Mumbling and shouting… I don’t know about that. This verse has long been a favorite of mine when it comes to understanding the sovereignty of God and the free action of conscious beings.
“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it.”
When we set our aim for becoming, it is better to aim higher than lower, to what can do all that we can do and more rather than something that cannot even do the things we can do. The appreciation of a beautiful stone is different than the admiration of someone to follow and emulate.
I see nothing in Psalm 139 about a God who is either timeless or controlling. To be sure, it is a God who knows us better than we know ourselves – one pointless to flee and fruitful to follow. And I don’t see jumping on this passage as an excuse to spurn knowledge and rationality as being very admirable. I see more to admire in the scientist who seeks what knowledge and understanding he can find, both about ourselves and about the nature of things we experience.
We also are told in a couple of places in English translations that God is inscrutable.
Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!
Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth does not become weary or tired. His understanding is inscrutable.
God has revealed a lot about himself in scripture and in creation, so we are way better off than the blind men and the elephant, but Mitchell seems to insist on trying to get the elephant inside his head.
Yes. God is the eternal Present tense and the always Now.
God can be both competent and capable without conforming to your expectations. Because he can doesn’t mean he did.
There’s a good chance his intentions lean more towards relatability than objectivity.
But you believe in God’s providential interventions into the lives of his children. How do you explain his orchestration of events, including people’s actions, without him being sovereign over both? You can’t, yet he violates neither the laws of nature nor any individual’s free will. There is a wondrous instantaneous and ‘cooperative’ dynamic between his will and ours, yet our wills our not bound. (Cooperative is in scare quotes because we are way less than cooperative to his revealed will so much of the time!) It would have been better for Judas to have not been born, yet he was also responsible for his actions. That dynamic is also both awesome and fearsome, especially if we are not childlike before him.
It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Hebrews 10:31
Yes.
The laws of nature are not causally closed. The majority of events are not determined by pre-existing condition, and the non-linear nature of the mechanics means an extreme sensitivity to these events. This is a back door through which God can influence events, allowing Him to do miraculous things without breaking any of the laws of nature He created to support the very process of life itself.
I just did.
correct. We have free will because the God does not control everything and the future is not written. And one of the reasons it is not written is because God Himself is a participant in events and in a real interactive relationship with us responding to our choices with choices of His own. He is not the Deist God who simply plans everything and sets it all in motion to watch with satisfaction how everything works according to His prearranged design.
No disagreement there.
It is only a fearful thing because when we insist on control of our own – trying to manipulate people and events for our own desires. For God will not do things according to our judgement of what should be done or how they should be done, but according to His superior understanding of reality. I certainly agree with that! I just don’t use that as justification for irrationally incoherent theology.
The ‘future’ was written for Judas. Jesus was not Plan B.
That is all time-bound language and does not apply to God.
Then logically it was written by someone who should not have
Jesus is God and God is not plan B.
But in Genesis 6, God makes it pretty clear that the flood and men thinking only evil continually was not plan A. And what Jesus prayed in the Garden and when Jesus says that it was better that the man who betrayed Him had not been born, this tells us that wasn’t plan A either.
Disagree. Time is not absolute or singular. Just because God created the universe with one measure of time doesn’t mean that God has no time of His own.
Right.
Agreed.
Sure. The time in our universe had a beginning. There may be multiverses with their own times, and those and the time in heaven (still part of God’s creation in other dimensions) does not have to correlate to ours.
Those times all had beginnings, and God is equally present in all of them, as long as they exist. When did “God’s time” start? And how does it correlate to the others?
It seems like that was Jesus.
Nope, He was the one who said it would have been better had such a person not been born. If someone says to a companion that he is going to make it better that he had not been born, that is a degree of hatred and evil I find it impossible to ascribe to Jesus. Some seem able to twist there mind into a pretzel in order to accept contradictory dogmas. I am not one of them. I either find a way to make the pieces fit or I discard them.
Good. It is written that he knew who it was, however. Ahead.of.time. It was not cruelty because it involved the instantaneous dynamic with God and Judas’ responsible free will.
Sorry, you cannot fit the elephant inside your head. I would advise not trying to discard it, though (neither the elephant nor your head… well, maybe some of your thinking ; - ).
Thanks. Regarding the question about whether this world is ideal or could be better, I think that world comes after the end times. In the meantime regarding this world, it was indeed meant as a sort of boot camp for salvation. If so, one could regard it as perfect boot camp for if we follow Jesus way and do the will of the father as guided by the Holy Spirit, then there is nothing in this world to fear.
Regarding the comment about whether God can be a personal God if He is without time, my way of thinking is that this is why there is the Trinity. The atemporal (is this a word?) Father alone without the Son or Holy Spirit would not be personal. C.S. Lewis does a better job explaining this than I can in his Book 4 Chapter 2 of Mere Christianity.
No, you did not. That does not explain God’s (Jesus’) prescience, and it excludes all prophecy.
Definitely, and more common than the one Mitch incorrectly and disparagingly says I coined (not that I would mind having coined it, since it’s a perfectly good word ; - ).
Forecasting the future doesn’t always require magical powers, let alone mean that the future is already written. Some things are simply predictable while other things are not.
You nailed it. Thanks. That explains absolutely everything.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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