I mean Jude already was picked to kill Jesus. Jesus knew that. I mean it makes me wonder. Why make us when you know the fate
I donât think it is that simple. âAlreadyâ is a time-based word, indicating the past. But God is Now. Always. Judas âcooperatedâ, for lack of a better way of saying it, contributing his sinfulness. God didnât have to save any of us. We were already as good as dead, so we canât âblameâ God.
People (Christians) that do not like the word âforeknowledgeâ or âchosen,â for instance (and there are several other words that describe similar truths), have to pretend that they are not there. But they are there and there is no honest denying of it. There is plenty of denial of the ideas by those purporting to uphold scripture, but in fact, they are actually denying scripture. The words are there but there is an apparent paradox that is difficult, so they are refusing to submit to scripture.
@Angela275, That is a question I haved thought about, and it leads me to consider a step deeper, âWhat am I saved from?â My first thought is that I am saved from the wrath of Godâs judgement, but ultimately in looking at Romans and elsewhere, we are saved from slavery to sin. Sin is no longer our master. We will still fail and sin, but it no longer has control and ownership of us, setting us free to follow Christ in righteousness. To me, that is what it means to be saved, in a nutshell.
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That is a helpful place to pick up on testing our own hearts that I mentioned earlier. We can examine our hearts to see if our desires really have changed, or if we are dismayed at our sin because we have hurt our loving Father and we are not deserving his smile.
We are not to beat ourselves up about it, but to plead for grace to change. There are multiple severe warnings both in the Gospels and the Epistles, not because we can lose our salvation, but because our hearts are deceitful and we can lie to ourselves. We can believe in our heads that because we have followed the prescribed recipe and done all the steps, we are âinâ. But have our hearts been changed.
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I mean does that mean we canât actually save others? True Christians have their names already written in the book of life?
From my studies of time and space in physics I think I may understand it better than you do. Equating God not constrained by time with God incapable of time is symptom of antiquated notions of absolute time which has gone out the door with absolute space. Time is just an ordering of events and only notions of absolute time presume that there is only one ordering of events when there is no reason to presume this and science precludes this. Make God incapable of time and what you have is no belief in a personal God at all and god which is less than we are and incapable of the things which any human can do.
Of course I donât believe in any such nonsense.
I believe in a God who is more than we are not less and can do everything we can do and more. So no, God is not confined to our temporal ordering of event. But yes, God can use time Himself as He chooses. And no, your magical hand waving with the generic excuse of God.who.is.not.restrained.by.time doesnât make your description of God any more sensible than it did in medieval Europe with the poor understanding of time they had back then.
Persons are dynamic and God is personal, because they have a future of possibilities to choose from. That is the whole point. They are not static unchanging objects like the characters in books where you can flip to any page of this already written story.
People do not generally see irony on the internet unless it is made explicit. Everybody knows that! But YOUR irony, SURE! When you said you feel like a puppet you were being ironic and thus meant you did not feel like a puppet. But again, what do your feelings have to do with anything if you are made into a puppet by a logically inconsistent theology. Saying you do NOT feel like a puppet is like the great Oz telling us not to look behind the curtain â nothing you say is believable.
Yes that is a key question I like to ask as well.
It is very telling when people answer that we are being saved from God â LOL God saving us from Himself. That is exactly like a mafia protection racket.
My answer is that God is saving us from ourselves, because we are the problem â not God!
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We cannot actually save others, but we can lead others to the Savior.
âalready writtenâ 
Thereâs a couple of those pesky tensed words that can mislead us if we are not careful. It is both a qualified yes and a qualified no. It might be helpful to think about The Book of Life existing in another time dimension than our own. We know it is not in this physical universe with its sequential timeline, so it must be somewhere else that does not directly affect our timeline and our choices.
I am sorry your thinking about God and time is so constrained.
I am sorry you think God is so much less than we are.
We also know that there are angelic and demonic dimensions that are not of this physical universe, and the heavenly dimensions that have been seen by some of the prophets (Iâm thinking at least Ezekiel) and the Apostle Paul. (It is difficult in Johnâs Revelation to know what was real in other dimensions and what is metaphor, since there is so fantastical imagery.)
That is a bizarre inference!
God calls himself the I AM (so did Jesus). God is the eternal Now and Present tense. Jesus humbled himself when he became a man and voluntarily subjected himself to a variety of constraints, one of which was our universeâs timeline. God the Father and God the Holy Spirit? Not so much. God is not static. He dynamically fills everything everywhere and every when, including our time.
the timelesness of God is not a recent invention but has been discussed by Aquinas and Boethius and biblically he is at the beginning and the end albeit you might say that refers to our beginning and end.
So by your understanding God only knows the past and guesses the future with high accuracy. So he lives in the now is is very good at statistics and has existed from the beginning, not before it. Thus he is time constraint and had a beginning himself which means he is in need of a cause himself. To me that is illogical.
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Good point. If âGod has a futureâ and is not atemporal or omnitemporal, then that suggests he had a past and a beginning.
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thanks. I started wondering if I am a bit naive, never even having worried about this, so to some extend I am thankful to be challenged as it force me to think about those issues.
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My nephrectomy account, above, demonstrates we are not talking about our libertarian free will. God chose for me to get cancer and directed the mutations in my cells. Am I upset at him? Hardly. The timing of it and the accompanying co-instants were wonderful. He loves me, and he knows I am delighted with his displays of immanence, intervention and sovereignty over time and place, timing and placing, including the when and where of mutations in my DNA. It is not for nothing that I label myself as an âevolutionary providentialist.â What did my choice have to do with it? Zip, zilch and nada. Am I an automaton? Hardly. I choose to praise him â my heart gives me no choice. 
I did not say from the âbeginning to nowâ, I said from âinfinity until nowâ. God has always existed and when He begot Jesus, that was the beginning spoken of in John 1:1. God is not guessing. He has an infinite dataset to rely on of His planning and forecasting. He can foresee every iteration and accurately assign probabilities.
Why do you think God is constrained to our timeline and time dimension, our present, our now? Could there not be other universes that have different ones, that run faster or slower or in even in another direction, so to speak? What is his relationship to their futures? Are their presents and futures necessarily synchronized with ours?