Dale. What difference does it make? Seriously. Openly.
I’ve no idea what that means Dale. Like free will. Genuinely. It’s all truly meaningless to me. There again I’m Asperger’sesque. Put it down to that. I must be disabled, you know something I can’t.
It means that God is worthy of our trust. That is not meaningless. How can he be worthy of our trust if he is not sovereign?
God is worthy of our trust because He’s good. I couldn’t give a ■■■■ - wow that’s censored! delta alpha mike november - about His meaningless sovereignty otherwise.
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If he is not sovereign, his is powerless in his goodness and can do no good for his children.
I won’t argue with that.
Everything you say is meaningless, purposeless. You said so yourself:
Then why do you bother saying anything? Either you don’t really believe that, or you don’t know what you believe or you’re being disingenuous.
Then it would seem that evolution is not real. Evolution says that the4 present is based in the past, so the past must be “real.” Also Science says that since the Big Bang is real, then the Beginning is real and time, past. present and future, is real.
I do not think God is omnitemporal as @Dale claims. God created time out of nothing in the Beginning, so time a real, but also time is free, because God ,made it to have integrity and reality. God does not predetermine time, nor does God predetermine us and the rest of God’s Creation, which allows for Science to exist and flourish. This is hard to understand , but this what God reveals to us, and science confirms it as well as logic.
Spurious semantics Relates. You know what I mean and actually agree. But there is no Beginning of beginnings.
Hi Dale. Peace be with you. And I apologize for my dysfunctional - catty - tone.
To business if I may. Your logic is perfect. If God is not sovereign in some way, not an actual interventionist, then yes, to use your excellent phrase, He is powerless in His goodness, and yes, can do no good for His children. Which is what I see, what I experience. That goes counter to the language of the Bible. But to me it does not go counter to God, who is as good as it gets. Who is as good to us as He possibly can be.
The ways I do see God intervening are first, in being the ground of being; the ground of provision, second, proving it by incarnation, third, ineffably by the Spirit and fourth, in letting us love Him. Closing the circuit. Ongoing incarnation. I do not see Him intervening at all otherwise. Otherwise He would and there would be no room for doubt. And doubt is essential for faith. Yes even doubt to the point of His being at all. Which is perfectly rational. Not disabling.
For fifth, He will transcend us all and every other fallen sparrow.
No I believe it and know what I believe and I’m not being disingenuous, in the light of my previous reply to your previous comment. God is sovereign in the only way He can be. As if He weren’t in every sense. Until we die to enter paradise.
It’s curious that you would say that – he is both sovereign and intervening in scripture.
Are we talking about the same thing? I was referring to your statements:
You take the opposite meaning to what I meant Dale. My fault I’m sure. The Bible is full of a sovereign, intervening God. Nothing else is. History, evolution, cosmology. Life. Anybody and everybody’s life since the first couple or three waves. Other cultures’ myths are of course. Full of intervening gods. Even fathers in heaven. Sky fathers. Zeus paters. Jupiters. Even kings of kings, lords of lords, sons of god. God is not God. Not the God of the OT. God the Violent. God the Killer. Not the God of our liturgies, hymns, texts, formularies. Of our imaginings. Our enculturation. Even Jesus’.
Oh aye, I meant those all right.
I think I’m tracking with you on that much, but not the last – there seems to be a paucity of subjects and verbs 
– so if you could fill that out a bit?:
The God we grew up with, usually to a point of arrested development, is not God as He is. Until I was about 40 my God was the God of the flat, cook book, grammatico-historical Bible that doesn’t matter what order it’s read in. Inerrantly and infallibly revealed, prophesied, here a little, there a little. He came under a flag of truce as Jesus, but that was it, back to business as the God of History after that with the very worst yet to come.
It took 20 years of accelerating deconstruction not to be able to put that God back together again at all. I’m left with God in Christ alone, and due to Jesus’ full humanity, an enculturated God in Him at that.
So, we need to tell a better story of God from that divine beginning for a minority of humanity, especially in the light of the fact of eternal, infinitely peopled creation.
YMMV
But God had foretoldthe future a few times to prophets and Israel. He foretold his son will save us. God has a few times put himself to change time.
I do have to question what is the purpose of suffering? I don’t mean just death. A person with cancer or a person rape. Why? If God loves couldn’t he limit certain evils? Like there is no rape?
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I don’t pretend to have any great wisdom in answer to all your questions, but one answer I am quite sure of, and that is that at least one reason he allows pain into his children’s lives is to strengthen them for their own betterment and gain.
A song I like is Blessings by Laura Story:
We pray for blessings
We pray for peace
Comfort for family, protection while we sleep
We pray for healing, for prosperity
We pray for Your mighty hand to ease our suffering
All the while, You hear each spoken need
Yet love is way too much to give us lesser things
'Cause what if your blessings come through raindrops
What if Your healing comes through tears
What if a thousand sleepless nights are what it takes to know You’re near
What if trials of this life are Your mercies in disguise
We pray for wisdom
Your voice to hear
We cry in anger when we cannot feel You near
We doubt your goodness, we doubt your love
As if every promise from Your Word is not enough
All the while, You hear each desperate plea
And long that we’d have faith to believe
When friends betray us
When darkness seems to win
We know that pain reminds this heart
That this is not our home
What if my greatest disappointments
Or the aching of this life
Is the revealing of a greater thirst this world can’t satisfy
What if trials of this life
The rain, the storms, the hardest nights
Are your mercies in disguise
(Note especially the first half of the last verse. The most important thing to desire is God himself, and the most important thing to know is that you are his child and loved, adopted because you are redeemed from your sins by Jesus on the cross.)