God's sovereignty & predestination

philologos

I definitely replied to this before but either the modding is super strict or it got swallowed up in the ether.
Their is so much wrong here I don't know where to start.
1 Predestination and God can't exist in the same universe, they don't so no problem, neither can free will, now theirs a problem.
2 Being responsible requires free will to commit the sin, lacking that responsibility is a moot point but not free or willed.
3 Now Jesus comes to redeem us, freely, or is that predestined? Now God is subject to the destiny that damned us. Bang goes His sovereignty.

Bad things happen good people has been troubling thinkers for a long time, so far no satisfying answer but we got art, religion and philosophy out of the efforts so not a total wast of time.

From another thread:

1) Free will and divine predestination is a difficult topic. For me it comes down to the fact that God is omniscient. I.E - That God foreknows from the beginning of Creation who will come into fellowship with Him and who won't. There are a number of passages that suggest this to me from Scripture. I would have been very skeptical of predestination, but it is because the Bible makes it abundantly clear that predestination is a reality that I need to consider it clearly. It is also important to note that just because you know in advance that someone may decide A or B, it doesn't necessarily mean that God has chosen that for that person.

1 should also cover 2.

3) Jesus indicates in Scripture that He knows already who would know Him.

John 6:60-64 wrote:

When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, “Do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.)

God reveals to Paul that He knew in advance who would be saved in Corinth:

Acts 18:9-11 wrote:

And the Lord said to Paul one night in a vision, “Do not be afraid, but go on speaking and do not be silent, for I am with you, and no one will attack you to harm you, for I have many in this city who are my people.” And he stayed a year and six months, teaching the word of God among them.

God knows what words will come from our lips before we even speak:

Psalm 139:1-4 wrote:

O LORD, you have searched me and known me!
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.
You search out my path and my lying down
and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue,
behold, O LORD, you know it altogether.

How does His sovereignty go? God is only sovereign because He knows all things. That's why I call Him sovereign. To deny this, would be to say that God is not the ultimate ruler of all things. That's the definition of sovereign:

Possessing supreme or ultimate power: "the people's will is in theory sovereign

This is a position that I haven't come to with a lot of ease, but I am convinced that the Bible clearly teaches about predestination.

tommy2bad

As I said Phil, God and a predestined universe can't occupy the same space, good thing they don't

The problem comes with the incarnation, this is God in this Universe, which if a predestined one, means that He came to fulfill the destiny or to change it.
Both cancel out a predestination model of creation. God would be as trapped by creation as creation itself. Or by changing it, it cant be predestined.
Maybe it's the word that causes the problem but when I hear predestined I think mechanistic clockwork winding down to a set conclusion.
Not the creation described in the bible.
God may know the outcome by virtue of seeing all the frames of the movie at once but thats not the same as setting dominoes tumbling. One scenario has God outside time letting creation take its course and observing it as it happens and all at once. The other has God create the whole scenario, every micro and macro event built in, only to be let happen much as I might set the timer on the oven.
One makes sin Gods plan, one makes sin our independent decision and God unwilling to prevent it.
God could end it all now or let it play out, that's the point of being an omnipotent god, not that I see Him interfering in our free will by pulling the plug or abandoning the whole thing as a bad idea.
To square predestination with a God who can act in the world but will not suggests that He doesn't care enough and that it is all pointless clockwork. If I were God, I'd bore of creation fast.

Remove the predestination thing and we have a God who limits Himself in how He acts in the world but cares enough to act when necessary and leave us our freewill when it isn't.
It gives us a relationship with God not as toys but as people.

See how I have a problem with the idea of predestination? It diminishes us, creation and God.

philologos

The problem from my perspective is that the Bible clearly points to predestination.

Ephesians 1:3-6 wrote:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.

Romans 8:29-30 wrote:

For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.

I can't ignore this. That's my problem. If I believe that the Bible is God's inspired and infallible word, I have to listen to it.

gimmebroadband

The following is what the Catholic Church teaches on the term 'predestination'.

Eph. 1:5 - Paul teaches that God “predestined” us in love to be His sons through Jesus Christ. "Predestination" means that God knows what we will do before we do it (it does not mean that God determines what we do; otherwise, we would have no freewill). Predestination is taken from the Greek word "prooridzo" which means to know or declare in advance by God’s foreknowledge. See, for example, 1 Peter 1:2 where Peter writes about the “elect according to the foreknowledge of God.” The terms “predestination” and “the elect” always refer to God’s knowledge (not human knowledge) because God is outside of time (and humans cannot predict the future). There are two types of "predestination," to grace and to glory. In this verse, Paul is teaching about predestination to grace, which means becoming a Christian.

Source:

http://www.scripturecatholic.com/salvation.html

philologos

tommy2bad wrote:

To square predestination with a God who can act in the world but will not suggests that He doesn't care enough and that it is all pointless clockwork. If I were God, I'd bore of creation fast.

I don't get your point here.

God is not at our beck and call. He doesn't have to act when we desire it, in fact it is better for Him to act when He determines is right. That's why when we say the Lord's Prayer, we say "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven".

Sometimes people don't seem to realise what they are saying. They are saying, Lord you are sovereign, you know what is best, we don't. Do your will.

God is not our servant, He is our Lord. Jesus, came not to be served, but to serve, but this never meant that He had to do so. He chose to to give His life as a ransom for our sin. We don't deserve it, and we don't have a right to demand it from God.

bonniebede

I think there are some points needing clarity here.

The bible teaches about predestination and free will, so clearly we have to be able to hold both together somehow.

(Some one used the image of Christianity being like a long picture gallery with pictures on each side. To get the right idea you need to hold both pictures in mind. For example on one wall there is 'God is one' and opposite 'three persons in one God'. Focus only on the first and you end up denying the trinity (mistake!) while focusing only on the other you end up in polytheism (mistake!)

AS far as I can see it, many people have difficulty in this way with free will and presdestination - it has to be either/or ; when it should be both/and.

Let me invite you to do a thought experiment.
Your friend tosses a coin, and holds it on the back of his hand. 'Heads or tails?' So you choose - and have a fifty fifty chance or being right.
Now, without allowing you to see, your friend takes a look. So she knows what the right answer is. For her there is certainty about the outcome.
Does her knowledge affect you? Have the odds changed for you because she knows if you are right or wrong? Not at all. Her perspective and knowledge are different to yours, but yours has neither lost or gained anything.

Ok so applying this to God.
Is it true that if God wills something it must happen?
No - otherwise there could be no sin, as sin is not doing God's will.

But if God is omnipotent, how can it be that what he wills is not done?

Only by seeing that God has permitted his will to be set aside.
In traditional terms this is expressed as Gods perfect will, and Gods permissive will.

It is Gods perfect will that all men be saved (1Tim 1:4).
However, salvation for a moral being like humans involves our will - which cannot be coerced into salvation, because by definition salvation is the free acceptance of the free gift of grace.

So Gods perfect will - that we be saved, can only be accomplished if he gives us a truly free will.
But in giving us a truly free will, he is permitting the possibility that we will freely reject salvation.

See how that holds together?

Now lets consider Gods perspective on time. For us, we experience time as a succession of points. God does not. He sees the whole of it all at once, from what we call the beginning to the end.

However, his knowledge of what we will do with our free will, does not prevent our will being free, as his knowledge does not conflict with his will, nor with his power.

Just like your friend with the coin, Gods knowing your final answer does not make your freedom of choice any less real.

Much of what is written of predestination in the bible is more easily assimilated if you think of it in terms of what God is committing or covenanting himself to.

For example when he says that he wills all men to be saved, he is really saying that there is no one to whom he will not give the grace to be saved, no one whom he will not support through life to reach heaven; all that is necessary is for that person to say yes. Even the possibility of saying yes to that grace is a grace - the grace of being created, the grace that supports our freewill, and so on.

Finally, I love this thought - in Romans 8:28 we read that God works all things for the good for those who love him , who are called according to his purpose. Those who are called is everyone. Those who love him, well that depends on our choice to love. But i love to reflect on the fact that when we reach heaven we will finally gain enough of Gods perspective to be able to see how it all hangs together - even the permission he has given for us to sin, whre his greatest triumph is won through the Cross.:)

(I don't mean to imply that God permits us to sin - he doesn't, the bible explicitly states that, but that is becasue there is always grace on offer to avoid temptation and flee from sin. Nonetheless, when we do sin, God can still make even that serve his ultimate purpose).

antiskeptic

philologos wrote: »

1) Free will and divine predestination is a difficult topic. For me it comes down to the fact that God is omniscient. I.E - That God foreknows from the beginning of Creation who will come into fellowship with Him and who won't. There are a number of passages that suggest this to me from Scripture. I would have been very skeptical of predestination, but it is because the Bible makes it abundantly clear that predestination is a reality that I need to consider it clearly. It is also important to note that just because you know in advance that someone may decide A or B, it doesn't necessarily mean that God has chosen that for that person.


...but I am convinced that the Bible clearly teaches about predestination.

Hi Phillo,

It seems to me that what is being predestined (when the Bible uses that word) isn't anything to do with the will. Rather it's something that is applied to a certain category of people (a people called 'us').

Take one of Calvinism's proof verses on the subject:


In love 5 he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will..



If you take the view (as I do) that having a salvation transaction with God is a pivotal event, then it is no surprise that God has decided in advance that certain things should take place should that event occur between an individual and himself.

- the Spirit of God will come to take up residence in the person.

- they will surely 'go to heaven'.

- their citizenship is changed

- they are, as our verse above states, adopted to sonship.


All things that occur to the person once the salvation transaction takes place. All things that God has ensured will happen to anyone with whom that transaction occurs. All without there being any need that the salvation transaction itself is predestined to occur.

Subsequents to salvation are predestined - in other words, not the salvation transaction itself. That remains a matter of freewill

-

The verse above can (as can Calvinisms other proof verses) be read in two ways: God predestines us for salvation (Calvinism). Or God predestines certain things to happen to us (where 'us' = "those who are saved").

The second reading sits in harmony with freewill. The first is unreconcilable with freewill. And since freewill is far more heavily emphasised that predestination, I plump for the second reading. And reconcilation.


Does that make sense?

tommy2bad

Bonniebede is close to where I am, but not exactly.
antiskeptic brings in Calvin, who to my reading is much more a mystic than his followers would admit.

I don't have a problem with God knowing now what I will freely choose later, I have a problem when this is pushed to the point of God deciding now what I will freely do later. Once people start saying 'predestination' it can slip into doomed and saved, nothing we can do but ride it out.
Not saying that thats how it is but it's how it gets presented all too often.

philologos

tommy2bad: I think where I'm getting at is, God doesn't change because we mightn't like how He is. God is who He is, and we should strive to understand Him more, irrespective of whether or not the idea of predestination is one we mightn't like at first. It's not people that are saying "predestination". God is revealing that to us through His word. The question is how should we understand it rather than whether or not we should listen to it. At least as far as I can see.