Free to Choose?

One of the most hotly debated concepts in the last 500 years or so has been that of whether or not people actually have a free will to choose their eternal destiny. People debate each other with-shall we say, religious fervor-and people on both sides of the debate offer Scriptures to support their viewpoints. On the one hand, we have people who believe that God offers us a choice to voluntarily repent and turn to Him. On the other hand, we have people who believe that God is sovereign, and that sovereignty necessarily means that God determines the eternal destination of everyone, with no regard to our choices. These two viewpoints can't both be correct, because they say mutually exclusive things. But fortunately, the Bible is remarkably unambiguous in its teachings: reading Scriptures in context and thinking about how various passages relate to each other make it abundantly clear which one of these viewpoints is actually the Biblical position.