Fate as commonly understood is pure myth.
There is certainly no harm in using the word much as you would any other literary term. It plays a part in language and communication. However, to imagine a force controlling your human destiny separate from the hand of God is deeply deceptive. The problem is tightly wound here: You cannot righteously oppose apparent fate until you purge the false perceptions of which fate is a part.
More than once I’ve written at length the soul’s triage of context.
1. A strong move of the Spirit and convictions.
2. General principles of divine justice as currently understood.
3. Human reason (works better if conditioned on ANE epistemology).
4. Your whims and inclinations.
Feel free to rewrite that according to your own best understanding, but this is a rough summary of how I approach the question of, “What do I do now?” But this works only if you commit yourself to preparing the ground on which it is built. There is a sense in which you will spend the rest of your human existence renovating and fixing what you build as your frame of reference. You should expect to make adjustments up to the very end. This is what is behind the expression in the New Testament: “I die daily” (1 Corinthians 15:31). The old fleshly dominance dies by degrees and will never die completely until literal death.
As always, the objective is not objective, but a clarity of personal commitment first. We are striving to participate in the glory of God. Fighting one’s apparent fate is not a matter of whether you might possibly overcome, but whether such resistance is where His glory is found — not for everyone, but where you find His glory. You cannot know whether you should fight or go along or withdraw or any other choice until you have a clear view of that divine priority.
The result in concrete terms is generally mere entertainment for us. Was my prayer for a certain thing granted? I realize my human self is gratified in the thing, but my spirit rejoices in how it signals I am grasping God’s intent. If the thing never arrives, I feel certain I’ll stop wanting it soon enough. No, not everything; the flesh remains until I leave it on this plane. I’m still tied to it for now. A part of that quantum moral reasoning is recognizing when something seems tied to flesh and when it is does not, or when it is far more complicated than that.
Part of our fallen nature is an awareness of time and space as a stream of experience. The Spirit Realm suffers none of that; such consciousness is in the package with the Fall. Not the space-time continuum itself, but our awareness of it, how we experience it. So we have to recognize that pulling the trigger at one moment in a particular context is righteous, but a few seconds later would be wrong. It’s not a question of the trigger pull itself, nor even having a trigger to pull, but the shifting sands of human awareness.
Examine your own soul. Go where your convictions lead you at any given moment. Do whatever is apparent to you as necessary or just. Redemption is not in the doing, but in the care and commitment. You’ll get things wrong all the time; you should expect that. Own it. Be humble about it even as you proudly assert you were obeying your best impulse at the time. It may well be that in the sum of things you could not have done better. The humility is in the assurance that we participate in the broad ultimate failure of being a fallen human. Open that quantum recognition of simultaneous multiple levels of reasoning, and recognize you won’t really ever know until you are gone from this world. We are sampling the divine, tasting the Spirit Realm of operation and the ineffable joy of things to come (Hebrews 6:1-12).
If the context seems to hand you a role you never expected, run through the triage; sense your own convictions first. If the question hangs on something arising from human aspirations, engage it with full cynicism, the cynicism of the Spirit that flatly denies it will ever matter very much regardless of outcome. It may well be the right thing for you to do, but as a community of faith we generally avoid engaging human political actions. Within whatever course of action that consumes your human time and resources, keep an eye on the divine glory. There are boundaries and you will have to stop. Death in pursuit of the divine is just a circumstance. If you haven’t already laid hold of your own personal cross, you aren’t ready for anything. If you haven’t yet become eager for the end of this life, you aren’t ready for very much.
There is no particular nobility in accepting or opposing your apparent fate. There is great nobility of spirit if you are focused on much higher concerns. Fate is just a word for things as they come at you, things over which you have no real control. What you control is your response.
