Im sorry to give this late a reply, but I couldn't help but be moved to talk after reading it.
The thing that most people dont understand about god and by extension Jesus, is why suffering exists. And the truth is that without suffering, without giving people the choice to do evil over good. There would be no free will.
Not too late at all don't worry. It's a topic I enjoy talking about. I probably should wait till I'm more rested to answer this but a few ramblings while I'm half asleep.
There's three basic problems with this premise of free will not existing (among others, but I'll lead with these three).
The first being that a God, who is all powerful has created a world in which a binary of good and evil exists at all. God, who is all good, has created either directly or indirectly something wholly anthetical to his whole being.
There's also the other side of this that if he is all good, every single day things occur that God doesn't intervene in to mitigate or stop. If we accept your premise that suffering is necessary to allow people to do good (ignoring the idea that good can be done via improvement or ascension, not necessarily stopping immanent bad things), some people don't get a chance to do either. The man who his stabbed for his walet, the child who is ran over by a hit and run driver. These people don't get a chance to do good, they just get to be a victim.
There's also the problem with "Free will" itself. To make a free choice, surely a choice must be made without coercion or threat right? Can it be said humans have a choice when they are posed with a choice to follow the dictates of a religion or be roasted to death forever and ever? If they are, we must accept that the Americans were truely free under the British who insisted they pay exhorbitant tax or face the wrath of his majesties armies.
Free will is the most important part of our lives. Without it, there would be no reason to live and we would not be able to define ourselves. You take away rape completely and you either take away the ability to have sex or people's free will. Happiness and good would have no meaning. We would be robots little better then angels.
It's funny you say that, because isn't that what happens when a human successfully obtains salvation, beholds the beatific vision or is enraptured. The lingo may vary, but the ideal is the same isn't it? Being reunited with God in heaven.
Thomas Aquinas explained in the summa why the saints don't care for the damned, and why saints don't mourn for their relatives who are in hell. Once in heaven, the will of a human is in total alignment with God. They feel exactly the same way as he does about heaven. There is no sadness in heaven, there is no rebellion, there's also no questioning or indeed ability to change. There are no choices at all actually, the saved are wholly reprogammed into robots. Worse than angels actually, because apparently one particuarly infamous angel did rebel with his cronies to quite dramatic effect!
The highest ideal in the abrahamic faith is to shed ones ego and free will, so that ones own will is perfectly aligned with that of God is it not? Free will doesn't seem very highly prized at all, and seems more a temptation into damnation than anything else from this standpoint.
God can soften or harden our hearts. He can bring out the best or worst in what's already in our hearts, but he will not "make" us do anything. There are rules to the universe, rules we cannot see and understand that are for our long term benefit.
But he does. He threatens us directly with his unending wrath for failing to do what he wants.
He also creates a world in which his creations are tortured on a daily basis, and for some the only promise of relief in death is merely a gateway to a whole new level of suffering or in the very best case scenario as mentioned above; oblivion via the total loss of self in heaven.
Can God make a stone so heavy he cannot lift it? Is God bound to certain laws of the universe? If there is something, anything at all, that God cannot do; he can't possibly be omnipotent. If there's something God could do to help humanity, but he choses not to then he isn't omnibenevolent. Is he neither able, nor is he willing? Then is he divine at all?
This isn't a problem the Abrahamic God alone has, Epicurus' riddle was problematic for devotees of Neoplatonism and Imperial era Mystery Cult deities long before Yahweh took centre stage.
I read something recently that changed my entire perspective of sin and heaven. Where sin was described as a Virus that gets stronger the more we do it, corrupting our very body's and souls..... Ive seen enough things on this site to know that is the truth. Sin is a natural consequence of free will, and you simply cannot have one without the other.
But we don't have free will at all in the current set up. If I put a big cake in front of you, and tell you I'm going to stab one of your relatives to death if you eat the cake, have you really had a "free" choice to eat the cake or not?
This is before we even get into contexts and scenarios; i.e: "Murder is always wrong but if I'd killed Hitler I could save millions" etc.
God wants us all in heaven, but heaven cannot exist with sin in it. Sin would perish in the presence of god. With all that in mind, old testement god seems less like wrathful god and more like a parent who is trying to scare his children straight, but in the long run that didn't work. So he sent Jesus as an anchor to protect our souls from sin. Its simply up to us to believe and trust in him.
I don't know if you're a parent or not, but are you in the habit of murdering your children if they do something you don't like? Floods, Israelite armies, plagues....How can the children learn anything when they're dead? Moreover, what about all the goyim peoples who didn't even ever learn why they were being slaughtered because they'd never even heard of the God of Israel or what he wanted?
Also, sin can't exist in heaven yeah? Whose choice was that? God has decided what sin is, and has invented sin as a concept. If he's all powerful, he could make sin cease to exist but he chooses not to, and chooses to keep it cast out and infecting his flock at the same time.
Unless he didn't create sin, and he isn't able to stop it...At which point, he isn't omnipotent?
This is something from what we can glean from late antiquity the last of the pagans, such as the Academy at Athens or Hypatia in Alexandria, used to debate about and why many of them couldn't accept the Abrahamic deity. It's very, very hard to be monotheistic and rationalise this being as being always good all the time when so much evil is around; you either need a lesser deity of darkness like Satan or the Demiurge of the Gnostics to be an antagonist, or multiple deities of which some may be good, others bad or a bit of both at different times.
Hence why the problem of evil just didn't really exist for Polytheists and is a uniquely monotheist issue.
I think the question most people should ask themselves is why did god create us and by extension the universe?
Who knows? Why did I burn so many hours in my younger years on The Sims making rooms full of fireplaces on rugs to roast my pixel doillies to death?
Twisted amusement in my case. Mileage may vary.
And another equally wonderful question is if god can see and know everything, can he close his eyes on the future we will pick? Can he choose not to know what we will finally do to preserve our free will?
If he is omniscient then no, because an omniscient being by necessity must know all things. If there is something, anything at all, they don't know they can't by definition be all seeing.
If he is omnibenevolent then no, because if I saw my child outside playing with a gun and didn't intervene that would be criminal negligence. For a higher being like a deity, to sit back and not intervene when their "child" is in immanent danger of unending torment or very real immediate pain...Why do we hold ourselves to a higher standard than deities?
If he is omnipotent then probably, because it's immaterial if we obey or not. His seat is secure and there is no risk whatsoever of being ejected from it. His other qualities could impinge on this freedom however, as if he was omnibenevolent he would be forced to remain focused on it to prevent evil being done and his power would be required to enforce it.
