Commentary on Selected Verses in Isaiah

                                Isaiah 48:1-12 (KJB)

In these verses, God explains to Israel that He gave them prophecies that come true in order to cause them to have faith in Him and not in idols that cannot predict the future. When God gave them prophecies that came true, then they knew that only God could predict the future because the false prophets of the idols often made predictions that did not come true.

In verse 7, God declares that He can change the course of history as it unfolds, and the changes that He makes become prophecies that come true. This verse does not contradict the revelation that God knew the entire history of the human race from the beginning of its creation. Acts 15:18 (KJB). In the doctrine of predestination, God knows the entire history of the human race from the beginning, and He knows every choice that humans will make. In the doctrine of free will, God allows every human to make their own choices, and He responds accordingly. But the history of the human race actually happens to be similar to a chess game. God makes His moves, and the Devil makes his counter moves, and then God counters those moves. But God is destined to win the game because He has an infinite number of moves while the Devil has only a finite number of moves. When Lucifer rebelled against God, he must have thought that God had made a mistake in giving free will to him and the angels. Lucifer must have reasoned that as long as angels and humans have free will, then choices to do evil will always persist, and therefore, the forces of evil will acquire an infinite power that will equal God's Infinite Power. That event would give the Devil and the powers of evil a chance to eventually defeat God and take His place. Isaiah 14:12-17 (KJB). But what Lucifer forgot to take into account was that the number of choices to do evil would always be finite while God's creative choices would always be infinite.

But the seeming contradiction between history being based on predestination or free will can be resolved in the following speculative manner. The present history of the human race was previously planned by God in its entirety, but only on a spiritual and intellectual level. God created the world and the human race in His image to be good, but He also gave them free will. The Devil countered that move by causing humans to choose to sin and do evil. When humans became sinful, then the Devil acquired the power to inject spiritual death into every human who would come into the world except for those who would die in childhood before they could sin. Genesis 2:17 (KJB). The entire human race made the same mistakes that Adam and Eve made. Sin causes spiritual death, and spiritual death, in turn, causes sin and evil. Romans 5:12 (KJB). The Devil reasoned that God's gift of free will would ensure that the fallen condition of the human race would last forever, and therefore, the Devil would acquire an infinite power that would equal God's Infinite Power, and that condition would weaken God to the point that the Devil would eventually become able to defeat God and take His place. Isaiah 14:12-17 (KJB). But God countered the Devil's move by the Infinite Power of His Almighty Love. God promised the human race that He would send them a Savior who would suffer the sins, evil, and spiritual deaths of all humans caused by the Devil, and He would also utterly crush the Devil and rescue His entire, living human race from all sin, evil, and spiritual death. Genesis 3:15; Genesis 3:20 (KJB). But the Devil did not know that all of this was but God's intellectual plan, not His actual material creation. When God made His material creation, all of the choices that the Devil and humans had made were locked in and could not be changed.

This intellectual war between God and Satan became the actual history of the human race. Satan would cause humans to choose to commit sins and evil in the hope that spiritual death would become permanent and eternal. God allowed humans to make their own choices to do good or evil. But God countered every evil move by the Devil by either His wholesale destruction of large groups of evil people, or by His ability to work within every sinful and evil system to turn it eventually into a good system. This meant God had to make changes in history as it went along, but every change would come true as a prophecy. In His intellectual war with the Devil, God would prove that He could always outmaneuver and defeat the Devil sooner or later. But God's final defeat of the Devil occurred in His material world when His Son sacrificed Himself on a cross to suffer the sins, evil, and spiritual deaths of every human, and He rose from the dead to turn eternal spiritual death into only a temporary death so that He could liberate all of His living humans from the power of the Devil. Genesis 3:15; Genesis 3:20; Luke 20:38; Hebrews 2:9-18; Colossians 1:20; Revelation 21:1-5; II Timothy 1:10; I Timothy 4:10; I John 3:8 (KJB).

God has proven to all doubters in His creation that His Love can never fail. I Corinthians 13:8 (KJB). The Devil could never use free will to destroy God because free will, like God, is also eternal. God can make it always to return to the choice for good. The number of choices that humans can make to do sin or evil is always finite. But God holds the eternal power to cause all of His living humans whom He creates and loves to return of their own free will to faith in His Son as their Savior. John 5:24; Revelation 5:11-14; Revelation 21:5 (KJB).

All of this means that the doctrine of predestination is true because God's plan to save all of humanity wins in the end. But the doctrine of free will is also true because every human simply repeats the choices that he made as God planned the history of the human race. No matter what choices humans make, God holds the power to cause them all to choose to return to faith in Him. In a sense, as the history of each individual unfolds, free will obtains. But in another sense, predestination rules because God has already in eternity completely crushed the Devil and all evil out of existence. Genesis 3:15; II Peter 3:9-13; John 5:24; Revelation 5:11-14; Revelation 21:5 (KJB).