Human Free Will in a Fore-Ordained Future

What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person?  What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as he knew he would?

If you knew the course of your life and how it would turn out, would you change things?

Very few of us would change the happy times, the triumphant moments; but many more of us would consider changing those painful experiences, altering the path to avoid heartache.  But I wonder if we could look into our own future lives, as witnesses to those as yet unencountered tragedies, and embrace them.  Could we walk into them with a sense of resolve?  If we could see the end before we got there, how would that change us?

Or better still, if we knew that our future was ordained by One with infinite wisdom, infinite love, and an infinitely gracious disposition toward us, how might that change us?

If an infinitely wise mind determined a plan, it would have to be most excellent.  No lesser wisdom could question it.  If an infinitely loving heart chartered a course, it would surely be most admirable.  No lesser love could challenge it.  If an infinitely gracious individual ordained an outcome, it would undoubtedly be most noble.  No lesser benevolence could protest it.  The specific events of the future would no longer matter, for the One planning them would be fully trustworthy, completely honorable, and immeasurably upright.  Nor would the objection of fatalism, for who would want to alter such a blessed destiny?

To suggest that self-determination is freedom is to suggest that the creature exerts authority over the Creator.  Free will is an illusion, a deception to keep the creature thinking that he determines, that he charters, and that he ordains - in short, to keep him thinking that he is god-like.  It is the set of shackles that keeps him enslaved.

Human freedom, the ability of the individual to truly choose and exert some kind of control over the course of life, is only important for those who remain alienated from that infinitely wise, loving, and gracious Being.  The desire to strive after an end that we have created only entered the human soul after we ate the fruit of estrangement.  But before that fatal choice - perhaps the only choice that has ever been truly free - when man knew the Divine, there was nothing but rest, repose, and delightful submission to our pre-ordained future.  For the determined end, much more the path leading to it, was perfect goodness and boundless joy; it was a rapturous corollary we could never have chosen for ourselves.

What could be more free than this: to resolutely embrace, with an urgent sense of obligation, a path that another has determined, if it should lead to glory beyond our conceiving?... to be sure that, with every step, we were moving toward the intended end?  We would be free from worrying that our random and uninformed choices might end in ruin.  We would be free in knowing what actions we needed to take, what answers we needed to give, and what attitudes we needed to manifest.  Thus, our freedom must be found in the loss of self-determination, in the abandoning of ourselves, in the casting of our bread upon the waters.  It must be found in the submission of quiet, yet profound, trust in the One who does all things well.  All.  Things.  Well.

What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person?  What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as he knew he would?