all people desire to seek Him?

- Does a person have the desire for their 'Divine Appointment' at a given time and day, and the person, using their free will, then chooses to make it at a specific time? Doesn't that insinuate God alone determines a person's actions and free will has nothing to do with it?

- Does God coerce someone with His divine sovereignty to want to do something, and if so, doesn't that mean there is actually no human freedom of willful choice?

- If God desires that "all should come to repentance" and is equal to His foreknowledge and power, why are some people lost and destined for Hell?

I had pondered these questions for decades, and my years of formal education, which included studying Calvinism, Arminianism, Determinism, Compatibilism, etc., etc., etc., revealed they were inadequate in providing persuasive answers to reconcile the seemingly contradictory doctrines of God's grace and free will. God is exponentially beyond human logic and understanding.