Nature of Nature and the Fall

Hal is in blue I am in red.

And on... As Ray and I have discussed, at length, in the past, from gradual, time to time, my own limited (necessarily), understanding of the nature of "nature" and the fall of creation, is one based on contingency. All creation is contingent, whether we are speaking of mankind's world, as we presently know it, or the world which seems to be indicated, in that time just after," In the beginning," (The words after that, "God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form and void," are better translated, "were chaos and a ruin." It has been widely thought about, that chaos and a ruin connotate that there was order and NON-ruin, (non-ruin meaning structural integrity).

The two words in question here which Hal translates chaos and ruin are tohuw and bohuw. Tohuw means formlessness confusion and emptiness and is most often used to mean a wilderness and vanity. Bohuw means emptiness void and waste. The idea here is one of repetition as in when the Lord says, "Abraham Abraham," or "Samuel Samuel," or "Simon Simon" this sort of language when used by Hebrew people is one of emphasis. When Jesus says, "truly truly I say to you..." He is not stuttering but is saying, "Listen up, this is really important." In the case of Genesis 1 I think the usage here is an emphasizing of the idea that when God created He created from nothing and that nothing was absolute. The emphasis works in this case to mean, I think, that though God has created the Heavens and the Earth, the work is not finished there is still a filling up to be finished in His creation.

A word here, the phrase Heavens and the Earth does not mean flat earth with sky over head and neither does it mean that this act of creation created the Earth specifically. Rather it is a Hebraism meaning basically, "All that is, everything, the universe." The wording could just as easily have read, "In the beginning God created the universe, and the universe was empty and without things as we see them now."

However, there are other places that the text uses the same phraseology to indicate a ruin due to God's wrath (Jeremiah) and while I do not think that the text supports that idea in this case, I also agree that it does not specifically rule it out, therefore I think those who say this is an indication of the Fall are not without argument I just don't personally agree with this idea.

The point, however, is that nature, as it is seen, is a restored patchwork, with God having done His best to use ruins to rebuild a universe that fell with the angelic host, using naturally corrupted elements, whose best use still contains the elemental spirits that are contained within the material God has used to rebuild the fallen universe.

I really dislike the notion that God "did His best" to restore the universe. I think it indicates that some things are beyond God's ability. Understand I am not arguing for the omni-competence of God but rather that those things which God purposes to do He does so in total and without anything lacking. I think Genesis also supports this idea because God declares Creation "Very Good". If Creation were a patchwork of something which had been better before then I have a hard time grasping how it could be "Very good" in the eyes of the Almighty. Also I think the idea of the universe being constructed of "naturally corrupted elements" is not a Christian-Jewish idea at all. The Bible unashamedly declares that everything God did in creation is good and not lacking in anything at all. Why would God curse creation because of man's sin if it were already cursed. Rather such a notion is Platonic in its nature. The idea that the universe is basically evil is to say that all physical matter is evil and therefore you fall into the Neo-Platonist heresy of "Spirit good/ physical bad" not so not at all. God created man good period and declared him to be so. Also the idea that the universe was cobbled together with wicked elements is a gnostic heresy which has nothing whatever to do with Christian orthodoxy.

Regardless of the quality of the material used to rebuild the universe, the fact is, that the contingent nature of the universe was always there. The free-will choice of Lucifer and his 1/3 of the heavenly host, as contingent beings, was misused to choose to make a choice undirected by the will of God, from within, (now), Satan's own internal will. Mankind's temptation was, though his own fault, from outside his will. He was tempted from an outside source. That made him redeemable, BUT, true moral guilt, (as mentioned before), required a repair job on his will, which though his body is still made of fallen matter, causing the occasional poor decision, allows better decision-making capability. This has some bearing on some of the doctrines of the church, dealing with ongoing need for repentance and admission of sin, since we are still NATURALLY prone to sin.

This argument cannot be made in defense of Christian orthodoxy. Of course Lucifer was a contingent being, but apart from the ability to sin he also had the ability to not sin (which is an ability which we post-fall lack.) The same is true of Adam. There is a sense in which we can never grasp what temptation meant to Adam, but we can be certain that it must have come from within and the reason why is simple. If Adam fell because he was tempted outside of himself then how did Lucifer fall? As the angel who rebelled, Lucifer must have been tempted from within since the only other being who could tempt him was God. So if the only way Adam could fall was because he was tempted form outside of himself then the only way which Lucifer could have fallen was the same. Unless of course Adam was not morally perfect in which case the fall is not a fall at all. However Ezekiel tells us that Lucifer fell because of the lust in his own heart which welled up from within himself. And James tells us that we sin because temptation wells up from within ourselves. Remember that Scripture holds Adam responsible for the fall, but he did not sin first. Eve sinned first but was deceived Adam chose to sin in full knowledge of what he was doing.

And you can't say that it was because he had a natural proclivity to sin because he was in a fallen body. He was not and Scripture tells us so quite plainly. God gave Law to our parents and they transgressed it. They did so because they wanted to and yes God had to allow it to happen. One could argue that the fall was inevitable since it happened, but it need not be so. That Adam was made good and given free will and Law indicates that he could have done differently. If he could not but fall the God's cursing of him is unjust. If God fashions Adam from fallen matter and gives him Law knowing He can't obey and then holds him responsible for his sin then God is unjust. And you can't argue that we have a sin proclivity and God holds us responsible so... because we are not Adam and neither are we as Adam was. We have a sin nature, he did not. We live in a fallen world, he was in the Garden of God. Our situation is nothing like Adam's and yet when we sin we do so because we choose to and God holds us responsible for it. So for Adam to have sinned given the beatific existence which he enjoyed which we have never known is all the more shocking. God not only made him good, He stacked the deck in his favor. And Adam still fell.

That having been said, it is now necessary to touch on the issue of the inevitability of the fall of man, & as a matter of fact, the issue of the necessity of the destruction of Satan & the heavenly host, & yet again, the point of view that the three periods of earth's and mankind's history being the dramatic proof that the destruction of Satan and the heavenly host is necessary, for true redemption to be effective. (Those periods are (1), the creation of Adam and Eve to the Deluge, (2), the Deluge through the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the history of the world until the future ascension of Satan to power, in this world, and the return of Messiah to stop the destruction of the world, and holding him powerless to affect the history of the world, until the end of the last period,(3), the thousand year reign. i will do that next.

I am not a dispensationalist and I do not believe that history is carved up into different eras. Of course the covenant under which Adam existed is different than ours because he existed in the presence of God whereas the covenant of grace which God gave to Israel through Moses in the Law and then in its fulfillment in Christ Jesus is that God will be with us, but that is very different because the final Messianic age is the fulfillment of the promises made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, given to Moses the People of Israel, brought forth in Christ and for that which we now wait. We wait for the presence of God; Adam lived in that presence. But the promise and the Law giver and the laws given do not change because God relates to us only through His covenant which is now and has always been one of absolute grace.

But back to why the fall was not inevitable. I said earlier that God stacked the deck in Adam's favor and he still fell but did not answer the obvious question, Why? Why did Adam fall? If he did not have to then why did he?

The answer is, I think, because he wanted to. It is the same reason we sin. Had Adam not wanted to eat of the fruit he would not have. Yes the temptation of the Serpent was very powerful I am sure, but people cannot be compelled to moral evil against their will. A man is told to rob a bank or he will be killed, he has choice. Commit a crime or death. He can choose death, and if he does not he does so because he thinks his life is more valuable than the damage caused by the moral evil of his act. He wants to rob the bank so he does.

Adam had choice. He could have not eaten. If the fall was inevitable then he could not not have eaten and therefore God is unjust is punishing him. I am really surprised to hear my friend say this when he stands so strongly against hyper-Calvinsim (and rightly so). Adam sinned because Satan told them they would be as God. God then says that they must be cast because they have become as God. So Satan told them a legitimate truth in an illegitimate way. Adam is in Paradise with a command to obey and if he does he will be found just before a holy God. I think eventually God would have brought them to the tree and gave it to them, but they reached for it before God intended them to have it. We see the same thing in the wilderness temptation when Satan tells Jesus he will give Him the kingdoms of the world. Well God has purposed that Christ will rule the kingdoms of the earth and Satan does have them so he was offering Jesus a legitimate thing. But the way which God purposed Christ to have the kingdoms was by the Cross, so Satan was offering this to Jesus in an illegitimate way.

So how did Adam become as God?

The idea given in Genesis is "discerning good from evil", but what does that mean? I think it means that they would decide what is good and evil for themselves. That they would now make up their own minds what is good and what is bad. I think this is the very nature of Satan's sin. He decided that he had the right to take a higher place than he had been given. That he would decide for himself where he should be rather than being in submission to God. Adam, I think, had he obeyed would have communed with God to such an extent that, even though he is not God, he would have become fully submitted to God and then would have had the tree given to him. We can't say that they did not know to eat was sin, they did. They knew they were sinning and they did so because they wanted to decide for themselves what their station should be. They wanted to be God. And when they had eaten they were immediately ashamed. I think what they now saw which they had not before was not the difference between good and evil, but that to have obeyed would have been far far better than to have sinned.

The fall is a great and terrible tragedy. Adam and Eve, having now eaten, suddenly feel for the first time separation from God and shame for their own sin. They remember what it is to obey and suddenly wonder why they thought it was a good idea to do otherwise. So far from the freedom which they thought they would have, they rather now have the responsibility to decide what is good and evil, and they will do so without the immediate help of God. And so we now spend each day in a suffering dying world surrounded by suffering dying people whose eyes are opened only to their own blindness which they seeing do not see as they try and fumble their way to righteousness and God.

And it need not have been so, and thus God's wrath is just.

God Bless

Just Thinking

Little Ahmed Paper Loved That Rascal....

OK, so let me set the scene.

My family and I are out at a restaurant eating dinner (as opposed to ya know... wrapping ourselves in saran wrap and running about screaming "The Ghost of Stephen Foster") and on the TV there is a story about the snow storms in the northeast.

When suddenly from one table over an educational moment broke out as a curmudgeonly elder gentlemen spoke up about the snow saying, "Wish all 'em muzlims wood luke at that so they'd stay in ther own cuntry seein az they like sand so much."

If you don't speak Texan he said, "I wish all of the Muslims on Planet Earth would get the chance to watch this news story on the television so that they, seeing the snow, would be dissuaded from coming to this country because they like the sand in their own country so much."

OK translation time is over.

Now this struck me because this thoughtful well informed gentleman had presented the room with information which we did not previously possess. For example...

1. All Muslims like sand.

2. All Muslims hate snow.

3. All Muslims are coming to this country.

4. All Muslims come from one country.

Now this struck me as odd because I am fairly certain that Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, etc., are all separate and sovereign nations, and are all "Muslim" Countries.

But our friend seemed so sure that I now feel obliged to rethink my prior position.

So from this day forward we the people declare that all Muslims come from one country... Talibania. It is a wonderful place with deserts and mountains where children are taught religion in school, intolerance for other races, religions and ethnic groups is sternly encouraged. The only religious intolerance more smiled upon than dislike of other religions is that for other Muslims of a different Islamic Tradition than your own, and pretty much all of the problems in the world are the fault of Jews and minorities.

Wait....

I know why he's worried now. Talibania sounds just like Texas... and it never snows here.

Hal wrote

This is a different approach to the subject than I have addressed, publicly, than in the past,though Bogey will recognize it. I think that the approach to free will,from a Biblical basis,which is the primary thing we are really debating,here, has to include the fact that scripture says we are created in the Creator's,(God's),image. An analysis of the Hebrew and the thought behind the Hebrew phrasing,would indicate that we are not created in the image of an anthropomorphic God,but that we,(anthropos),are created in the image of a Theomorphic God,which INCLUDES free will,since by very definition,God has to have free will,indeed,the freest will of all,or we are not talking about God,in the true definition of the word,at all.

I think Hal has pretty much hit it right on here. I wanted to comment on something he said though which I had not thought of in these terms, but it makes an interesting point.

He mentions that God is not anthropomorphic but theomorphic. I like this idea.

First off I think there is a great deal of confusion, even among Christians and especially among evangelicals and among those even more so southern evangelicals, that God is an old man sitting on a throne in the middle of outer space somewhere shaking his fist at us when we sin. This notion is in fact not only erroneous, but so erroneous as to be utterly indefensible and so far off base that it need not be redefined or refined, but jettisoned and a new idea of God must be conceived of altogether. The problem is that this notion is so widely held that when those who would attack the Faith are met with resistance which begins with, "Well I don't believe in that god either so let's talk about the God who is instead..." the response often borders on violence because the detractors of thd faith think that this notion, being so widely held after all, is the notion of God which Christianity confesses.

But it is not, and it never has been.

And for those who will say, "Well I speak to lots of Christians and they think God is like this...." two things. One, truth is not subject to public opinion. If ten million people hold a view of something erroneously then all of them are wrong. Two, just because lots and lots of people believe something doesn't make it right (nazi germany, ufos, compassionate conservatives) or anything less far fetched.

The Bible uses anthropomorphic language to describe God; the eyes of God search the earth, to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed, etc, but such language is not a statement about the actual nature of God, but rather about the way in which God relates to us in such a way as we can understand. We have no concept of what God is like, but we know things about ourselves. For example we know the tender care of a mother nursing her child and the safety of a child in her arms, so when the Bible calls the Lord El Shaddai (God the breasted One) it does mean that God literally descends and feeds us from His breasts, rather it means that the affection and care which God shows toward those who love Him and are called according to His purpose is like the care of the nursing mother for her child. The anthropomorphic language exists to serve as an analogy for us to help us understand the care and nurture and wrath and judgment of God.

So what is God like?

Well on the authority of none less that Jesus Himself, which by the way settles the argument for faithful Christians, God is a Spirit. Not the Spirit, as in Holy Spirit (that's the Trinity.... aaaaand we don't have time) What that means is that God is non-corporeal. God does not have a body. God exists and has being and that being has a nature which is part and parcel of that being, but is not contained locally within a body. Remember the notion of God in the box?

Is God in a box? Well since God is everywhere, yes.

...and no, since God cannot be in the box only, or rather in this box but not that one.

You see incomprehensible. God exists perfectly and His being needs nothing to exist. He did not need someone to praise Him so He made us. Such a statement implies that God was lacking something (praise) and had to make it. The problem is how could God possibly make something which was not within Him in some fashion already. In other words if there were no us, God would praise Himself and be right to do so. After all, who else would a perfect being praise perfectly if not the perfection from which such perfect praise originates in the first place. Once again Trinity.

The point is Hal's idea of the Theomorphic is helpful because it distinguishes God-ness from everything else-ness. God in Himself makes and upholds all things, and that Creation bears His image, but that Creation is not God and neither is it exactly like God. So what it means to be made in God's image it to be higher that the Creation which only indirectly bears the image of God, and yet to not be exactly like God since we are Creature and He is Creator.

I know I am inviting a discussion on the nature of man from Hal here so feel free buddy and I'll hash that one next.

What I want to say here though is that we must jettison a lot, a lot of really bad thinking where God is concerned and instead read the Scripture for what it has to say about God. Because far from saying that we and our rock are the bright shiny center of the universe and God dotes on us because He has nothing better to to do, instead Scripture points out that we, one and all, are wretched fallen sinners who's idea of self is way to big and who's idea of God is way to small.

Just thinking.

Can we please fire the Christian Conservatives

So yesterday I was listening to NPR and the host was talking about the family. For those who don't know the family is a 'christian' group of politicos who lobby for things like anti-abortion, gay marriage, pro family, etc causes. Ya know, the sort of folks who send you emails about America going to hell and have arrived at the hair brained conclusion that they can actually do something about it.

Anyway

This particular show was about a politician in.... Africa somewhere (I know but this is blog not journalism so deal with my fuzziness OK)... who is attempting to pass a law which would make "chronic homosexuality" a crime punishable by death.

No really.

Anyway this particular Mr. Niceguy is a member of the family and is doing so for... uh God I guess. So after throwing up in my mouth a little I got really bent about this. The thing is I am a conservative Christian and I am sick ad naseum of these folks attatching the name of my Lord to their bigoted cause.

And yes it is bigotry. You wanna know how I know?

Simple, the political pukes who pound their desks and holler about family values and how gay folk are taking them away have not read their Bibles. Scripture does condemn homosexuality, which they are oh so fast to point out, but it also condemns any and all sexual activity apart from marriage. Scripture lumps gays, the high school jock and the cheerleader, the twenty something live ins, and the common law folks all together and declares them equally guilty. This means that those politicians who pound the lectern with a Bible in one hand a flag in the other while giving tearful hand wringing speeches about the family and the children are, in all likelihood, just as guilty of sexual sin as the gays they are so very concerned about. For that matter, these good ol boys are probably sipping scotch with some lobbyist chatting up their son who's popping the finest girl in private school with their chests puffed out as they say things like, "Manly" and "Boys being boys."

But somehow when these folks decide to speak of crumbling morality and God and country they never seem to be able to confess that Scripture only knows two kinds of sex, that which is between a married man and woman and that which is sinful.

Funny thing is the Bible makes it abundantly clear that all such behavior can be repented of and ammended, but somehow these guys don't seem to be really interested in mercy for gay folk or for morally lax folk. Ya know like guys who accidentally solicit sex from undercover cops in airport bathrooms.

No instead when these yahoos get together and start throwing around words like sexual and sin they only seem to have eyes for gay folks. Why? Because they are personally offended by gay folks. They just don't like gay folk that much because gay folk are a 'them', and anytime you single out a 'them', you're a bigot.

And frankly I am sick to death of having God's Name come out of the mouths of bigots and having my faith be associated with bigoted men and their bigoted causes.

I know a lot of folks are predicting the dems will get swamped in the midterms and maybe they will, I am not a lib so I can't say I would mind too much, but oh my goodness if I have to hear one more hack holding a Bible telling to be afraid of all the 'thems' that are stealing America I'm going to freak.

Scripture tells us to not oppress the poor, the fatherless, the widow or the alien in our lands. As a Christian I am pretty sure that makes the republican party a 'them' to me from a Christian perspective.

Be afraid... or ya know don't and be a person in stead

The Problem of Pain

Among the arguments against the existence of God which have been put forward over time this is one of the big difficult ones to deal with. The question goes something like this, the Church affirms the goodness of God and that God is all powerful which would seem to indicate that God, being good, would not want suffering in His Creation, and since He is all powerful would eliminate it so what gives?

Let me begin by saying that this question is enigmatic to say the least and that some brilliant thinkers in Church History have said some pretty spectacularly stupid things trying to answer it. See Leipzig and Candide.

The issue is that any attempt to answer the big question does nothing whatever to deal with the fact that pain is a big issue experienced personally and that big answers do not play well at the hospital bed of a friend or the grave of a child. So as to not "attempt to handle at arms length problems to deep for my reach" I want to be perfectly clear that my answer is I don't know. The purpose of this post is not to attempt to alleviate the suffering of one who hurts but to explain my own understanding of this problem. This is how I deal with it and I do not make the slightest pretext that this is going to solve the issue for anyone who reads it, but rather this is to try and explain what gets me out of bed when I am having a rotten day.

I will explain in three points,

1. What do you mean by good and all powerful?

2. God is better than we think

3. And we all know it

First off I think the person who says that a good God would not allow suffering has zero understanding about the God put forth in the Bible. Christ teaches more on Hell than all the other people in the Bible put together and He does so without apology. He also emphasizes emphatically (alliteration cool huh?) that Hell is a place of suffering and that it is God who sends people there. "Do not fear the one who can kill the body, but fear the one who can destroy both body and soul in Hell" Since Hell is a place of punishment prepared for Satan it stands to reason that we are not being admonished to fear the Devil, but rather the God who will send us to Hell. The Bible also says that God sends people to Hell BECAUSE He is good not in spite of it. The question Abraham asks God when judgment is pronounced on Sodom and Gomorrah is, "Shall not the Judge of the Earth do right?" That is Abraham is surprised by the judgment and is wanting to save Lot and any others who are innocent, but the question is answered that yes God will do right. God has mercy on Lot and spares him and destroys the cities of the plain, in doing both things God has done right?

Why?

Because God is holy. God is separate utterly from sin and is righteously indignant with sin. When God says that He hates sin He is not confessing a sin but rather is expressing His own absolute rightness. There can be no other expression of God's rightness in Scripture than His furious anger and indignation over our sin which is a direct rebellion and affront to His glory and holiness. Nothing that a sinful man could ever do will earn him a hearing with the Almighty and God does not listen to the pleas of the condemned. Since all men are guilty before God, any and all calamity which befalls them is a righteous expression of the goodness of God.

But God is also merciful. God spares Lot and not because he is good, remember Lot offers up his daughters to the mob to be gang raped... not a good guy. And when he escapes promptly gets drunk and commits incest with both of them. So let us set aside the notion that Lot must have been good in some way because God spared him. Not so. Lot was a rat amongst the rats and deserved the same condemnation which befell the cities, but he received mercy from God for God's own purpose (I think because Lot is in the Messianic Line because one the children of incest is Moab, Ruth was a Moabitess and the great grandmother of King David and thus also a great grandmother to Jesus) and in so doing God revealed again His goodness. And if we want to continue to use this example, I would say the presence of the Dead Sea where Sodom used to be speaks pretty highly of God's power over Creation.

So the first point is that I don't think it contradicts the goodness or power of God that we suffer.

Second off, I think we take this very goodness for granted every single second of our lives.

How do I know?

Because we are surprised by suffering. When things like tsunamis, hurricanes, disease, war, poverty and suffering take place we are surprised. We are affronted that planes are flown into buildings. Shocked that hurricanes flood cities. And appalled that entire peoples can be wiped out by fire, flood, earthquake and disease. We have no frame of reference for dealing with these things because we do not expect them to happen. We are "standing on a planet that's revolving at approximately 1100 mile an hour" around a star which could kill us at any second with a solar flare, protected by the cold blackness of outer space by a layer of atmosphere which is infintessimal when compared even to our planet with comets and meteors flying by at several thousand miles an hour which could wipe us all out in a blink, living among quadrillions of germs which could mutate at any second and kill us all, etc, etc, etc, and we never think about it. We assume the basic goodness of Creation, so much so that we get pissed when it backfires on us.

But why should we be? Why shouldn't the "planet shake us off like a bad case of fleas?" If we are assuming that there is no God then we are stupid to assume that universe prefers our existence over our non-existence, and yet that is exactly the assumption we make when we blithely carry on day by day without the slightest thought that any second the whole thing could go radically different. Notice I did not say wrong, because to say wrong assumes that not suffering is right, which brings me to my last point.

We all know God is good.

I have never met even a hardened atheist who will not say something to the effect of "look at the world, something is wrong." Innately we all know that we are not supposed to suffer. We know it is not normal.

A quick word. I am not going to argue that God exists because evil exists. I think to do so assumes that there is such a thing as evil and that this proves the existence of good. While I do believe that this is valid, it assigns a value to 'evil' and 'good God' which some here may not agree with, which ya know is why I'm trying to explain the problem of pain in the first place.

I want to instead posit the existence of human beings and suffering. I think everyone in the room can agree these things exist. The point is this. We, all of us, know that there is human suffering, and we have a difficult time explaining it. There are those who will say that God is good don't worry, and there are those who will say there is no God and suffering doesn't matter, but the adults in the room know these arguments are equally flawed. Rather, we know that suffering is wrong. We know that when nature kills us it is because something is wrong. We know that when dictators sanction the rape and murder of their populace that it is wrong. And those who will say that it is cultural and we shouldn't make such judgments about other cultures... shut up you're stupid. Its wrong. Period.

We know this suffering is wrong, and we can't explain how we know, but we know that the answer is not here. Education, ecclesiastical rule, totalitarian rule, socialism, communism, social welfare, charity, theocracies, all of the institutions of men have failed to alleviate suffering. I think deep down we know the reason why is that people are in charge of them. People seek good and want good, but cannot ever find it. And yet we know that it exists. And the reason we know is that we know God exists and that He is good even if we won't admit it. We have not found this good in and amongst ourselves because goodness does not exist in a sinful world. And we may speak platitudes about the basic goodness of humanity, but such words are empty as soon as they are spoken because in order for something to be basically good it must must also be partially, even basically bad. Its like meat that is sort of rotten. It may not kill us to eat it, but it isn't a heck of a lot of fun either. There is no such thing as goodness among men, but we know that goodness exists and is desirable, and this goodness must therefore exist outside of and apart from us.

And that goodness I think is best described as God.

And our frustration when things go bad is that we see this not as a badness in God, but an inability toward goodness in us. We see the suffering in Sudan, and Nazi Germany, and Cambodia, and name it, and we know that inside if the fetters were removed, there are some among us if not we ourselves who would not find sympathies toward a cause which brutalizes another in the name of our own advancement. It is the beauty of Heart of Darkness when Marlow realizes that he is not so different from the aboriginal peoples upon whom he has looked with such disdain.

This frustration toward wickedness wells up inside us because it violates our natures which long for goodness. A goodness found only the God who made us.

The God we long for.

The God we know is good.

I have no idea why God allowed my friend to have a stroke, I have no idea why God has allowed my family member to begin that slide which apparently will claim her life. I don't know.

But I do know the frustration and sorrow that I feel about these things is proof to me that God is good and things are not as they were meant to be. But I believe there will come a day when they will be. Because the God who is good may allow us to suffer for a season because it serves His ultimate goodness, but that He in mercy will wipe away every tear one day.

Time Free Will Sovereignty

So then I left a hanging sentence two blogs ago.

How bout then YANKEES!!!!

Sorry, I promise the adults will now be posting for the duration.

tee hee hee

Ahem.... really.

So the question was how can a man's will be free if God is sovereignly overruling all of creation. First off I think it is important to say that by overruling I mean that God rules over creation not that He capriciously overturns all of our intentions for His own will. However, in that God does rule over Creation we must ask the question is God's knowledge causal to our actions? I think the answer is no. And for the explanation I will turn to C S Lewis.

In Mere Christianity Mr Lewis spoke of not of the means by which God relates to creation but the manner in which God relates to creation. He said that the first thing we must grasp is that God is timeless. This does not mean that God lives forever and ever and ever, it means that God's existence is separate from time itself. I know that may seem like a strange proposition but I feel it is important to understand. First off we know that time is a part of the physical universe (Einstein) and that time is relative to everything in the universe (Einstein) and therefore time must not be thought of as universal constant but rather as dimension by which we measure our existence. It is not only that time is not constant for us it is that the way by which we experience time is such that it only applies to us and if there are little green men on the other side of the universe they may experience time in a totally different way. But they do experience time because they exist inside the universe.

However God does not live in the universe. The universe is created by God, upheld by God, and yet is not God. And neither is it like God. God is not physical (Augustine did not get it and neither do I, the Bible tells us that God is spirit and thus non-corporeal and I don't know what that means exactly) and does not live in the physical universe. However God is not separate from the physical universe either. For example, let us take the idea of God in the box. If we assert that God is everywhere and we have a box then is God in the box? Yes. However, if God is everywhere and we have a box is God only in the box? No. So how can this be. I think the answer, and btw so does Lewis, rests in the understanding that God's existence and His knowledge are simultaneous. The idea being that while I know myself, my knowledge is lacking and therefore I cannot truly say that I know myself exhaustively. As such, sometimes the things I do seem startling even to me, and the outside world is often just abjectly shocking. God however knows everything not in its totality as though He were some store house library in the sky, but perfectly. That is there is no knowledge which God lacks. So if I have a box, does God know that box perfectly? That is does God know its size, physical properties, the way it smells, is it held together by glue or tape, what is in the box, is the box empty, the chemical composition of the box, everything. God knows the box totally and exhaustively and with a perfect knowledge that neither lacks nor can lack anything which could be known about the box. In that sense God is in the box. However God is also non-corporeal and therefore is not locally in the box.

The way by which God relates to the box is by His knowledge. The way which a timeless God relates to temporal me is by His knowledge. God knows me exhaustively. He knows all of my thoughts, words and deeds, but also he knows my will, knowledge and motives. In fact God knows these things infinitely more than I do. Why? Because God knows them perfectly while I know them partially, and the difference between 1 and -1 if only zero may be added or subtracted to either figure is infinite. God cannot know me less than perfectly and neither can I know myself perfectly and therefore the gap in my knowledge is not small but infinite.

But that is not all that God knows about me. Because God is not only perfect in His knowledge He is also timeless. Therefore God knows what will become of me tomorrow not because He is instructing the fates to lift and set my feet each step of the way but because God is already in my future. He is already there. God is here with me, in the past with me, and in the future with me, because (Augustine) to be perfect in being means that time never perishes for God and neither is it future to God. The future need not kill the present and neither does the present need to be buried in the past, but rather all time exists simultaneously for God who exists perfectly beyond this physical universe and its temporal dimensions and yet knows all things in that temporal universe and governs them second by second by His knowledge of them.

So God does not have to try and guess what I will do because He knows me perfectly. God need not try and guess how those around me will react to me because He knows them perfectly. And God need not try and guess how we will affect each other because He knows us perfectly and our reactions to each other are a temporal causal chain. This is what it means to say that volition is free and yet shaped by forces within and without. A man's dislike of tomatoes causes him to not eat tomatoes. He does not eat them because he does not want them. His dislike causes him to not eat them. God knows that a man does not like tomatoes and thus is not surprised when he orders his chicken sandwich without the tomatoes.

But what about the future?

Lets roll dice.

Let us assume that we are throwing craps in Vegas and our mark if eight and we are trying to roll a hard eight. If we knew the exact physical properties of the dice, table, backboard, velocity of the thrower, angle of throw, air pressure, electro magnetic influence, temperature, elasticity, position of dice in thrower's hand, etc, we would know to an absolute certainty that a shooter was going to get hard eight or not. And we would know one hundred percent of the time. That is perfect knowledge allows us to predict what will happen, and God can do this with us.

But it is more than that.

Now let us assume that we not only can predict with perfect certainty and already exist ten seconds into the future and as such have already experienced the hard eight, then we would not only know in the sense of predictive prophetic certainty, but also in the sense of experiential knowledge which is absolute in its certainty. God knows my tomorrow because He is experiencing it right now.

So does this knowledge violate my volition?

I think the answer is no. And Lewis explains why. He said that since God is already in our tomorrow He does not need to lead us by the hand to wait on us around the corner. While God knows our actions because He knows us, He also can be with us always because He is with our future even before we experience it. This knowledge, while certain, is not causative in that it does not compel us to act other than in that way which we choose to act. Our will is only violated if God turns us left when we would have turned right, but (Edwards again) God need not force us to change our mind by compelling us left against our wills, He need only change the things internally which shape our volition and thus affect a change in our affections about left. That is we go left because we want to and no because we are compelled. And God does not have to force us left to know it will happen, and neither does His knowledge compel us left against our will. And if are more bent to the right, God does not need to change the shape of the road, He need only change us.

This is what it means to be saved by Sovereign choice and free will. If God changes m,y affections by changing my heart (making that which is dead alive Ephesians 2 Romans 8) and thus I see God in a way which I never saw Him before and I change my bent by my choice because He changed me and not my direction. I cannot choose Him without Him, but with Him I will not choose other.

God does not need to turn the world over and shake it to cause me to arrive at where He knows I'll be and neither does He need to drop a map from Heaven. Imagine the great Celestial chorus following us around yelling "LEFT LEFT LEFT!!!!!" No rather God need only whisper to that part of us that is us and we turn because we are truly starved men and He is truly the Oasis of Rest Everlasting.

He does us no violence and yet overrules us by His knowledge and presence with us.

So what about pain?

Later

Still Thinking

OK, so its been a while but ya know the Yanks are in the World Series so chill.

My buddy asked me some questions and I thought I would take a second to answer them as such as I can.

He wrote,

"Hmm. Well. First,I think that mental faculties do indicate a Creator, since I don't believe in 'spontaneous generation' of intellect any more than I believe that horse hairs turn into snakes,(and this was one belief of that earlier,simpler version of evolution),.BUT,that having been said,let's get on to the free will issue."

I am not arguing for the spontaneous generation of the intellect, however I do not think that the presence of an intellect in and of itself is necessarily proof of a Creator. The reason why is really simple. We experience intellect through our eyes only, and have a tendency to think that is the only way in which it can be experienced. However, we do not know what it is like to be say a snail, and as such do not have anyway of knowing for sure what or if snails think about anything. We may say that your garden variety snail seems a little slow, but maybe they are just really deep thinkers.

Understand, I do think that self/soul/nephesh/pneuma awareness is unique to human beings, but I am not sure that we cannot call the behavior of other animals 'non-intellectual' in the sense that they are surely aware of the world around them and react to it some certain ways. I know this is a little ticklish for some, but I do not think that the uniqueness of man necessarily precludes some sort of experience of the physical world on an intellectual level by other animals in Creation.

As such, I do not think the mere fact that we are curious about ourselves really holds water as a proof for the existence of God.

More to come.

Peace.

If man's will is free and yet not divorced from his nature then does it make sense to assert a free will. I think the answer is yes. The reason why is that we must distinguish between the ability to exercise our will and the actual exercising thereof. That we have the ability to freely choose left or right, up or down, red or blue paint is undeniable, but the choosing of left or right, up or down and blue or red paint is not free in the sense that it is not divorced from our preference toward those things. A man who likes blue more than red will freely choose blue paint while the person who prefers red will freely choose red. A person who is in a hurry to reach their destination may turn left at the intersection while the person who enjoys country drives will turn right in stead. What is the difference? Preference.

Johnathan Edwards said that a man will do that toward which he is most inclined. That is a person will turn left not because they are compelled to but because they want to. A person will choose blue paint for the same reason. It is also true that a person will go to work each day, even if he dislikes his job because he enjoys having heat, a roof over his head and food in the fridge more than he hates his job. He goes to work because he prefers to. It is a pleasure pain, risk reward, preferential choosing which all of us make thousands of times each day without thought or need of thought.

That is why our will seems capricious even to us. We make decisions so fast and with little to no examination of the self that very often those decisions seem to be random, but they are not. In fact it is the job of behavioral therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists to do this close examination of our wills and motives which we, if we were willing and honest enough, could do on our own. We are not honest however and thus do need others to help us in this sort of examination. However the very existence of twelve step programs, accountability groups etc I think proves that this sort of examination need not be done by trained professional in most cases, but by people who have shared experiences and are open and honest enough to help each other out. The reason why is that there is not some sort of great magical power at work in such things, but the examination of motive and desire which is common to us all in general if not in the specifics. That is why the Priest will heartily say that confession is not for God, but for the confessor. For the truly penitent will examine his own heart in so doing and find in himself the reasons for his sin.

So it is our volition that is free, but the exercising of that volition is constrained by our natures. That is why knowledge, nature and desire shape our decisions because all that we do we do by choice, but not by a will which is neutral.

I want to take one second here to digress. I have spoken to many who believe that any and all decisions are random. That the will is only free if it is also divorced from all influence. However I think such an assertion is ridiculous given the fact that all men are a composite of all they have been, seen and done. No one is free from his past and neither is he free from his inclinations and therefore to say that free will is random is to assert uncaused effects. Our will is free and yet it is determined, but that determination is one of self determination and not from the divine puppet master in the sky.

So in our choosing of daily mundane things we find ourselves over and over again doing things which seem to us to be random, and yet if we could fully break down our motives, desires etc we would find that the exercising of our will is the result of direct causal links which are born out of our knowledge, experience and nature.

So how does this apply in the question of a Sovereign God who overrules our self determination?

More on that later.

Just Thinking

A Question

Is it rational to assert a truly free will while also asserting a sovereign God?

I guess the answer would depend on another question, what does 'truly free will' mean? So lets define some terms.

truly: in agreement with fact.

free: (1) not determined by anything beyond its own nature or being (2) having a scope not restricted by qualification (3) not obstructed, restricted, or impeded (4) not united with, attached to, combined with, or mixed with something else.

will: (1) used to express desire, choice, willingness, consent, or in negative constructions refusal (2) used to express determination, insistence, persistence, or willfulness

free will: : (1) voluntary choice or decision (2) freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention

To start with I think we can use the word 'actually' in place of truly since to define truly free will as a free will which agrees with fact while questioning whether such a will actually exists would seem strange. To that end I think instead I will say "actually free will", as in is the will of men actually free?

Then we get into the words 'free' and 'will' which is where the whole thing gets sticky. To start with, if we use the dictionary definition then we come up with (by combining) ideas such as; a desire determined by its own nature, or an unrestricted determination, or an unobstructed willingness, or even an unmixed persistence. So clearly the idea is somewhat vague. I think therefore we need to consider what free will is not before tangling what it is.

To begin with I do not think that we can define free will as an unrestricted, uninhibited, unattached volition because all of us have a preexisting determinate factor in the exercise of our free will, namely ourselves. All of us exercise our wills within the scope of our own experiences, memories, knowledge and desires and while these are universal in general they are not so in particular.

For example an adult which knows that the cooking surface on a griddle is hot is not the least bit curious to know exactly how hot said surface is, or at least is not open to testing the hotness of the cooking surface with the old bare hand on hot metal method. A child however, who may have never before applied the bare hand on hot metal method, may be curious to touch the surface and therefore will exercise his will in an entirely different direction from the adult. What is the difference? Knowledge. The Adult knows right well the surface is hot and therefore will not touch it, the child knows nothing of the sort, or at least does not understand experientially what "hot" means and therefore touches the cook surface. Once. Armed with this new knowledge the child will not soon exercise his will in that direction again.

If we accept this example, then I think it can be fairly asserted that the exercise of our will is affected by our knowledge and therefore knowledge acts as a determinate factor in how we exercise our will, and therefore our will is not truly free.

But one may argue the will is still free, as in the ability to decide is free, but knowledge helps to determine which course of action will be decided upon without actually affecting the faculty to choose.

I think that is true, but there are factors involved in the choosing as well. Our criminal system recognizes, for example, that certain people who commit crimes do not have equal liability with others who have committed the same crime because of metal faculties. The courts have recognized that the exercise of the will can be affected by the ability of the person to choose according to knowledge, experience etc. The same holds true in other ways. A small child who hits another small child will not be punished severely, but a teen who strikes a small child will have long ramifications to face for such an action. The culpability in exercising the will rests in the ability to understand consequences etc of making those decisions, and therefore the actual choosing itself, while free, is not free from the nature of the chooser.

I think this is a very important idea to grasp as it will color the discussion greatly (after all this is what I believe) that is the exercising of our will, even if the ability to decide is free, is not divorced from our natures. An aggressive person and a timid person will not react in identical fashions to similar situations. Neither will a brave man and a cowardly man react the same. The ingrained nature of a person will radically affect how that person will exercise their will, and while the decision making is free, the decisions being made do not simply appear out of the ether, but rather are the result of the nature, knowledge, etc of the one choosing the course of action.

But one may argue that the nature of a person may be formed of that person's past experience and thus it is not nature but nurture which leads to decisions 'x', 'y' or 'z'.

Again I think that is true in so far as it goes, and I also think it proves my point. First off I think we should be careful in ascribing causal power to nurture apart from nature. For example I have read various psychological profiles in self help books (btw most of these are hysterically funny) which argue that one sort of thing (like a distant uninvolved parent for example) leads to mutually exclusive behaviors in study subjects. The strange thing is that these authors are arguing that a distant parent causes both (again a non-specific example) promiscuous behavior as well as distant unattached marriage relationships between spouses, and to argue that one factor caused both contradictory behaviors is very problematic. Even in cases where nurture and nature being combined are supposed to indicate future behavior, such as alcoholic parents and the potential genetic predisposition to the children as a result, has been shown to produce both alcoholic children and children who never touch a drop. The difference is not found in the contributing nurture of the person, but in the exercise of the will and how that person chooses to live. The point is that observation of behavioral patterns can lead to contradictory findings because the natures of people are not identical and therefore the way which people respond to situations is not identical either. The contradiction is readily explained in that the childhood situation is not the cause of the behavior of the persons in question, but that the nature of the persons in question is the cause of how they have reacted to the situation.

How do I know? Because a single cause cannot produce contradictory effects. While it is true that various contributing factors in a causal chain may produce apparent contradictory effects, it is those factors which act in a causal fashion to produce the effects in question. For example, two men jump off of a cliff, one falls until achieving terminal velocity and meets the ground with a sudden bone shattering stop while the other floats off into the sky and disappears over the horizon. What is the difference? One man leaped from the edge without anything to arrest his fall and the other leaped with a hang glider. Did gravity produce apparently opposite results? No. Rather the contributing factors of hang glider and no hang glider affected the causal chain of gravity (what goes up will come down) to produce different results.

In the same way, while nurture does affect the fashion in which we exercise our wills, I think it is our nature which acts in a greater, and therefore determinative fashion.

For these reasons, I think that "free will" is actually nothing of the sort, and that one need not believe that we have puppet strings sticking out of the tops of our heads for this to be so. In fact I do not think one needs to assert the existence of a "god" at all for this to be so. One could argue that our free wills are determined by experience and chemical make up in our brains completely apart from any sort of belief in any sort of creator or endower of free will. Obviously I do believe in a Creator, but the mere existence of mental faculties is not a proof that such a Creator exists actually in any fashion whatever.

So, this one is getting long so I'll quit now, I do not think the will is free in the sense that it is divorced from any and all contributing factors to it. But rather that the exercising of our will is shaped and caused by our own experience, knowledge and inclinations/ natures, and as such cannot be said to be free in this sense.

However, I do believe the will, within our constituent natures, is free and I will try to explain why later.

Just Thinking.

Part II

Strangely enough I just commented on this on another post.

The question is, how can God ordain wickedness to be and still be good?

We must first understand that we are people who are surprised by suffering. It is not when things go as planned tht we shake our hands at Heaven and yell, "How could You let this happen to me?" I have never seen a man in the midst of his happiness shrug his shoulders and say, "I just don't understand why this thing is happening to me at this time." No father holding his new healthy child next to his smiling wife has ever said, "Why! Why oh God why?" It never happens. And the reason is that we are so accustomed to blessedness that we take it for granted.

Think about it.

Most people get up everyday, go to work, come home safely to their residence and family and friends, and it never once crosses their minds that they have just received a level of gracious blessedness which boggles the mind if meditated on for even a second. First off the complex systems of the body have worked in cohesion for another day without flaw. The sun has not lashed out a solar flare which burned off our ozone and radiation layers and killed us. We have managed to drive our vehicles, which lets face it something close to none of us do safely and without distraction, to our places of work and not been killed or killed someone else. We have a job which even in a bad economy something like 90% of us still do. We have come home safe and sound to our family and friends. We have family and friends who have not been killed during the day. We are tiny little creatures on a tiny rock sheltered from the cold blackness of space by a layer of air so thin that it laughable even on a geologic scale and forget a solar, galactic, universal scale. We assume the basic goodness of life every second of every day, and this is true even in more impoverished an even subsistence countries. Even in lands where poverty is crushing and life is bleak joy is found. If it were not so the people who suffer in tsunamis, earth quakes, hurricanes, fires, etc would not stand in the ash heap appalled at what has happened to their even meager possessions. The fact is we live in a measure of grace which is mind boggling and never think to look to the One who has shown such beneficence toward us.

And we need no further proof of this than the simple fact that we are daily surprised by suffering. How it must gall our Creator to see us impassively presuming on His mercy day by day and then daring to accuse Him when we hurt. It is truly the measure of our greedy selfish stupidity that we would dare do such a thing. We stand petty and spoiled in the face of the Almighty and assume that He owes us a hearing because he allowed our lives to break when the very measure of our brokenness is the grace which He has showered upon us unnoticed day upon year upon decade.

And so when we speak of evil and suffering we should do so in the care of remembering that we have received from His hand more grace than we can measure, and that our suffering lies not in His wicked intention and neither in His indifference, but in our own failing. For it is, at least in our cultural context, usually the poor decisions and misguided will of the sufferer which has led him into his own suffering. Of course I would never say that this is true of all peoples everywhere, but given our tendency to complain over minutia in our milieu I think it fair to say that most of that over which Americans suffer is directly related to our own failings and not God's. After all it is not God which causes us to live beyond our means (and yes I point the finger firmly at myself in all these things), over eat, laze about etc. These are bad decisions which lead to bad consequences which have nothing whatever to do with God somehow allowing us to suffer. For truly a man who smokes a pack of camels a day and eats a cheeseburger for lunch everyday need not be aghast when he comes up with hypertension, ulcers, high cholesterol and heart disease, that is cause and effect not God.

However, there are natural disasters, dictators, cruel evil men who victimize others for gain and sick pleasure and one need look further than the evening news to see all of this and more, and clearly for these to be God must allow them. The question is why?

First off I think we must look to Scripture. The Bible tells us that God intended for us to dwell in shalom, that is the perfect rest in which He resides in Himself. God intended for man to reside with Him and give Him glory in this perfect rest, and that the world has gone to Hell in a hand basket is laid firmly at man's decision to refuse this shalom and choose sovereignty for himself. It was this act of rebellion which invoked the curse of God on humanity and the world over which man was to rule. The reason the earth resists our attempts to control it rests in our initial rebellion against the God who gave us Creation over which to rule. Once we separated ourselves from His rule we also divorced ourselves from His shalom and cast ourselves into difficulty and suffering which was never intended for us.

And of course the question comes here, "But if God did not intend it then how could it have happened?" The answer lies in that we do have free will. This does not mean that we are morally neutral, but rather that the decisions which we make do not happen as a result of puppet strings sticking out the tops of our heads. St Augustine said that we are slaves to sin as a part of our constituent nature and that every action is affected by that nature, but that nature rests within our own hearts and not outside of us. So in effect the wicked desires in our hearts well up from within us as a part of our nature.

But didn't God give us this nature?

Yes and no. We are created in the image of God, but I think this image is our free will and the sovereignty intended for us by the Sovereign who gave it to us. That is Adam as the vice regent of the Creator was given the directive by God to obey and a nature unmarred by sin by which he was able to obey that directive. Included in this free will was God's promise of penalty should Adam choose to disobey. So God knows surely what Adam's course of action will be, God is able to prevent it and does not, and Adam is responsible for his own action and fall. As such while God ordains that Adam would fall, God does not cause Adam to fall. Why would a good God allow such a thing? I will not hazard to say I know but I think the answer lies in glory.

God wills that He receive glory. The greatest good in Creation is that God be glorified. We know this to be so in that we know that God glorifies Himself. However we must not think of God as some sort of cosmic egomaniac, but rather in His perfect holiness Go must seek His own glory. If God sought the glory of anything other than Himself then He would be giving glory to creature and not Creator, to do such a thing would make God an idolater and such a thought is intolerable. We could not assert that God is perfect and at the same time assert that God is an idolater.

So how would God get the glory in the Fall?

Let us assume that Adam had not fallen. In such a world, God would have given to Adam a place in paradise forever I think in like manner to that which the angels enjoy. That is at a certain point creatures become fixed in their way. Those who fall become permanently fallen at some point to never be redeemed, and those who reach glory do so forever. I think had Adam not fallen he would have experienced and ascension based on his own merit by which he would eventually have experienced a perfect relationship with God and thus would have glorified God for His work in Creation and relation with His creatures.

However, manifestly, Adam did fall. In his fall God received glory in that His judgment on His fallen creature is just. A just judge will always punish the guilty. And God received glory in that He took mercy on His fallen creatures. Remember that God had promised death for disobedience, but God delayed that judgment for a time and gave Adam the mercy to continue living, but in a fallen world righteously cursed by a holy Creator. So God, in the fall, is glorified in His judgment and mercy.

So how does this relate to us?

Well first off I think that fall is a literal historical event that is in some ways repeated in the lives of all of Adam's children. Given this belief then obviously the fall effects all of us. Also, we all experience a point where we commit Adam's sin. I have no idea how to quantify this event, when it happens, how it happens etc, but I am certain it does. The evidence of which is found in Romans 1 when the Apostle Paul tells us that all men see God in that He is manifest in His Creation, but that all men choose to not worship God but the creature and therefore are given over by God to his own sin. Adam ultimately chose to worship himself instead of God, and we do the same thing. I think the failings of greed, lust, strife, hate, murder etc all relate to this choice. All men choose to worship their own pleasure over the pleasure of worshiping and glorifying the God who made them.

But there is a second element to the fall. Adam did not fall alone, Creation was cursed because of him. God gave the world to Adam to subdue and fill and make all Creation as Eden was, and when Adam rebelled God cursed creation and caused it to resist us and bring us suffering. So when things like earth quakes occur somehow someway I think God is glorified. The reason I think this is because of relationship, that is what is true of the individual is also of the friend, family, household, neighborhood, city, state, country, world. So if it is true that I as an individual struggle against myself and my local surroundings then it should not be surprising that a large group of individuals would corporately struggle against themselves and their larger surroundings. And just as the individual can give God glory in the disasters which befall him by remembering God's great over arching beneficence toward him, so large populations can, in some more vague way, do the same thing. Also Scripture plainly tells us that the great tidal shifts in history are overseen by God for His own purposes. For example in 2Kings Syria bands with Israel to destroy Judah and Ahaz, King of Judah, seeks an alliance with Assyria to thwart this alliance. Assyria later destroys Israel and turns on Judah which leads Ahaz's son Hezekiah to seek an alliance with Babylon. Assyria is destroyed by miraculous intervention and Judah is saved only to later be destroyed by Babylon. Over all of this Scripture unflinchingly tells us God was working to bring His people to repentance, but the people did not repent and therefore further disaster befell them until finally they were destroyed altogether.

And now at long last the point.

When the towers fell in New York a great many people asked the Church, "Where was God?" Ironically most who asked this were seeking to blame a God in whom they professed unbelief for this disaster. The answer to the question is simple, God was in exactly the same place on September 11, 2001 as He was on September 10 and 12; in Heaven overruling history according to His own will for His own glory.

That so many people died should not come as a surprise to us. Everyone dies, thanks to Adam, and it is not unusual that people died in New York and Washington DC on that day. And we live in an evil world where people murder each other. Murder may be abhorrent, but it is hardly uncommon. In fact it is an expression of the wanton wickedness of the human heart which all of us have. Each of us capable of murder if we allow ourselves to be. I am sure that had those planes not crashed into those buildings and the field in Pennsylvania there would have been murders in New York and Washington DC that day, only we would not have heard about them. The reason why is that murder is terribly common in our culture. People are murdered all over our country everyday and we don't hear about it because we have accepted murder as the norm and not the catastrophe which it actually is. It never occurs to us, secure in our houses and lives, that all around us people are suffering and dying as a part of everyday life. We neither consider them nor pray for God's intervention over this horrible situation. Therefore I think it is possible (and please I am not presuming to know the mind of the Almighty I am only speculating to make a point) that God would allow such a disaster to befall us to get our attention that we are a murder soaked culture. It speaks more of our hard hearts that it takes mass murder to make us object to murder than it does to God's failure in allowing such a thing to happen.

Maybe God allowed all of those people to die to bring us to repentance as a nation that He may be glorified. Maybe God allowed it to be to remind us that we are fragile and running out of time.

One day the Headstone of History will be written and America will be found among the other names memorialized there. We are not eternal, and neither are we above God's Law, and that God would permit us to suffer in such a way is for our good and His glory that we may remember this and turn to Him who truly does offer security in the storm.

Let us glorify Him.

Just thinking.

This Will Take Some Time

OK

Since I have had some feedback on the subject of God's will I will undertake to clarify what I think about it and how it relates to human freedom. I will do this through a series of questions because that is how I think best. I have already spoken to some of you about this and your questions will appear first. For everyone else I should be able to cover this subject in oh... say 100 blogs so it been nice knowing you (sounds of chutes popping as people jump ship). OK now I have the room to myself.

The first response I got was on my assertion that God had willed evil to take place place and that there was nothing man could do about it. This really is my position and I will try to explain why as briefly as possible here.

First off God is sovereign, and not over most things but over everything. Even the bad stuff which means that God has to allow any and all things which occur to occur, and if He did not then they either would not happen or God's sovereignty is an illusion. God is not interacting with time and doing the best He can, but is rather overruling all of history according to His will and His purpose and no purpose of His can be frustrated; 2Ch 20:6, Jer 49:19, 50:44. That means that all and everything which occurs does so according to God's will without exception.

God never is the cause of evil.

Depends on what you mean by cause. If you mean that God does not tempt men to evil nor to sin but rather that God wills that all should repent and come to salvation, I agree. But if you mean that evil happens to the absolute exclusion of God's will and desires then I disagree. Isaiah 45:7 unflinchingly declares that it is God who brings calamity. Of course one would say that the Lord is speaking of judgment, but this calamity is still in accordance with God's will and purpose. And God does not always send calamity in the form of judgment.

Job experiences a level of suffering beyond what most anyone would ever suffer and God not only does not do so in judgment, but God does not tell Job why He has done so. There is nothing in the book of Job to indicate that Satan acted apart from God's allowing him to torture Job, and there is no reason therefore to concoct an excuse for God's having done so.

Joseph is sold into slavery by his brothers and then is falsely accused of attempted rape and then is imprisoned unjustly only to be rescued in time because he is God's man to affect the saving of his Father's family. God absolutely willed that this calamity would fall on Joseph, and the Bible makes that abundantly clear when Joseph tells his brothers that, "You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good." Gen 50: 20.

If Scripture is not embarrassed then neither will I be.

Last, and greatest, is the Crucifixion. The Scripture makes it abundantly clear that it is God who crushes Jesus on Golgotha. It is the Lord's pleasure to bruise Him and to affect our healing with His wounds. (Isaiah 53) There is nothing in Scripture to lead us to believe that anything beyond the will and expectation of God happened on Golgotha, in fact it is in the famous prayer of Gethsemane in which Jesus acknowledges that it is God's will that He be crushed. To say otherwise makes the Cross the greatest cosmic flub in history and sets aside God's ruling power in any fashion. After all, if God is not capable of keeping Christ from the nails and whips of the executioner then neither should we trust in Him. But the Scripture is absolutely clear that this calamity was according to God's purpose and we have no reason to think otherwise. Clearly this is the greatest act of sin and human wickedness ever done, and the Scripture unblushingly tells us that it was done according to God's will and God's plan.

So clearly God allows, purposes and wills evil according to His own counsel, but He does not cause evil. That is a different thing altogether. God has never caused anyone to sin, if He did He would not be God but the Devil. And neither has God ever tempted anyone to sin, same reason.

God allows evil, God ordains evil. When God placed man in the Garden He knew man would fall and He let it happen. Had God not allowed it to happen it would not have happened. Therefore God ordained it to happen and inescapably it happened according to His will. But God did not cause the Fall. It was not God but the serpent who tempted Eve. It was not God who led Eve to sin but her own will. Clearly God did not desire that they would sin seeing as how He had told them to not eat of the Tree, and yet He knew they would fall and did not prevent it. If God is sovereign then it must have been according to His own purposes and will. If it were not so then God would not be sovereign.

But it is different to say that we allow something to happen and we cause something to happen. I could say to my kids that I am going to the store in five minutes and if they have their room picked up and shoes on they can go. If at the end of that five minutes they are still playing in the land of blocks everywhere having done neither of the things which I asked. I leave them with their mother even though they are mad at me, and will probably cry. I give them specific instructions about the conditions by which they may go to the store. I really want them to obey me and I want to take them to the store. They don't obey me and they don't go. Is it under my authority to force them to clean their room or even clean it for them? Yes. Will I? Not a chance. Have I done them wrong by allowing them to disobey me? No. Did I cause the disobedience? No. So if my children choose to disobey me they do so out of their own volition completely apart from my will, and my not helping them does no violence to them and neither does it make me a bad dad when I don't take them.

Well the same is true of God. God may allow us to sin, know we will sin and not prevent us from sinning, but in so doing He has done us no wrong. However the difference between me and God is that He is totally sovereign over the state of my kids room (which is proof positive that He wills disaster) as well as everything else. So when we sin He is sovereign over that and is working out history according to His will which includes my sin.

Ah, but sin is not God's will but man's.

True, God does not cause us to sin and God gave us free will.

And...

I fail to see why this supposed to be some sort of great argument for God's role in the existence of evil. It goes something like this. Man has free will and can therefore choose to not obey God and therefore it is not God's will that man sins.

Wow so many things wrong with this one.

First off is that at the most shallow level it could almost be true. But that is like saying the ocean is big and blue. Even if i is true it is not helpful if you are trying to find Venice Beach.

Second is that if God gave men free will and is not responsible at least in a secondary manner for the wickedness that men do then we can only draw one of two conclusions; one God had no idea what would happen when He gave men free will or two God in giving man free will surrendered His right to rule over His Creation.

If God gave men free will not knowing that they would sin then clearly God is not omniscient. How could God know everything and not know that? So if we are going to assert that God does in fact know everything perfectly then we must also assert in the giving of free will to men that God knew man would fall and therefore man's fall is according to God's will.

Or if God knew that man would fall and did His best to prevent it it but just couldn't the Rabbi Kushner is right and God is doing His best and we need to forgive Him for being a doddering old fart. After all, if God could not prevent man from sinning because man has free will then man is god now and god is irrelevant. What is the purpose for prophesy in such an idea? If God cannot overrule man's will then all man need do concerning the Second Coming, the end of sin and God's eternal rule in His Kingdom is say, "No we like it this way and choose to not have this whole Revelation thing come down," and God will be forced to smack His open palm to His forehead and yell, "Oh man! I had no idea it would come to this! I would never have written the Book if I had known they would say no! WHO TOLD THEM THEY COULD SAY NO!!!!"

No! It does not work. If we are to trust in God that He will keep His word we must first trust that He has the power to perform His word. We cannot say God is sovereign over everything excepting man's will excepting prophesy which is a special exemption. That is absurdity.

God is sovereign.

God did will man would have volition.

God did know man would fall when He did this.

God did not compel men to fall.

God did not prevent man's fall, and thus inescapably allowed it.

Therefore God knew evil would come into His Creation as a direct result of His creating.

Therefore God is responsible, even if secondarily, for the evil in the world.

This is not heresy, it is the ordination of a sovereign God over all things.

But how could God have allowed these things to happen and still be good?

I don't know. But the Bible gives us a hint, and it God's glory.

It is late and I am going to bed, I will pick this up tomorrow.

God Bless.