Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!att!dptg!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian 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... Message-ID:Date: 9 Aug 89 07:17:36 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Lockheed AI Center, Menlo Park, CA Lines: 38 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu [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]