Theists: How can predetermined fate and free will coexist?

[Tonus]

1) Yes. Our hearts "feel" the pain of others. So in an abstract sense, we "suffer with" them when we are compassionate.

What I meant is that our ability to empathize means that we can relate to the suffering of others even if we do not share it. In your example re:Syria, I may decide to travel there to help out and I may be moved by what I see, but my desire to help was triggered by empathy even though I was seeing their plight through a very narrow lens and from a much more comfortable perspective. I didn't have to suffer with them in order to be moved to help them.

3) Like you said before, the image of god means the ability to empathize and be compassionate.

But this implies that the ordeal he went through wasn't necessary.

We can look at Jesus on the cross and see the reality of God's being so close to humanity that he even suffers what humanity suffers. In other words, how can we know that god is compassionate and merciful toward humanity?

If he were to immediately eliminate all pain and suffering, I would know that he was compassionate and merciful.

5) That's the thing. He did do something about it, right there and then. He rose from the dead.

But that's something that separates him from those of us made in his image. See, it's not just that God could easily fix things in a second with a wave of his hand. It's what his time as Jesus represents if we simply shift the perspective slightly. Imagine that God has become frustrated. His creation --both heavenly and earthly-- rebels against him and ruins his initial set up for humanity on Earth. He strips perfection from them and watches as they continue to do what is wrong and hurt one another and follow false gods and so on. So he masquerades as a human for a short time and lives a perfect life as if to mock humanity by showing them how easy it is. He arranges for a brutal and savage experience of torture that ends with his execution... only to return three days later, refreshed and ready to return to his role as the most powerful being in all of existence.

He is eternal. Thirty-three years isn't even the blink of an eye for him, much less three days of suffering that ends with him becoming God again and able to visit the most horrific torments on the people who hurt his temporary physical body. And they're going to suffer forever. God is different from us in every possible way. How would such a small sample make any difference in what he could do for us if he was truly compassionate? Why would he have to experience all of the suffering that ever happened in order to decide that imperfect humans were in a really bad state? And why go through any of that in order to fix it?

8) Well that is the thing. God united humanity to "his super-brain". He CAN empathize and sympathize BOTH as God AND as human. As many of the church fathers were fond of saying: God became man so that man might become like god. God became human to suffer with humanity, so that humanity could enjoy divinity with god.

Would I really be getting a share of his divinity? I might end up as an eternal soul in heaven, but that's about where the similarities would end, isn't it? I think it's the mormons who claim that after death each of us gets a planet of our own to fiddle with. That strikes me as an example of God becoming man so that I could become a god. Otherwise it seems pretty lopsided, and I think we'd all have been happier if God had just fixed things when they first went wrong.