This might be tough, please try to follow.
If God foreknows everything and God is all powerful, then, it follows that everything that occurs, occurs as a result of the following reason.
1. God plans it and is actively subduing the results
2. God plans against it, and is actively subduing the results
3. God allows it and is neither actively planning it nor actively restraining it, however he IS actively restraining his power/right to control it
In all cases, God must actively plan an action, or choose a course of action; even if that action is a planned inaction. Since he cannot be surprised and neither can his mind be stimulated with new information, in effect he plans to do nothing, he plans to do something, he plans to allow something by actively acting or actively restraining his power for his foreknown disposition.
The only thing that this theorem cannot account for at this time is if there is anything that God can passively not care about. Is such a thing possible when you know everything and everything is in submission to your power?
My view is that God is the first cause of all things. It doesn't seem possible for God to be uninvolved in anything.
7 comments:
4. God allows it and is moving at His will to intervene when He chooses according to His purposes.
God is never surprised, however scripture seems to indicate that He allows things that oppose His expressed desires. If that is true, then God's sovereignty and His desire are not synonomous. Meaning, there are elements of God's will He does not bring to pass. In essence, God chooses what to do within the construct of His own creation.
Most definitely. He planned the crucifixion of his own son, which was certainly sin in the hands of all who acted in such a way to bring that about.
Now if he planned that, even to the day, what free will part did they play?
Don't confuse free will with responsibility, for we certainly have that.
Interesting. Your view seems to limit that God could choose the very thing that we could choose. In other words, the men that did what the did chose to do so and God planned that it would come to pass. Your either or view of the debate limits your ability to see that God is not bound by human logic, just as he is not confined to my will. Remember that God intervening on behalf of man is the power of God revealed on Earth. Didn't God send a prophet to Hezekiah to get his house in order that he would die, but Hezekiah prayed and God answered his prayer (yes that does sound like God responds) and gave him 13 more years of life just prior to Israel being carried off into captivity.
1 John 2:2 "And He is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world."
Ezekiel 18:23 "Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord GOD: and not that he should return from his ways, and live?"
Ezekiel 18:32
"For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord GOD: wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye."
Thoughts?
Yes, you confuse God's foreknowledge and predetermined plan with the fact that he still holds us responsible
...but you will say, why then does God treat me such for who resists his will? But who are you oh man to answer back to God? Romans 9.
See the way I look at it, the only people who are limited are us. God knows, and preplans everything, and by some mysterious mystery is able to justly hold us responsible.
For example, Jeremiah, in certain chapters he seems to say repent, turn, but I know you won't, I've planned your enslavement, but then he comes back and says, repent again. So what's the deal? Is he confused...or is he laying down for the record how incapable we are?
How can he totally foreknow what we would choose, not intervene and then hold us responsible? We could do no other, and HE KNEW THAT! So then we can only surmise that he, in some way, approves, or plans to disapprove, but yet redeem anyway....
For whom he did foreknow, he also PREDESTINED to be conformed.
For by grace are you saved, if it is works then it is no GRACE AT ALL.
God foreknows, and in pure holiness plans the actions of his children. And that is totally okay.
Responsibility is not at issue. I am not at all trying to determine whose responsibility actions are. Instead I am trying to entertain the notion that God both has foreknowledge, plans and provides free will at the same time.
Since we both agree that NO MAN CAN COME TO GOD AT ALL IN ANY WAY WITHOUT GODS CALL I am not saying that man can choose for God and God must obey him. Instead I am saying that God says to man, much like He says to Job, come let us reason together.
In that statement, is God having a rhetorical conversation; one which he planned all the words and commanded them to be what they are yet somehow reasoning together is the outcome?
Why do you believe that God could and would limit Himself in such a way as to take on human flesh and endure hunger, yet the same God would not limit Himself in allowing an interactive relationship with His creation? He would endure the death on the cross, but allowing free will is out of His holy, sovereign capability?
Is it at all possible that when God commands His people to choose that He really means they have the capacity to do so?
Is it further possible that when John indicates that Christ was the propitiation (full satisfactory payment) for our sin and the sin of the whole world that He means the payment has been made and all you have to do is choose to accept it?
Further that man's apparent choice in no way encumbers the Lord, nor thwarts His holy and divine will, nor does it impinge on His sovereignty, but instead demonstrates the awesome love, patience, kindness and restraint that is our God in this present age?
Responsibility - that is an interesting concept to ponder. In Calvin's paradigm even he could not come to understand how God could not be responsible for man's sin if God indeed causes it. In my paradigm, man is responsible for his own sin. In God's law a man suffered for his own sin, while his children and others were not to bear his iniquity but he himself.
BTW - by one man sin entered the world. In that regard, did God create sin directly or instead create the capacity for it to exist? In other words, is it a stretch to believe that God creates the construct and the boundaries and what happens within is both random and planned?
I wonder what the verse in Ecclesiastes means when it says, "Time and Chance happeneth to them all."
Maybe I don't understand your premise. Let's clarify - does God pull all the strings? If so, what is time and chance, but God's plan? So time and chance should be used interchangeably with God's plan, correct?
Here's where it's at for me. I've examined the whole idea of free will. Our will is neither free, nor can we determine how much of it is ours. Yet we know we have responsibility.
So; I look at Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos,
If evil comes, has the Lord himself not planned it? Amos.
The problem isn't whether or not you have an influence in the outcome of events, or what part of God's plan is dependent on human agency, the question for me is how little. Does God make me push the keys? Does he make me correct my spelling, does he make my wipe my brow, brush my teeth? I don't know. I can't say for sure. But, as I read the Bible, I see how remarkably little isn't planned by God...so that begets the question what is it, exactly, that God doesn't care enough about to plan?
I don't confuse causality with choice, or will.
Piper says from his article entitled; Why I Do Not Say, "God Did Not Cause the Calamity, but He Can Use It for Good"
How God governs all events in the universe without sinning, and without removing responsibility from man, and with compassionate outcomes is mysterious indeed! But that is what the Bible teaches. God "works all things after the counsel of his will" (Ephesians 1:11).
This "all things" includes the fall of sparrows (Matthew 10:29), the rolling of dice (Proverbs 16:33), the slaughter of his people (Psalm 44:11), the decisions of kings (Proverbs 21:1), the failing of sight (Exodus 4:11), the sickness of children (2 Samuel 12:15), the loss and gain of money (1 Samuel 2:7), the suffering of saints (1 Peter 4:19), the completion of travel plans (James 4:15), the persecution of Christians (Hebrews 12:4-7), the repentance of souls (2 Timothy 2:25), the gift of faith (Philippians 1:29), the pursuit of holiness (Philippians 3:12-13), the growth of believers (Hebrews 6:3), the giving of life and the taking in death (1 Samuel 2:6), and the crucifixion of his Son (Acts 4:27-28)
Again, I come back to, what exactly isn't ordained by God?
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