Posted on 04/21/2014 2:32:58 PM PDT by wmfights
I don't disagree. I would add that in addition to seeing everything before it has even transpired, He is the creator of all and is Sovereign over it. We are blessed to be a part of His plan and to Glorify Him.
It will not work for us to say "Lord, you made me this way."
I agree. A pastor made a great comment to me when he said, "I'm always amazed by people who think that they will come up for judgement at the White Throne and argue with God."
My question about predestination vs free will in different eras is just a topic to see if we can learn more and understand more.
Lets see somewhere between 3 and 37 dispensations, as if it is not important how many there are, I would think the number is of great importance, because God in our scriptures tells exactly how many there are.
Knowing and believing this will make the scripture and the gospel so much easier to understand, our scripture abounds with simplicity:
2 Corinthians 11:3 But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.
Moreover the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, Son of man, take up a lamentation upon the king of Tyrus, and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty. Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created. Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee.
(Eze 28:11-15 KJV)
Remember Satan was in the presence of God too and see what he did.
My hope is for an open discussion among fellow believers exploring some of the differences and why they exist. I'm posting these threads so that Dispensationalists can discuss these things without all the "noise".
The Angels that rebelled against God were stupid...(like a computer, able to do things and figure out things very fast but only as good as the input provided). So sin is not a human thing only. To be in the spiritual world as God, to see “him” and to deny “him” = stupidity.
Before God removes the heart of stone and replaces with a heart of flesh, how free is the will of man? His thoughts are evil continually. He has no faith, and can have no faith of his own doing and therefor finds it impossible to please God. His will is bent towards sin, so much that it is said the he is a “slave to sin”. Not very free if you ask me.
But in the sense that man makes his choices based on his own desires, yes man is free. Just his “desirer” is corrupt.
I look at it this way, in a broken analogy. At 9:30 pm I’m watching a show on TV. A commercial comes on for a juicy cheeseburger. All of a sudden I make the freewill decision to get up and leave the house to go to that establishment and get a burger. I made a freewill choice...that resided inside a set of circumstances created by advertisers who have spent billions to get to know the inner me and what makes me tick.
In a similar way, God knows me so well, better than I know me, and can create the correct circumstances in my life to allow me to make the freewill decisions and yet still be subjected to His sovereignty and the working out of His will through His providence.
Pharaoh made every choice of his own freewill, and yet was directed by God to those decisions due to God knowing what it would take for Pharaoh to be hardened. To fit it in my analogy, the plagues were commercials, done by an all-knowing, always successful God.
To continue along this line of thought. I think the degree to which God influences free will decisions may be different depending on the dispensation. God being omniscient knows the outcome from the beginning, but God also knows how much He has chosen to direct the outcome.
The rebellion at the end of the Millenial Reign never made sense to me until I thought of it in terms of God leaving us to our free will and as a final example of how lost we are without His involvement in directing us. Also, it reveals how great God's mercy is because without His undeserved direction our default behavior since the fall is rebellion. Yet he seeks us out and saves us.
Sorry I'm slow responding.
Hard to believe that descendants of those that came through the Tribulation and who travel to Jerusalem to worship and see the living Lord Jesus Christ would rebel. I think there is a significance to this willingness to believe Satan and rebel. My thought is we are being shown how fallen our nature is without God directing us.
I hadn't really thought that was a "hill I was willing to die on".
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