Does Predestination apply to all people or just the major characters God needed for His plans for us to unfold?
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Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ: Grace unto you, and peace, be multiplied. - 1 Peter 1:2
Election is according to the foreknowledge of God who knows the end from the beginning. There are many who believe that such foreknowledge eradicates choice but this is not philosophically necessary nor biblically sound. If God did not foreknow that Adam would freely choose to disobey, thus ushering sin and death into creation, the statement that the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world makes no sense and turns the plan of redemption through Christ into a "plan B".
For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified. - Romans 8:29-30
Those who are elect (those whom God foreknew would choose to believe) are the ones to whom predestination applies. It is not that anyone is predestined to believe but that believers are predestined to conformity with Christ.
Belief that God predestines people to either salvation or reprobation apart from any choice is actually a conflation of election with predestination and renders choices that God lays before us into nonsense:
See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil; In that I command thee this day to love the LORD thy God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commandments and his statutes and his judgments, that thou mayest live and multiply: and the LORD thy God shall bless thee in the land whither thou goest to possess it. But if thine heart turn away, so that thou wilt not hear, but shalt be drawn away, and worship other gods, and serve them; I denounce unto you this day, that ye shall surely perish, and that ye shall not prolong your days upon the land, whither thou passest over Jordan to go to possess it. I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live: - Deuteronomy 30:15-19
God knows who will choose life and is faithful to bring that life to completion. The Elect are predestined to life because they were foreknown not because they were without choice.
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