The Relationship between God and Man

[Petrel]

Originally posted by Helen:
Hi Petrel! Its Barry here -Helen's husband.

Hello!

In other words, what God is saying to the Israelites is that He has disallowed, broken, and made of no effect His original promise to them. God had clearly changed His mind and has admitted to it.

I haven't said that God cannot change his mind, I have said that God cannot change his character (at least I hope so). I don't see this passage as being contradictory because past events indicate his arrangement with the Hebrews at that point was quid pro quo. He would guide them into the promised land if they worshiped him and didn't whine too much.

Helen here now.

Hello!

So while God can do anything He chooses to do, we cannot judge Him. He is, by nature, intrinsically good and therefore only what is against Him is bad. Thus He CANNOT make any wrong or bad decision by definition. This is not a matter of limitation, but a matter of definition.

God is free to change His mind if He wants to. And we are not to judge unless we want, also, to eat from the forbidden fruit.

There are a whole mess of problems with this. First of all, typically Christians try to say that morality comes from God, without him we have no way of determining what is good or evil. Most Christians say that evil acts are acts that are against God's character. Therefore the morality that we are supposed to follow flows from God's character and his image in us. The conclusion I draw from what you have said is that our morality is not based upon God's character. It's quite possible that it's just an arbitrary list of things that God drew up that is not particularly meaningful to him except as a measuring stick to see how obedient we will be. If God is free to keep his word or to lie, to endorse murder or punish it, maybe we should count ourselves lucky we got the generally warm and fuzzy list that we did.

This also makes our morality baseless. If it isn't based off God's character but is instead arbitrary, how can we claim any particular value in following virtue? And how can we say our morality is superior to any other man-made standards? It also brings up the side point--if God was just delighted about the Hebrews murdering the Canaanites' babies, why are we getting so worked up about abortion now? Apparently God today might say killing babies is good and tomorrow might say it is evil. It's arbitrary and vacillating. This places God completely outside our understanding and makes me wonder whether it's even appropriate to apply the label "good" to God. Perhaps it would be better to say he is amoral? But if that is true, why in the world does he care so much about us following his list?

The final and most devastating problem which flows from this is that God is not trustworthy. If God is free to do whatever he likes, even things we would think are evil, how do we know he is good? Because he tells us he is good. What if he is lying? After all, if truth-telling is optional he could easily lie to us. And if he is lying to us about that, why couldn't he be lying to us about other things? How can we be sure that there is an afterlife? Maybe God hasn't really forgiven us, so how can we be sure we will get to heaven? God tells us that heaven is a wonderful place, but how can we know this for sure? Maybe a lot of Christians will arive in heaven and find out to them it is more like hell.

Sure, the answer is that we should have faith. But in the Bible we are always told to have faith because God is trustworthy and will not deceive us. If we can't know that God is trustworthy and can't trust he will not deceive us, it's rather a gamble.

If God is really like this then perhaps Satan got a bum rap. Maybe he simply made the mistake of pointing out these inconsistencies. If all this is true, maybe more of us should truly embrace our standards of morality and eat the forbidden fruit.

 

[Helen]

You are ignoring every verse that encourages man to seek, to choose, to not harden his heart. You are picking and choosing what you want to support what you want to believe.

I prefer the God of the Bible to the one Calvinists describe.

 

[Helen]

Acchhh, that was to Calvi, not you Petrel! I'll try to respond to you more fully later, but we are jammed right now trying to get the lectures ready for the trip.

God bless.

 

[Petrel]

Yeah, I figured. Hope it goes well.

 

[Benjamin]

Originally posted by Petrel:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by whatever:
Is God therefore not really free to make real choices?

You know, I don't think he is. It is impossible for God to sin. Some people seem to think that morality is just what God says is good. In this case God would be free to do whatever he likes since he could just decide that today it will be good to lie to people, for instance. Others say that sin is something against God's character. Then he could do whatever he liked by changing his character. Both of these run into the problem that God is supposed to be unchanging. If God is unchanging and God is completely good, then God is definitely not free in his choices.

</font>[/QUOTE]I think omnipotent God exist within His desired will and His own self derived nature which is good, love, and truth, He abides within His truth nature being self created in it. God could make 2+2=5 but that is not the truth that He created within His own nature, it is not logical that God could make 2+2=4 as truth and yet make 2+2=5 true also no more than He could make a rock so big He couldn’t lift it. I might say He is limited within His own nature of truth by His own choice of His nature.

With the way some people talk about God the standards of morality we follow don't really apply to him, which makes it difficult to understand how we can say that God is "good" if his goodness is so different from our goodness as to be completely unintelligible. I think only in this case could God be considered to be completely free. I think this is a little different from the first case I presented--whatever God does is good, and he has given us a different arbitrary standard of right and wrong that we have to follow but which is not necessarily based off his character.

I assume that freedom is a “good” that God desired rather than absolute moral perfection from His creatures. Evil is something that God does not want but yet has given His creatures the freedom to bring it about. So I would agree the standard of right and wrong that we have to follow is not necessarily based off of “His” character but is based off “our” standard that we received the knowledge of because of the fall and we will fail. To be good we must abide within His existence through His truth nature of good as He created it. If we think we can judge good from evil aside from God then we would have to be a god but there is only One God. The truth of His nature would have to be unchanging or it would not logically be a truth as in changing the absolute answer of 2+2.

 

[whatever]

Originally posted by Helen:
What would a "bad" choice on God's part consist of?

An evil choice would be anything that goes against God's nature. So answer the question - does God make free choices? As a reminder, you said:

Either men are not free to choose because their nature demands only evil choices or there is no real choice because God has predestined what they will "choose."

To that I replied:

God's nature demands only good choices. Is God therefore not really free to make real choices? Or is your thesis wrong?

Let's narrow it down even further. Most theologians teach that the "impeccability" of Jesus; that is, because of His divine nature He could not have sinned, even though He was also fully man. Do you believe that? If you do, then do you believe that Jesus made any real choices?

If you do not believe that then that is a subject for a different thread.

 

[Calvibaptist]

Originally posted by Helen:
You are ignoring every verse that encourages man to seek, to choose, to not harden his heart. You are picking and choosing what you want to support what you want to believe.

I prefer the God of the Bible to the one Calvinists describe.

We've been through this before, Helen, and you didn't like my answer. I don't expect you to like it this time either, but I will put it in type again for all to read.

The Bible commands all to seek, repent, believe, choose, follow, etc. etc. etc. Paul's illustration of the Law gives us insight that the commandment does absolutely nothing but make us guilty. So, the command to seek does nothing but make people guilty of not seeking. It does not either give them the ability to seek or assume they have the ability to seek.

Man is commanded to love God with all their hearts. This is impossible even for believers until they are glorified. The command provides no ability to fulfill it. All it does is let us know what the rule is that we are breaking.

 

[Benjamin]

Man is commanded to love God with all their hearts. This is impossible even for believers until they are glorified. The command provides no ability to fulfill it. All it does is let us know what the rule is that we are breaking.

To what purpose if we have no ability?

 

[whatever]

Originally posted by Petrel:
You know, I don't think he is. It is impossible for God to sin. Some people seem to think that morality is just what God says is good. In this case God would be free to do whatever he likes since he could just decide that today it will be good to lie to people, for instance. Others say that sin is something against God's character. Then he could do whatever he liked by changing his character. Both of these run into the problem that God is supposed to be unchanging. If God is unchanging and God is completely good, then God is definitely not free in his choices.

With the way some people talk about God the standards of morality we follow don't really apply to him, which makes it difficult to understand how we can say that God is "good" if his goodness is so different from our goodness as to be completely unintelligible. I think only in this case could God be considered to be completely free. I think this is a little different from the first case I presented--whatever God does is good, and he has given us a different arbitrary standard of right and wrong that we have to follow but which is not necessarily based off his character.

The biggest problem I have with this line of thought is the possibility that there is something outside of God that constrains Him to certain behaviors and/or actions. I don't think that's the right way to think about goodness and what God does, and I'm not saying that this is what you are saying, but it's a short step from what you have said. God always does right, in fact I think God always does what is most right at any given point, but I don't think there is anything outside Him that compels Him to do what He does. I think the compulsion comes from within Himself. If nothing outside God constrains Him, but if He constrains Himself, is He not free? I suppose it comes down to what one means by "free".

 

[Me4Him]

Originally posted by Calvibaptist:

The Bible commands all to seek, repent, believe, choose, follow, etc. etc. etc. Paul's illustration of the Law gives us insight that the commandment does absolutely nothing but make us guilty. So, the command to seek does nothing but make people guilty of not seeking. It does not either give them the ability to seek or assume they have the ability to seek.

Man is commanded to love God with all their hearts. This is impossible even for believers until they are glorified. The command provides no ability to fulfill it. All it does is let us know what the rule is that we are breaking.

It does not either give them the ability to seek or assume they have the ability to seek.


Are the "Muslim Terrorist"...."seeking God"...are they saved???

How can you say that man, on his own, won't seek God, and still explain all the "faults Religions" that "Billions" follow??

"Every man going his on way" quite obviously doesn't mean man won't seek God.

All have come short of the glory of God means that all have committed one sin, and that "one sin" places a person at emnity with God, it doesn't require a "multitude of sins", or a "devil in flesh".