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Hi, Father we usually hear in Greek when someone passes away ότι τον ήθελα ο Θεός . My question is the moment of one's death determined by God? This would obviously obviate someone's free will to an extent for example a person who leads an unhealthy lifestyle and dies young or someone who drives recklessly and dies in an accident. However, there are people who are terminally ill and who don't recover despite fervent prayer and others who are healed after praying to the Saints for their intercession. Is life and death in the hands of the Creator?
Answer to Question 490 Free will is and always was the teaching of the Orthodox Church. If everything, even the hour of our death, is predetermined by God then we have no need of free will. If we say that everything that happens to us is because it was written to happen we are in danger of falling into the beliefs of karma and predestination.
The idea of “ότι τον ήθελα ο Θεός” means that God predetermines who will live 1 year, five years, thirty years or a hundred. If a plane crashes it means that God made that plane to crash and kill hundreds of people because their time was up. If someone dies of an illness then did God send that illness to kill that person because his/her use by date came up?
There are many examples I could use, but I think you can understand that there cannot be a “use by date” stamped on us by God, because life would have no meaning. Predestination, karma, or fate however we want to call it means that we have no free will and that we have been programmed to live and die a certain way and we have no choice to change our destination in life.
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