Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: bnr-fos!bnr-public!davem@watmath.waterloo.edu (Dave Mielke) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: He loves me, He loves me not, He loves me, He... Message-ID:Date: 12 Aug 89 02:15:38 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Bell-Northern Research, Ottawa, Canada Lines: 66 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article laic!vogon.laic!darin@decwrl.dec.com (Darin Johnson) writes: >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. This position assumes that God is a mere observer, i.e. He does not intervene in our affairs. The Scriptures are, however, full of cases where He has directly intervened. We must remember that God can, with perfect foreknowledge, intervene in such a way as to make things turn out in the way that He wants them to. Even if the concept of a person having the free will to either accept or reject God were true, there is still no way to avoid the fact that God has to involve Himself with each person who is to even stand a chance of being saved. John 6:44 begins "No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him:". > 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? There are a couple of Scriptural problems with this theory. The Scriptures teach that we have abandoned God as of the time we are conceived. Psalm 58:3-5 says "The wicked are estranged from the womb: they go astray as soon as they be born, speaking lies. Their poison {is} like the poison of a serpent: {they are} like the deaf adder {that} stoppeth her ear; Which will not hearken to the voice of charmers, charming never so wisely.". In case anyone wants to fault me for having said "from conception" when this Scripture implies "from actual birth", I would also like to quote Psalm 51:5 which says "Behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.". You have assumed that God considers all of us to be His children. There is no Scriptural support for this idea other than the leap in logic that says that we must be because He created Adam, because we are all descendants of Adam, and because He must have considered Adam to be a child of His. What the Scriptures actually teach is that we become His children at the point when we become saved. John 1:12 says "But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, {even} to them that believe on his name:". Please understand that I have not chosen to respond to you in this way so as to give you a hard time. I, in fact, rarely even look at who originated each article until afterward so that I can insure that my response is not biased. This has given me an opportunity, though, to illustrate the dangers of coming up with a nice sounding theory that is very convincing yet cannot be supported by the Scriptures. I'm sure that we all agree that the best way to get to accurately know God is to let Him describe Himself to us through His Word. I, personally, would like to see Scripture references that support any given position. This is the only way to insure that we are speaking with even a minute degree of authority. Dave Mielke, 613-726-0014 856 Grenon Avenue Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K2B 6G3