How does God guide us?

I used to think I knew the answer to this one quite clearly: God's got a plan for our lives which is set in stone because it's there from all eternity, and so all we've got to do is find it out - by prayer (understood as getting us to conform to God's will), reading the Bible, and "circumstances" (along with a bit of 'prophecy' if you're a charismatic) - and then just do it.

This has never sat easily with me. The trouble is that it can't ultimately matter whether we "find it out" or not, if it's going to happen anyway. I've never been philosophically happy with explanations along these lines that still try to give us "freedom" of choice, or even "responsibility" - because no matter how I look at it, it's just not real.

When I've voiced these doubts to others schooled in the same nursery, the standard response I get is along the lines of "you're just trying to gain autonomy from God - it's just your sinful tendency to resist submission - it's just man-centred Arminianism in another form - etc..." But is this all right?

What I've been learning recently about God as Trinity and his relationship with space and time, suggests a different possible paradigm that may be more faithful to the Bible's testimony, and philosophically more satisfying as well.

God does not know everything about the future, because he only knows what is knowable. This is not to diminish the omniscience of God or his glory. The glory of God is seen in his turning everything to the good of those who love him; his omniscience is seen in his knowing everything that there is to know. But we need not limit the freedom of human agents which God has condescended to give us. Yes, God has plans for us. Yes, God works in us to will and act according to his purpose. But we can always refuse him. He gives us that choice.

I'm not sure how this works out in all its implications. But if it's correct - even if it's heading in the right direction - it means we have responsibility that's deeper than I ever thought we had before. Before, the universe as I understood it was just working itself out like a book that was already written and published. Now it's a drama, and the script is not finished.

What if we realised - just as an example - that our progressive destruction of the earth is not an inevitability? Now, OK - I recognise we all have a natural bent towards sin, but are we taking seriously what the Bible says about our redemption? And about the earth to be redeemed along with us, for that matter? It's not all about "going to heaven", after all, is it...?

I'm beginning to see that God's "destiny" (if I can talk in these terms) is bound up with ours, and ours with his more than ever. We are his fellow-workers. Wow...

How does that relate to guidance? Well, for one thing, nobody knows what I'm going to do tomorrow. God may know every single possible thing I might do, but he hasn't pre-ordained any particular one of them. He may well have particular purposes for me tomorrow (I guess he does) but I don't have to go along with them. But if I don't, and I sin instead, I've no-one to blame but myself.

But what if a choice presents itself that's not between good and evil, or good and better, but between good and good? Or if I really don't know which one is better? Surely that's where the Bible, and circumstances, and prayer come in - only prayer is something different, because there's a possibility (and it is only a possibility) that God might actually change his mind and do it my way.

I can see the Calvinists rising up in horror... but Moses did it. Oh, that's just an anthropomorphism - God doesn't really change his mind.

But only because your hermeneutic (and philosphical view of God) says he can't. Now who's limiting God?