Atheists I have encountered often insist God’s omniscience and human free will are contradictory: if God already knows what I will choose, how can I genuinely be free to choose otherwise? But this assumes that God’s knowledge causes or determines my choice. It does not. God’s knowledge of your choice is dependent on your choice. If you freely choose A, God eternally knows that you will choose A; if you were to freely choose B, God would know that instead. His knowledge is infallible, but it is not coercive.
Think of the play of life. God sets the stage, gives us the circumstances and possibilities within which we act, and sustains the whole drama, but he does not dictate every action of the actors. We genuinely act, and our choices genuinely become part of the story. In that sense, the script is something we co-create with God. God knows the whole story, but his knowing what we will do does not mean that he is the one doing it through us.
This also explains how God can guarantee his ultimate purposes without determining every human action. That Christ will return is not in doubt, because his return does not depend upon our choices. But how we respond to Christ, what we do with the freedom we have been given, and how we ultimately stand before God do depend upon our choices. God can guarantee the ending without dictating every move along the way
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