That's not really what I meant. I should have been more clear.
I know what you meant. My restating of it is the logical implication of your question.
What I mean is that if the possibility can exist that God could be mistaken, what security do we have in the promises He has made?
God is not a man, assuranceagent!
God can be trusted because He's God. He's existed forever and has never done anything other than to act in the best interest of others. Even when He punishes people He hates He is acting in the person's best interest!
If you can't trust God, who can you trust? Have you thought through that question? What if it turns out you can't trust God and in reality He's been lying to us all this whole time? What are you going to do about it? Its not as if you deserve God's love in the first place and so if God were to break His promise to save you then which of the two of you will have lost more? You will have gotten what you admit that you already deserve anyway but God will have lost His honor.
So the answer to your question is two fold. First of all God has an infinitely long track record which demonstrates His ability to choose love forever. Secondly, even if He didn't keep His word, you will end up no worse off for having trusted Him than you would have had you not.
Having said all that, the fact still remains that you are implying that God cannot be trusted unless He is incapable of choosing His own actions. You're implying that if God is capable in even the slightest degree of breaking His word, regardless of all other considerations, He is untrustworthy. You don't have that standard for your own parents and their mere human beings!
We can only trust those promises to the extent we can be certain of their fulfillment. What if an unknown variable makes the fulfillment of those promises untenable?
You are mistaking God for some super-human being. He is no such thing. God knowing something in advance isn't the only variable in the equation here. God is perfectly able to cause whatever need happen for His will to be fulfilled. And He doesn't make promises that He doesn't already know that He is able to fulfill. If some situation could occur that would effect some promise that God was considering making then He wouldn't make it in the first place without stating why it might not be fulfilled. Jeremiah 18 is an excellent example of this. God wanted to give Israel a Kingdom but they hated the King and so in keeping with Jeremiah 18, He didn't give them the Kingdom that He had promised (Romans 9).
I trust the loving God who inspired the verse because I believe that there is no capacity in Him for evil.
Then why did you feel the need to "clarify" your statement before?
This is what I said! You won't trust God unless He is altogether incapable of hurting you. It isn't because He's demonstrated His love for you but because He can't do it any other way. God, in you mind, doesn't love you because He decided to love you but because He couldn't have not loved you.
I believe He is only light and there is not darkness in Him.
I agree!
The difference is that you think that lightbulbs that are always on and are incapable of turning themselves off or burning out deserve moral credit for their trustworthy luminosity.
You've reduced God to an inanimate object!
I believe that God is only light and there is not darkness in Him because He has chosen to be that way.
And I believe that when our sanctification is complete and we are conformed to His image, the same will be said of us.
I agree!
But again, it will be because we will have been given the full power of the Spirit of God and will be righteous by choice, which is the only way to be righteous.
It is my opinion that you go too far in saying that prophecy 'fails.'
The Bible is full of prophesy that did not come to pass as stated.
Would you like me to quote them for you?
In fact, the Bible is clear that a prophet is known to be authentic or false on the basis of whether what he prophesies comes to pass. If the prophecy fails, so does the prophet.
It is you who are taking things too far. This pass fail test of prophesy is generally true but GOD HIMSELF states explicitly why a prophesy might not come to pass! The very same God who gives the test of a prophet that you mention also said that some prophesy may not come to pass! And He said it EXPLICITLY!
If I tell my son that I will respond with 'X' if he does 'A' and then he does 'B' and I respond 'Y', what I originally said did not fail and I was not mistaken. It is simply that the necessary trigger never occurred (likely as a result of my warning).
This is not the sort of prophesy failure that I am talking about. I'm talking about when God says that He will "without fail" do something and then He says later, that He will not do it.
Jeremiah 18 does no damage to my theological framework. See my previous comments.
Jeremiah 18 crushes your theological framework into splinters. According to you God word is pre-written history. According to Jeremiah it is not.
Let's suppose that in my example I told my son that if he threw a tantrum, he was going to get a spanking. My 'prophecy' to him is the vehicle by which I bring about my will. God does the same, albeit with more perfect and effectual result.
Amen! All prophesy is warning. However, God most often does not use the word "if".
This bears nothing on His foreknowledge and does not require Him to change His mind.
Of course it does! You haven't read your Bible.
God said that He would "without fail" drive out Israel's enemies from before them. A couple of chapters later, He changed His mind and told them that He would leave those enemies there because of Israel's evil. (Perfectly consistent with Jeremiah 18).
It is simply an 'A' leads to 'X'/'B' leads to 'Y' scenario for which only one side of the equation was made known.
"with out fail" is the words God Himself used.
For clarification of my position, I'll interject that I believe that God does have exhaustive control over every event that occurs, but I do not believe that He chooses to exert that control in every case.
The only reason to make such a caveat would be to make room for justice. In other words, you see, perhaps only intuitively the conflict between God having exhaustive control over every event that occurs and the concept of justice.
You are using the Open View paradigm here. You are placing God's quality of justice to trump the quantity of control He exerts over creation.
I agree in the sense that if God was exhaustively deterministic, He'd necessarily be the author of sin. I don't believe that God exhaustively ordains all that occurs.
This is the (or at least one of the) foundational building blocks of the settled view that you are undermining here. Plato would turn over in his grave.
I also don't believe that God 'risks' rejection to make love possible, but that's a whole 'nother debate.
No it isn't! That is THE WHOLE debate! That's the central point! The ONLY point! That's the whole Open View in a nutshell!
How in the world would you think that this is a different debate?
I'm not trying to be overly argumentative, but I fail to see how it is rational to believe that an omniscient God (omniscience as defined by the OV) could simply choose not to know something that could be known.
How is it not rational? God is able to do what He wants. How is it so difficult to imagine God turning His attention away from a wicked city like Sodom, for example? The Bible comes right out and says that God sent angels to investigate whether Sodom was as bad as He had been told. How is my position not rational?
It is my opinion that anthropomorphic understanding of those passages which seem contrary is both more rationally and more biblically consistent than trying to shoehorn a reconciliation that requires God to be willfully ignorant.
Anthropomorphisms are figures of speech. Figures of speech have meaning. When I say, "Let's hit the road." It means "Let's leave." What does the figure of speech mean when God said "I will go down now and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry against it that has come to Me; and if not, I will know.”
What does that lengthy figure of speech mean?
Again, I fail to see the rationality of that statement.
For something to not be rational it has to contradict itself in some way.Where do you see a contradiction in my position?
Since God is present with His people (because He chooses to be) if He were to perchance witness one of them committing sin, can He then simply 'un-know' it?
The Bible tells us repeatedly that God remembers our sin no more. In that sense, yes, God can forget what He wants to forget.
Can He literally force Himself to forget what He has just witnessed?
Yes!
Even so, we may simply have to agree to disagree here. Perhaps we can find common ground though: Can we agree that God, should He desire it, has within Him the capacity and ability to be omnipresent?
Yes! God is capable of being all places at once but is only in those places where He wants to be. He is not in Hell (i.e. the Lake of Fire), nor will He ever be. Not because He cannot be but because His absence is what defines the place's existence.
If one is irrational, so is the other. They pose the same argument.
They pose the same argument but that argument is not consistent with the settled view paradigm! If God has exhaustive foreknowledge it isn't that things simply will not happen, its that they cannot happen. I've presented the rational argument a hundred times. If you like I will post it again for you.
I'm not concerned about God hurting me. I'm concerned about ME hurting me.
Rhetorical mumbo-jumbo. If a person promises you something and then unjustly breaks that promise then you have been hurt. No matter how you slice it, if you're worried about God not fulfilling His promises, you're worried about being hurt by God.
We have all proven that if the capacity for rebellion exists, we will actualize it.
We humans have but there are lots of angels that have not rebelled and Jesus has the ability to rebel in the wilderness and didn't do it.
God is not a fallen human being!
God is not fickle, I am. You are. We all are.
All of us who are fallen in Adam are, yes but God is not in that category!
And yet it is a point that is lost to all the debate among godly men and women that suggests otherwise. Equally godly men and women have struggled with these very same questions for years. Decades. Even centuries.
This is true but it has nothing to do with how rational one position is over the other. This is true because most people make decision based on emotional considerations.
If your theological framework were truly as unassailable as you state, we wouldn't be on page 20 something of the third thread of this debate.
Anyone can assail anything! Look at the idiots that are on these threads debating this stuff! Not exactly the most rational group of people on the planet.
Which is essentially a meaningless statement. That's what EVERY theological framework attempts to do. And ATTEMPT is the key word in all of them.
Oh no it isn't what every theological framwork attempts to do!!!
Have you read any of Lon's most recent posts in response to me?
He openly advocates the notion that you cannot trust your own ability to rightly use logic! How in the Hell is one expected to have a rational theology if you, from the very beginning, undermine sound reason or your ability to recognize it?
And it isn't meaningless at all in any case! The point of it is that we formulate our theology from the objective foundations of Scripture and SOUND reason. That is to say that we don't get to just make up our theology as we go. We start with Scripture and proceed with sound reason. Thus any doctrine that is in contradiction to Scripture is false not because we don't like it but because sound reason insists that the contradictory (or otherwise irrational) is false! What other path is there to follow that makes any sense?
Resting in Him,
Clete
