Problem of Evil (Sproul's version)

[Bluefalcon]

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[skypair]

Is it good for God to punish sin?

Back up one more --- does it glorify the Father to HAVE to punish His kids?

Yes, he is glorified in his saints. But why do you think that means God can't be glorified by judging sin as well? The final judgment glorifies God:

It does prove His character, if that is what you mean.

Here's what I've gotten down to, russ ---- IF God wills evil, what is to say He doesn't will evil and sin in your (a believer's) life?? And if that is so, then God's OK if we are lawless. We are lawless because He wills it. And now lawlessness is part of God's character and He looks strangely like the coming AntiChrist.

Just keep that in the back of your mind because there is another was evil could come into the world without it being God's will.

Salvation and glory and power belong to our God, because his judgments are true and just.

No argument there. It is actually someone who says God willed evil that would be questioning these.

Perhaps there were other ways Christ could have died for us. We don't know. But there was only one way planned. We know that because Acts tells us that the peoples of Israel, in taking part in the crucifixion of Christ, did as God planned for them to do.

Now you're getting the point. There was a CHOICE for Israel -- crucify Him or crown Him. There was a "secular" context in which that decision had to be made and there was an outcome for them prepared by an all-knowing God dependent on that decision.

Yes, he offered it to Israel, but he planned for them to reject it.

See, again I would rather say He KNEW they would reject it and then planned for it. That way the choice if REALLY theirs, not God's.

And they blessed the gentiles by providing a Saviour for them. The Gentiles are blessed because the Lamb was slain, and by his blood he "ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation."

Actually, this prophecy is NOT complete yet but the part you got is true.

They did not reject him despite God's will and intentions. They rejected him according to God's will and intentions, because Acts 4 tells us that in the crucifixion, the peoples of Israel did what God willed and intended for them to do.

Right there you are getting the cart before the horse. Yes, God FOREORDAINS everything that happens. No, that does not mean that He does so ignorant of what man will do. That is, Rom 8:29 says "foreknow ... predestinate." Omniscience before omnipotence in the exercise of His foreordination.

We have a "church age" because they did God's will. The peoples of Israel gathered together against God's holy servant Jesus to do whatever God's plan predestined them to do. (Acts 4)

Not because THEY did God's will -- because SOMEBODY did what God wanted done. It could have been the Romans that prosecuted and crucified Christ and the the prophecy we spoke of above fulfilled -- ISRAEL might then have spread the gospel "blessing" to all the world. Instead, it was pretty much Gentiles that spread it, right?

Isaiah 53 says that the Messiah would be rejected by Israel and crushed for their sins according to the will of God. Acts 4 says that the people of Israel, in crucifying Christ, did what God planned for them to do.

I'm willing to be proven wrong on Isa 53 -- what verse do you find that in. But, obviously to say it was foreordained" and "prophecied" in Acts 4 when that is merely "reporting" is a bit dishonest, don't you think?

Of course he isn't responsible for someone not choosing Christ of for Adam eating the fruit. No one says he is.

Sorry -- if "God wills it" and God is supremely sovereign as Sproul teaches, then he is accusing God of causing Adam to eat the fruit and causing people (double predestination-wise) to reject Christ. If He has and uses that authrority, He IS responsible.

And he had authority over whether he would allow it or not.

Yeah, whether He would create beings like Himself who had the authority to choose or not.

He had authority over whether he would put that tree in the garden at all knowing exactly what the consequences of it being there would be.

It wouldn't really be a "test," now would it, if God knew they were going to fail? Why not skip the Garden scene and plop them into a cursed world that God willed to come upon them anyway??

Of course God lets people make choices. They make choices all the time. But if God overrules our choices, then he is sovereign over them because his rule over them is higher than our rule over them.

Overrules our choices? At what point? I have been maintaining that He can change the cosequences of our choices but often He can't take back what He promised would happen to us personally.

Do you see what I am saying? Calvinists think that if man can choose, he will somehow disrupt God's plans. But I have demonstrated through Pharoah, Jesus, Israel, etc. that either choice would not have kept God's plan from coming to fruitition. The only ones ultimately affected by individual decisions were the individual who made the decision and those God gave him (say Pharoah) authority over, right?

God let's people choose, but God is sovereign over their choices.

Yes -- if God says you must believe on Christ to be saved, that definitely is His sovereiengty at work regardless whether you choose Him or not! And yet personally, you also know that you made the decision "your own self" and God is not responsible for you being in hell or sinning.

So in the sense of God's will of command, it wasn't God's will that Adam sin. But in the sense of God's will as his plan for history, it was God's will that Adam sin.

See, I like this! You're beginning to see that Calvinist's view of sovereignty is a bit flawed. Good. You see God's will as His sovereignty and, distinct from that, God's will as His foreordination which is not really what He wants to happen in its details or the way He wants it to happen necessarily but is His plan for how it will all come to pass.

Adam has free will, but he doesn't have free will exactly like God has. There can only be one truly independent being in the universe: the one who made and sustains all other beings and is the ultimate ruler over everything else.

No, Adam can have "free will" as God does -- he just cannot have supreme sovereignty as God does. There has to be Someone above Adam "making the rules" that dictate the consequences of free will in obedience or in disobedience, right?

Lucifer's fall can't be the ultimate origin of evil, because God had to foresee it and chose to allow it before it happened.

See, there you go back to your Calvinist understanding of "foresee." If God "foresees" things per the Calvinist definition, He directly causes them to happen -- there is basically no allowance for free will of any kind. Even opposing will is not "free" because God is said to have "created them evil" (i.e. Lucifer, Adam, all mankind by being born sinners). So, yeah, then God "foresaw"/"created" evil.

In other words, the thought of evil and a choice in regards to it existed in God's mind before it existed in Lucifer's mind. Everything that now exists has to come back ultimately to God's mind planning creation.

I agree with the first premise. Like I said, God KNEW what breaking His own law would mean and disciplined Himself to be perfect!

As to the second, yes, but all God's planning HAS to take into account what He will do if an independent entity does something averse to His own plan. The very fact that there are 2 individuals -- God and Adam, God and Lucifer -- means there are 2 different and vastly disparate minds. And even wanting the same thing, you KNOW they are going to see different ways to get it, just like you and I, right?

When you first realized that there was a God and that you had sinned, God had one plan to save you -- you had an entirely different one for escaping the consequences of your act. If you were like me, you equivocated first, then measured yourself by other men, then tried to ignore the guilt because as yet you had NONE of the mind of God, right?

If you have Lucifer's fall as the ultimate cause of evil, then what you have is a dualistic system, not a Christian one.

No, no! Dualistic meand equally powerful -- no clear winner. No, that is NOT true.

And what you have is not a sovereign God, but one who does not rule over the forces of darkness.

You're right -- God doesn't "rule over the forces of darkness" for sure!! He is more powerful than they are -- He does and will defeat them in their own spiritual realm. But who are you saying gives them their orders?? Who has sovereignty over them?

Do you recall the centurian? Who did he say Christ could command to heal his daughter without Christ having to go there?? Who did the centurian have sovereign authority over and do you suppose some of them disobeyed despite his sovereignty??

I don't know why Sproul dismissed Lucifer's fall as the ultimate origin of evil, but that's the reason I do.

Well, I'd say you are thinking like Sproul and a Calvinist then.

And of course Lucifer thought he was independent of God. And he was decieved. Lucifer cannot be independent of God or else you have a dualistic system.

It is an observation that is mostly true. God has supplied the means by which we can care for ourselves and we largely take it for granted.

skypair

 

[StraightAndNarrow]

First of all, who says it's a vast majority? How would we know?

Mat 7:13 Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide [is] the gate, and broad [is] the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:
Mat 7:14 Because strait [is] the gate, and narrow [is] the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

This is how we know that few will enter heaven.

 

[johnp.]

REV 7:9 After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. 10 And they cried out in a loud voice:
"Salvation belongs to our God,
who sits on the throne,
and to the Lamb."​

john.​

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