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To: sinkspur; xzins; Buggman; blue-duncan
You seem to be saying that everything that happens is God's will. That is simply not true.

Ultimately, yes everything that happens is God's will. If he didn't want it to happen, he certainly has the power to stop it. And he is free to violate our free will at his leisure. Indeed, our ultimate deaths are entirely in the hands of God. We may will ourselves to live forever, but the time that we die has been appointed. Everyone who died in WWII died exactly at the time they were appointed to die. God was in control then and he is in control now. You will die on the date that God has appointed you to die. And so will I. Even if we commit suicide, we are not surprising God. If we succeed then that was our appointed day and hour.

489 posted on 07/13/2006 10:52:20 AM PDT by P-Marlowe (((172 * 3.141592653589793238462) / 180) * 10 = 30.0196631)
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To: P-Marlowe
And he is free to violate our free will at his leisure.

But He doesn't. God is free to commit sin, too, but He doesn't.

I'm sorry, Marlowe, but your view of God as some kind of master manipulator or Supreme office manager is a distortion of His love.

He doesn't love us if we have no say in what happens to us or in our choices.

513 posted on 07/13/2006 10:59:15 AM PDT by sinkspur (Today, we settled all family business.)
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To: P-Marlowe; sinkspur; xzins; blue-duncan
If I may add a clarification: We do draw a distinction between God's action and God's permission, while considering both to be His will. That is, He may control events by actively interceding--influencing hearts, controlling the weather, dropping a nuke on Sodom and Gomorrah, etc.--or He may allow events to run their natural course, knowing fully the near- and long-term outcomes. He may also do any combination of the above, for example by allowing evil men to carry out their plans to attack Israel so that He can give them another miraculous victory, as He has numerous times since 1948.

If you want to get a sense of how God is interacting with His Creation today, look in Scripture to see how He has interacted with us in the past. Just as the NT authors understood the prophets who wrote of Israel's then-impending Babylonian captivity to also be speaking to their own day, we can understand that God's actions for and against Israel in the Bible speak to our own day.

526 posted on 07/13/2006 11:04:34 AM PDT by Buggman (L'chaim b'Yeshua HaMashiach!)
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