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From: laic!vogon.laic!darin@decwrl.dec.com (Darin Johnson)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: He loves me, He loves me not, He loves me, He...
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Date: 9 Aug 89 07:17:36 GMT
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[In article  
dcatla!mclek@gatech.edu (Larry E. Kollar) suggested that God might
choose not to know whether someone is going to be saved, because
if he knows our fate, our fate is sealed.  --clh]

Two observations:

1) God knows what our eventual fate is because God is omniscient, not
   because it was 'decided'.  God can see the future, so he automatically
   knows if we are saved or not (unless God makes a special effort to
   not know this, which I doubt).  However, at the present time, we may
   not have made that choice for ourselves.  God has not told us what
   our individual fate is, so we act no differently.

   As an analogy, suppose you had a machine to see into the future.  You
   saw that your child would run away from home and lead a life of crime.
   However, at the moment, your child is 3 years old.  Your child has
   not abandoned you yet.  Do you love him/her less?  What would you do
   in this case?  Would you let your child know that he/she is going to
   mess up in the future?  If you had 2 children, would you spend all your
   parenting on one child, and ignore the other since you that one would
   grow up 'ok'?

2) Some have said that since God can not love sin, that God can not love
   those he knows will reject him forever (he/him used for  clarity).  I
   think this is a bad argument.  God hates the sin, but not the sinner.
   It hurts God greatly to turn away his own creations because of their
   sin.  If my cat got in a fight with a skunk, there is a very good
   chance it would spend the night outside.  I don't hate the cat, but
   I hate that horrible smell.  With us, we have decided that we like
   sin more than God, and God can not let us inside until we leave the
   sin behind.

Darin Johnson (leadsv!laic!darin@pyramid.pyramid.com)
	We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

[Thanks also to Philip R. Lindberg, bcstec!tahoma!prl3546@uunet.uu.net,
who made a point similar to item (2) --clh]