Yep, as your noticed afterward I said much the same thing upthread; and also in SttH (at muuuuuchhh more detailed length. )
For what it’s worth, Fe4r, I don’t agree that Free Will is any excuse for us to reduce our efforts to love those who are struggling with their lives, including with sin in their lives. On the contrary, I would say Free Will is why people exist to be loved (and to love) at all. Recognizing and acknowledging the environmental problems of a person does not require denying the ability of the person to make personally responsible choices (though a person may be crippled so far that their choices are poisoned or ineffective against their environment). Affirming personal responsibility, and helping that responsibility grow, honors the person as a person, and helps the person grow as a person.
Maturity could even be defined, I’d say, as coming to take increasing responsibility for one’s environment, and for one’s behaviors within that environment. There’s even a common scriptural phrase connected with that idea: “enjoying the allotment of the inheritance”! It’s practically the whole point to the “son-placement” idea, translated in English as “adoption”, described by St. Paul.
Actually, I believe they’re basically the same thing. But i acknowledge that the active will of creatures has natural limitations, and that this will always be true even in the resurrection to eonian life however much we grow in effective capabilities within the Natures we inhabit. Right now our wills are highly hampered by natural processes and environmental effects, though different people through discipline and training can improve their capabilities of interaction with natural processes to various degrees.
Change would still happen; God would just be present at all times and would know all changes (also, I suppose, all possible changes which never happen).
I’m not sure I would say (and didn’t actually say) God has no concept of a past-tense, but His concept of it would be a concept of our concept of the natural past: He knows how we perceive the past.
(Nor, by the way, do I think God would need an Incarnation to have that knowledge, though being Incarnate would give Him a way to ‘naturally experience’ that knowledge. There is a way in which, being omnipresent and omniscient, God knows of my eating more thoroughly and intimately than I ever can, yet what He knows thus is my eating, not His eating; what He knows in the Incarnation is His eating.)
The question of God being able to change something is kind of moot, since God at all points of space-time contributes to the shape of natural history in various ways – first and perhaps foremost by providing for natural entities to do things to have a history at all, but this keeps a way open for Him to introduce effects more directly into the system, too. From His divine present He sees all effects He introduces, without which introductions natural history would have had a different shape.
It isn’t a question of it being fixed against God’s ability to choose to contribute to the shape of the history; the history exists in its shape thanks to God’s choices as well as the choices of created agents, though unlike God we move along the history contributing our choices one at a time as we go. (The Incarnate Son is a way for God to experience and contribute to history along the story as well as from above the story, too; I strongly suspect the Son also travels around history in time and space as His personal natural history, which He starts in Bethlehem, or possibly at the conception in Nazareth, goes forward! – and that this accounts for a lot of the anthropomorphisms attributed to YHWH, especially to the visible YHWH, in the OT.)
If God wants to actively contribute to histories with different shapes, He ‘simply’ makes other histories in parallel with ours, though I doubt He contributes to, or authoritatively allows, every possible actualization and so every theoretically possible history. But there may be one best-possible-history which God prefers to bring about. Or there may be any number of best-possible-histories which God brings about but which are historically quite distinct from each other: to give an example of that idea, Narnia isn’t an alternate history Earth, so something like that would be brought about (on this theory) and not Lewis’ Space Trilogy stories which feature him and other persons from our history as well as persons not found in our history.
The question there would be whether, in short, God creates multiple Jasons in alternate universes. I can see arguments for the possibility of multiple universes without me; for multiple universes with different me’s yet similar enough to be recognizable as me though all different actual persons; and for one natural history that happens to be the only one God thought fit to create. However, I don’t have a main reason for some theologians like William Lane Craig to insist on the one-best-possible-history idea: it would seem weird on Arminian soteriology to have multiple persons existing, some saved and some damned (since if God doesn’t save everyone and doesn’t choose by election to save only some, then there would be at least some risk of multiple persons of me being perma-damned); and God electing to ensure the salvation of one version of me while damning another version of me would run against Calvinistic expectations in a different way (though a Calv might be a little more comfortable with close-parallel universes, where the same persons are always elected or not to salvation by God’s choice.) Either Calvs or Arms would I think be okay with more distinctly different natural histories being created with altogether different persons, though they might still have reasons for thinking God would only make one natural history. (WLC’s rationale for one-best-possible world is only partially soteriological, for example.)