Existing outside of time, God knows the past, the present, and the future all at once. He knew all people before they existed, chose them to be his children, and has a plan for everyone.
God invites all people to live for eternity with Him in Heaven and provides them with the means to get there. Everything happens according to his plan and his providence.
Although the destination is set, the path is not. God gives man free will so that he can choose whether or not to respond and cooperate with God’s grace and follow his plan.
If anyone does not reach Heaven, it is because they have willingly rejected God’s predestined plan. God does not deny grace to anyone and has not predestined anyone to be in Hell.
The Catholic Church’s teaching about predestination is different than the common understanding and from what other faiths teach.
Some Protestants and non-Christians believe that God has already decided who goes to Heaven or Hell and that man has no choice. Others have taught that each person only attains salvation by their own choices and effort.
God knows where He wants to take us:
God wants us in Heaven:
We must freely cooperate with God’s grace:
To God, all moments of time are present in their immediacy. When therefore He establishes his eternal plan of “predestination”, He includes in it each person’s free response to his grace: “In this city, in fact, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.” For the sake of accomplishing his plan of salvation, God permitted the acts that flowed from their blindness.
Catechism of the Catholic Church 600
God sees the past, present, and future:
We know that all things work for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. For those He foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, so that He might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those He predestined He also called; and those He called He also justified; and those He justified He also glorified. What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who can be against us?
Romans 8: 28-31
Purpose and predestination are intertwined:
Stringing together the whole story of salvation:
If man is the image and likeness of God by his very nature as a person, then his greatness and his dignity are achieved in the covenant with God, in union with Him, in striving towards that fundamental unity which belongs to the internal “logic” of the very mystery of creation. This unity corresponds to the profound truth concerning all intelligent creatures and in particular concerning man, who among all the creatures of the visible world was elevated from the beginning through the eternal choice of God in Jesus: “He chose us in (Christ) before the foundation of the world, … He destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will”. The biblical teaching taken as a whole enables us to say that predestination concerns all human persons, men and women, each and every one without exception.
Pope John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem, 15 August 1988
A balance of grace and freedom:
God plans for us to freely follow Him:
The Truth, Goodness, and Beauty of the Catholic Church
Authentic Christianity from the beginning:
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