Predestination or Free Will?

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 :slightly_smiling_face: – 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.)

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