God_Is_Truth
New member
who said anything about me? i most certainly do want to be with him forever, and i know i will be.
what motivated me to repent? God did, but i still had the choice to not do so.
that doesn't exactly explain anything.
Open Theism Stirs Controversy on College Campuses
- Thread starter Christine
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who said anything about me? i most certainly do want to be with him forever, and i know i will be.
what motivated me to repent? God did, but i still had the choice to not do so.
that doesn't exactly explain anything.
logos_x
New member
Yes you do.
Universal restitution does not remove choice.
Besides that..your choice had motivation, at the time you were converted, and IT WAS GOD THAT DID IT.
I am confident that God helps and will continue to help anyone and everyone to make the best choice...evn if it takes a little Hell to get it done. Hell is proof of how seriously God takes human freedom, and is corrective in the same way any other correction is.
At any rate...I intended to privide another point of view...not end up hijacking this thread...
I know. It's never effective to do that is it? ...
Originally posted by Lucky
Okay. I thought you were an idiot, but I just wanted to triple-check.
Unfortunately...I got you mixed up with another person GIT.
I am sorry.
God_Is_Truth
New member
i honestly HOPE that what you say is true. but i don't see good enough biblical support for it.
nope
Forgiven
God_Is_Truth
New member
well, it may take me a while since i have finals in 2 weeks, i'm doing a bunch of reading on dispensationalism, i'll be working again during my christmas break and of course spending time with my family and friends.
but hopefully i will get to it in due time
I wouldn't say never.
Let's say I told you I believed the muffler on my car ruled the universe, that if it was kicked Mars would send aliens to eat all our dogs, and we should all bow to it.
Wouldn't it be easier just to say, "man, that guy is nuts" than to thoroughly examine all my muffler theology to see if perhaps it's the truth?
logos_x
New member
:chuckle:
I stand corrected.
Surely, though, if I told you God is saving the world...the REAL God...and that we can have faith that He will succeed, that would be something you might want to find out about.
In other words...if you are comparing your example above with universal restitution...then you're an idiot.
Yes I do!
Gen 6:6 And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.
Gen 6:7 So the LORD said, "I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them."
logos_x
New member
What is God really doing in this judgement?
Notice...in Genesis 6:3 :
And Jehovah saith, `My Spirit doth not strive {1) to judge, contend, plead 1a) (Qal) 1a1) to act as judge, minister judgment 1a2) to plead a cause 1a3) to execute judgment, requite, vindicate 1a4) to govern 1a5) to contend, strive 1b) (Niphal) to be at strife, quarrel Part of Speech: verb} in man--to the age; in their erring they are flesh:' and his days have been an hundred and twenty years.
He is targeting their flesh...their physical existence. He is cutting short their days in the Earth because of their following after the "sons of god" (see verses 6:1-4)
It is the eqivelent of this in the new testament:
1Corintians 5:5 To deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.
So...what you have quoted is not the complete change of plan you've made it out to be, because God made things so that it can be corrected...this is the actual working out of His judgement as correction.
But..I understand what you are pointing out. The future for those people was open enough, and their choices wicked enough, to warrent that things be cut short...
They could have chosen another path, and if they had, God would not have chosen His course of action in the same way.
Omniscience and omnipotence are different attributes and should not be confused.
"As omnipotence is limited by the possible, so omniscience is limited by the knowable. We do not limit omnipotence by denying its power to do impossible or self-contradictory things (the uncreated God being created or creating a rock so heavy he cannot lift it or making a square circle). Neither do we limit omniscience by denying its power to foreknow unknowable things (modal logic...future free will contingencies are known as possibilities rather than actualities/certainties or the choice is not genuinely free= 2 or more alternatives possible). A future free will act is, previous to its existence, a nothing; the knowing of a nothing is a bald contradiction."
Omniscience is knowing everything that is logically possible to know.
The timeless 'eternal now' view of God is from pagan Greek philosophy through Augustine, etc.
The Hebraic view of eternity is endless duration, sequence, succession=time. Time is not space and is not a thing. Thus, time travel is absurd. The past and present are known exhaustively by God, while some of the future that He purposes to bring to pass is known and some is open and unknown except as a possibility (then it becomes a certainty/actuality).
The issues around predestination, foreknowledge, free will, etc. are related to our concept of time and eternity (there are 4 major views).
An omniscient God is aware of all sin or He could not judge it. Man and demons would know something that God does not know. He does not have to focus His attention on the sinning, but He must be aware of it if He is omnipresent/omniscient. Past and present sin is an object of knowledge. The future is not yet, so it is not a possible object of knowledge.
They are not identical, but they are similar. They are not totally different. Love has meaning whether from God's perspective or man's. We are in the image of God. Communication and relationship is impossible if everything is 'different' because it is relating to God. God is all powerful and we are frail/finite. God's relationship to time can be similar to ours (experiences past, present, future) without limiting God. We are finite in one location so can only do limited things at once. God is omnipresent and omniscient so He can know and do infinitely more things all at once. Yet, there is some continuity in how we experience the past and future. This is reality for God and man, not a limitation for God.
This is a long overdure response to SOTK's post #82...
Take Pharaoh for example, it is not necessary to believe that God overcame his free will in order to get him to let the Israelites go. In fact, we have all the reason in the world to say that He did not.
First of all, the whole story wouldn't make sense had God been controlling Pharaoh. What would have been the point of 10 plagues that were according to the text designed to convince Pharaoh to let them go? Why not simply force him to say "Yeah, okay. Here, take all our gold with you as you go!" and then that would have been the end of it. Instead, God performed undeniable miracle after undeniable miracle. Why? The reason why is because God knew Pharaoh's heart, that it was wicked. God knew him well enough to know that if He performed miracles that made pharaoh look foolish and weak that he would respond with more and more hatred toward God and toward Moses and his people. Thus, in a manner of speaking, God did indeed harden pharaoh's heart in that He was the one who was intentionally shoving the truth in Pharaoh's face by performing miracle after miracle. But the point is, that PHAROAH COULD HAVE REPENTED! Had he done so, his son would not have been killed and God's people would still have won their freedom. God would have won and would have had opportunity to show His mercy rather than His judgment, which is precisely what He would have done.
Now, you might think that this is a radical interpretation of what happened in Exodus, but the important thing to keep in mind is not how common a teaching it is but whether or not it conforms to the Biblical record. There is nothing in the text that contradicts this interpretation, nothing at all and yet this story is one of Calvinism's most favored proof texts! The simple fact is, they read their theology into the text, nothing in the Exodus account requires of belief that God took over Pharaoh's ability to choose for himself what he would do. If this were not so, then God's punishment of him would have been unjust, which is the primary point!
God is a loving God who is both merciful and just. If our theology serves to undermine such major and undeniable attributes of God's character then we can know that our theology is in error. God created us so that He might love us and that we might love Him. Our loving Him is absolutely contingent upon our ability to choose for ourselves. If we only "love" because we have been predestined to do so, then that isn't love at all! It might look like love to someone who doesn't know that such actions have been preprogrammed but God would certainly know and He's the only one that matters since He is the object of such so called "love". Thus the doctrine of predestination cuts at the very heart of the meaning of our very existence.
God's mercy and justice are undermined, indeed made meaningless, in the same way. If we cannot choose then it is impossible to assign any moral implications to our actions. We are simply doing that which we have been preprogrammed to do. A rape would have no more moral implication than a toaster browning a piece of bread. This being the case, for God to punish or reward any such act would be fundamentally unjust. We can know for a fact and be absolutely certain that we do have a freewill because the goodness and justice of God are undeniable presuppositions of the Christian faith. To deny one is to deny both.
To avoid confusion I would, if I were you, find a different term to use rather than logic. Otherwise, you run the risk of saying that God is irrational without intending to do so.
You've mixed Arminianism (foreknowledge), Calvinism(predeterminism), and Open Theism(free will) all together here.
You're a "Calminian Open Theist"! :chuckle:
Resting in Him,
Clete
P.S. Sorry it took so long to respond, I've been pretty busy lately.
God bless!
Manipulating in the sense of influencing not controlling; we are not puppets on a string. God is able to influence His friends and manipulate His enemies in many of the same ways you do your own and then some. God knows everyone better than they know themselves. He knows every detail of whatever circumstance He is looking at that can be known and is therefore able to act on the available information in order to work things out the way He wants for them to work out.
Take Pharaoh for example, it is not necessary to believe that God overcame his free will in order to get him to let the Israelites go. In fact, we have all the reason in the world to say that He did not.
First of all, the whole story wouldn't make sense had God been controlling Pharaoh. What would have been the point of 10 plagues that were according to the text designed to convince Pharaoh to let them go? Why not simply force him to say "Yeah, okay. Here, take all our gold with you as you go!" and then that would have been the end of it. Instead, God performed undeniable miracle after undeniable miracle. Why? The reason why is because God knew Pharaoh's heart, that it was wicked. God knew him well enough to know that if He performed miracles that made pharaoh look foolish and weak that he would respond with more and more hatred toward God and toward Moses and his people. Thus, in a manner of speaking, God did indeed harden pharaoh's heart in that He was the one who was intentionally shoving the truth in Pharaoh's face by performing miracle after miracle. But the point is, that PHAROAH COULD HAVE REPENTED! Had he done so, his son would not have been killed and God's people would still have won their freedom. God would have won and would have had opportunity to show His mercy rather than His judgment, which is precisely what He would have done.
Now, you might think that this is a radical interpretation of what happened in Exodus, but the important thing to keep in mind is not how common a teaching it is but whether or not it conforms to the Biblical record. There is nothing in the text that contradicts this interpretation, nothing at all and yet this story is one of Calvinism's most favored proof texts! The simple fact is, they read their theology into the text, nothing in the Exodus account requires of belief that God took over Pharaoh's ability to choose for himself what he would do. If this were not so, then God's punishment of him would have been unjust, which is the primary point!
God is a loving God who is both merciful and just. If our theology serves to undermine such major and undeniable attributes of God's character then we can know that our theology is in error. God created us so that He might love us and that we might love Him. Our loving Him is absolutely contingent upon our ability to choose for ourselves. If we only "love" because we have been predestined to do so, then that isn't love at all! It might look like love to someone who doesn't know that such actions have been preprogrammed but God would certainly know and He's the only one that matters since He is the object of such so called "love". Thus the doctrine of predestination cuts at the very heart of the meaning of our very existence.
God's mercy and justice are undermined, indeed made meaningless, in the same way. If we cannot choose then it is impossible to assign any moral implications to our actions. We are simply doing that which we have been preprogrammed to do. A rape would have no more moral implication than a toaster browning a piece of bread. This being the case, for God to punish or reward any such act would be fundamentally unjust. We can know for a fact and be absolutely certain that we do have a freewill because the goodness and justice of God are undeniable presuppositions of the Christian faith. To deny one is to deny both.
What you are talking about then is not logic, it's information and perhaps intelligence. God definitely has access to far more information than do we and of course He is vastly more intelligent than we are. Those are givens and are not in dispute.
To avoid confusion I would, if I were you, find a different term to use rather than logic. Otherwise, you run the risk of saying that God is irrational without intending to do so.
That's because the two are logical contradictions, they are mutually exclusive.
Impossible! You are literally trying to have your cake and eat it too. That is just not an option, you can either eat the cake or you can keep it for another day, you cannot do both at the same time. If your actions are predetermined then they are not free, period. Freedom is the ability to do or to do otherwise. If your actions are foreknown or predetermined either one then you cannot do otherwise and are therefore not free.
This sort of made me chuckle.
You've mixed Arminianism (foreknowledge), Calvinism(predeterminism), and Open Theism(free will) all together here.
You're a "Calminian Open Theist"! :chuckle:
Well if predeterminism is true then your actions, the fact that they make sense to you, your leanings, etc were all predetermined as well. In fact, if predestination is true then I was predestined to believe in free will! How much sense does that make?
Resting in Him,
Clete
P.S. Sorry it took so long to respond, I've been pretty busy lately.
God bless!
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Christine
New member
You must believe that verse six means that God genuinely was sorry and regreted that He ever made man. It doesn't mean that at all. The phrase "was sorry" is a figure of speech that's ascribing to God characteristics that belong to men or other creatures, just like the passages that say God has limbs. God did not regret that He made man. Just because God was grieved does not mean he didn't know man was going to act like this. It's like a parent-child relationship. A parent is grieved when his child sins, but the parent is not surprised because the parent knew the child was born with a sin nature. So God knew that man had a sin nature and would turn from Him.
OPEN THEISM STIRS CONTROVERSY IN PALESTINE
PALESTINE--A charismatic rabbi who has gained a small following in Galilee is drawing fire for his radical notion that God is available to everyone and is not to be found in the domain of temple worship.
The local chapter of Phaisees for Fundamentalist Purity has objected on the grounds that tradition needs to be upheld and that they alone should be able to decide who is righteous and who is not.
The Galilean upstart--called "Son of Mary" by some and "Messiah" by others, has also said puzzling things like "the Father makes his sun shine on both the evil and the good and sends rain down on the just and unjust alike."
Frank Pharisee, president of the local chapter, has said that he is going to take his organization's cause to members of the Roman government to enlist its support for boycotting or otherwise "dealing with this Jesus fellow."
"We have our world all mapped out and understood," Frank said, who was on his way to buy a choice lamb for the Passover festival for slaughter in the Temple. "We don't need anyone pushing the envelope of our version of reality."
PALESTINE--A charismatic rabbi who has gained a small following in Galilee is drawing fire for his radical notion that God is available to everyone and is not to be found in the domain of temple worship.
The local chapter of Phaisees for Fundamentalist Purity has objected on the grounds that tradition needs to be upheld and that they alone should be able to decide who is righteous and who is not.
The Galilean upstart--called "Son of Mary" by some and "Messiah" by others, has also said puzzling things like "the Father makes his sun shine on both the evil and the good and sends rain down on the just and unjust alike."
Frank Pharisee, president of the local chapter, has said that he is going to take his organization's cause to members of the Roman government to enlist its support for boycotting or otherwise "dealing with this Jesus fellow."
"We have our world all mapped out and understood," Frank said, who was on his way to buy a choice lamb for the Passover festival for slaughter in the Temple. "We don't need anyone pushing the envelope of our version of reality."
Please demonstate how you know this is a figure of speech as opposed to God saying what he meant. Why is it not possible the Bible refering to God as all knowing is a figure of speech meaning God knows all that is knowable?
Oh by the way parents are quite often surprised by the sins of there children! I understand that your world view would dictate that God would neither be suprised by the behaviour of man, or be able to change his mind. Hey wait a minute if God is unable to change his mind would he really be all powerfull?
Christine
New member
I don't remember the flood coming up in our discussion. I'm assuming you're referring to the verses Delmar quoted to me. If that's so, then you can read my response to Delmar.
From studying scripture with the aid of E.W. Bullinger's study aids. Nothing in scripture just happens to occur. Everything in scripture has a purpose, including the numbers. God didn't just randomly choose the number 40 in His words to Nineveh, the number had a purpose. Here is more info on the topic.
How could God for certain prevent it from happening?
If David had instead died on this "pretty close" instance, would God have had to turn to His "Plan B?"
God knows time exhaustively, Lighthouse. Verses like Eph 1:4 (quoted in next section) further prove that.
According to the following passages, the Dispensation of Grace was always part of "Plan A."
Romans 16:25 " Now to him that is of power to stablish you according to my gospel, and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began"
The "mystery" is the "Dispensation of Grace," Lighthouse.
Ephesians 1:4 "According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love"
The "us" is the Body members of the current dispensation. God knew, before he'd even created the world that there would be a dispensation of Grace.
:nono: God had the Dispensation of Grace in mind before Adam and Eve had committed the first sin.
If that had been a prophecy, then God would have changed, which would have been in direct contradiction of scripture.
Malachi 3:6 " For I am the LORD, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.
How do you know that Israel, as a whole won't turn to Christ, forcing God to "change his mind?" How do you know God's word is to be taken seriously, if, according to you, God has repeatedly changed His mind in the past?