November 16, 2025

On Fate, Freewill, and the Meaning of Prophecy

In just the last couple of months we’ve seen typhoons and an earthquake in the Philippines, a landslide in Sudan that killed over a thousand people, more typhoons, flash floods and earthquakes throughout Asia and Europe.  We’ve seen images on television and the Internet of neighborhoods and whole towns thoroughly destroyed.  In recent days not one but two typhoons have hit the Phillippines.  It seems that poor country is always getting slammed by these storms.

I had been watching coverage of a disaster in the Philippines, and I saw the face of a woman being interviewed after losing absolutely everything – her home, her family, her possessions.  She had no place to live and nothing to eat or drink.  And her face bore the most beatific aura.  I don’t remember her exact words but it was something like this: “We just have to do the best we can and keep the faith.”  I was stunned by her equanimity and what appeared to be a hopeful confidence in the face of overwhelming loss and grief.  Sometime later I was putting recyclable items in our recycle bin and raised up banging my head on the bottom of a cabinet above.  I jumped back, grabbed my head, and let go with a few choice, unrepeatable words at a high volume.  Upon reflection, the contrast between my reaction to a minor “first world problem” and that woman’s reaction to an horrific third world nightmare struck me with what can only be described as the force of typhoon winds.

That amazing woman with the lovely, calm countenance was living in the midst of that with which the prophet Isaiah would have clearly identified.  The “word of the Lord” we heard read this morning was offered as a prophecy by Isaiah in the sixth century B.C.  It was given to a people standing in the midst of the ruins of their city.  Not unlike Tacloban, Jerusalem had been laid waste.  It wasn’t a superstorm that destroyed their city, it was the Babylonian army of King Nebuchadnezzar.  The city was leveled, the temple was destroyed, and the leaders were carried off to Babylon in exile.  Isaiah himself was one of the victims of that destruction, and his words about a time of peace, prosperity, and long life were spoken to a broken and devastated people looking at what seemed like the impossible task of rebuilding their lives and their nation.  I can’t help hearing the echo of the prophet’s words in the voice of that hungry, bereaved, Filipina woman speaking with confidence about doing their best and keeping faith.

It makes me wonder if Isaiah’s prophecy is simply a prediction of future events, or if it may have more to do with now – with the eternal now.  It leaves me thinking about those who heard his words over twenty five hundred years ago.  Were they, perhaps, listening to a man who was living his hope – living his glorious new Jerusalem, new heaven and new earth – amidst the very ruins of the city?  Was I, in my lovely, warm, well stocked, log home, swearing about bumping my head, living defeated in the ruins, while that Filipina woman I heard on television was living in a new heaven and a new earth?

It strikes me that no one on this planet has a carefree existence, free of loss, heartache, pain, and struggle.  Some struggles are infinitely more devastating than others.  But the lesson of Isaiah’s prophecy, and of that dear woman speaking after the storm, confirms for me that there are two ways to approach life: either as the victim of those struggles, wailing and swearing amidst the rubble of life’s injustice, or as one who lives on a different plain, who lives their hope, and who dwells in a new heaven and a new earth.

If my notions hold any water, then it all raises important questions about the meaning of prophecy.  Most people tend to regard prophecy as fortune-telling – a kind of magical hocus-pocus in which future events are revealed.  That’s certainly the language used in these pronouncements.  Isaiah relates, “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth . . .” and Jesus says, “Days will come when not one stone will be left upon another . . . .”  But could it be that, similar to the language of myth, what is being conveyed are not future facts, so much as present truth?  Is it possible that by describing a future of wars, insurrections, persecutions and trials, Jesus is telling those who would follow him that faithfulness requires constancy, trust, and perseverance?

What I’m talking about here is the difference between truth and fact.  Facts are helpful; they are descriptions of observable reality.  But truth is more profound, and more capable of changing lives and shaking nations.  It is the deeper reality of existence that deals with meaning; it is the bread and butter of the prophets, whose job it was (and is) to use their often bizarre images to open a window on human experience.  Daniel Webster said, “There is nothing so powerful as truth, and often nothing so strange.”¹

And so what are we to make of the prophets’ future predictions in which these nuggets of timeless truth are set?  Do they, indeed, reveal something about the world that is yet to be?  Does that future world already exist in the mind of the Almighty?  Is it, in fact, inevitable?  Well, not according to Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg.  When they came up with the movie Back to the Future, they hypothesized a kind of tabula rasa on which the future could be written and, if one went back in time, rewritten.  Even minor changes in the course of events would have a profound impact on shaping, or reshaping, the world to be.  I think that’s the general cultural mindset that you and I live with most of the time.  It places a strong emphasis on individual responsibility.  After all, if anything that one of us does or fails to do can end up having an outsized impact on the course of future events, it behooves us to act as responsibly as possible.

When I look back at the course of my life I can’t help identifying key moments when I made choices and decisions that I wish I could change.  But when I consider the potential impact of correcting those mistakes, it would seem to send me on a completely different trajectory in life, and I realize I would have missed out on so much that I truly love and value.  Then, I think I wouldn’t want to change a thing, for fear that it would change everything.

There’s a cosmological theory that has grown out of quantum physics called the multiple universes theory.  It holds that everything that can happen does happen, and at the juncture between two possible outcomes both results occur and the universe splits in two at that instant, with the one outcome occurring in one universe and the second in the other universe.  At every instance in which such multiple possibilities arise, another universe is spawned.  Hence there are an infinite number of universes all following their own course of events, and an infinite number of universes constantly branching off of those universes.  According to this notion, there is a universe out there somewhere in which I didn’t hit the brake soon enough once a few years ago and was killed in an auto accident, and perhaps another in which I became a nationally recognized best-selling author.  I like that one.  This theory is, I suppose, the ultimate extension of the Back to the Future conception of time.

Strict Calvinists would shudder at all this.  John Calvin was one of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation in Europe in the sixteenth century.  Among other things, he was a powerful promoter of the notion of predestination – that everything that happens is destined by God to happen, and nothing can change any of it.  The Divine power and control of events is absolute.  Calvin’s ideas were highly influential in the development of Protestantism, and certainly among our forebears here in New England, the Puritans.  The whole premise of Back to the Future would be anathema to Calvin.  The future cannot be altered, he would say; it is etched in stone by the Lord of the universe.

What does this do to personal responsibility?  That’s a subject that was hotly debated by those among the Puritans who had the courage to offer dissent.  They argued that, if everything that happens is predestined and some people are irrevocably consigned to be among the elect and others are inalterably slated to burn in hell, then why bother to try to change one’s behavior?  Why bother to try to accomplish anything, for that matter?  The notion of free-will becomes meaningless.

So how are we to resolve this dilemma?  I have a few suggestions.  First of all, as I indicated earlier, biblical prophecy is not merely a matter of predicting the future, it is most importantly a window on human experience that allows us to see more deeply into the meaning of existence.  On the other hand, the hope that is offered by the prophets and by Jesus and his followers (and the hope offered by modern day dreamers and people of vision) is essential.  And it cannot hold power if it’s not real.  The new heaven and new earth might not turn out to be exactly as described in Isaiah’s vision (it was Woody Allen who said, “The lion and the calf shall lie down together, but the calf won’t get much sleep.”²).  But the substance of Isaiah’s hope, that humanity will ultimately become all that we are intended to be, must seize us and empower us.  The alternative, especially in this world of darkening clouds of destruction, is to yield to the powerlessness and hopelessness of despair.  And that is not who we are called to be.  I have to turn no further than the face of that Filipina woman to know the power of living with such faith.

Do you and I have free-will to make the future what we will?  I tend to believe that.  Is the future already written?  Are we in the hands of fate?  I don’t know, but I am confident that we are in the hands of the Lord of Life.

¹ Daniel Webster, The Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster, vol. 11 (1903), Cornell University Library, 2009, p.68.

² Woody Allen, Without Feathers, Ballantine Books, 1986, p. 28.