God sovereignly decreed that man should be free to exercise moral choice, and man from the beginning has fulfilled that decree by making his choice between good and evil. When he chooses to do evil, he does not thereby countervale the sovereign will of God but fulfills it, inasmuch as the eternal decree decided not which choice the man should make but that he should be free to make it….. Man’s will is free because God is sovereign. A God less than sovereign could not bestow moral freedom upon His creatures. He would be afraid to do so…
God moves undisturbed and unhindered toward the fulfillment of those eternal purposes which He proposed in Christ Jesus before the world began… Since He is omniscient, there can be no unforeseen circumstances, no accidents …[but] within the broad field of God’s sovereign, permissive will the deadly conflict of good and evil continues with increasing fury.
There is freedom to choose which side we shall be on but no freedom to negotiate the results of the choice once it is made…Our choice is our own, but the consequences of the choice have already been determined by the sovereign will of God, and from this there is no appeal.
A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1961), pp. 117-119, as quoted by Dave Hunt, What Love Is This? (Bend, Oregon: The Berean Call, 2013), pp. 234-235.
Psalm 119: 38 