One of the highlights of my weeks recently has been looking forward to playing D&D, a game in which players declare what their characters attempt to do, and then roll dice to determine if (or how well) their characters manage to do it. There's a lot of die-rolling in this game, and many of the events and outcomes of the game are determined by random chance.
God doesn't do that. He doesn't leave things to chance or determine things at random. In Elder Ronald A. Rasband's recent General Conference talk, By Divine Design, he teaches us that many events, in the world, in the church, and in our personal lives, happen "not by accident but by God’s plan." God plans many of the events that unfold, rather than letting fate or a roll of the dice decide.
However, I won't commit to saying that everything that happens happens according to God's plans. There are more than a few "wild card" factors that can interfere with God's plans. In fact, by some estimates, there are approximately 7.6 Billion of them. Of course, God has accounted for human agency and has correctly predicted what each of us will do, and He can even have worked our decisions into His grand designs long before we ourselves knew which choices we would make. God can predict our choice as well as He can predict the movements of the planets, and He has made His plans accordingly, so even when we consider the factors that we would like to think are the least predictable, we know that God can have predicted them and built His plans around them.
God has a perfect and detailed plan for this planet and everyone on it, and I am convinced that none of it is left up to chance.
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