Having It Both Ways

The conversation with Godlessons goes on.

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that our decisions matter since they really aren’t our decisions. God intended for us to make them, so they are God’s decisions.

It depends on what you mean by “matter”. You seem to define decisions that matter as “decisions that can change the future.” I define decisions that matter as “decisions that bring about the future God has planned.” God intended for us to make them, so yes, they are God’s decisions. And based on God’s decisions, we decide. We look at the alternatives, weigh them, choose as seems best or most desirable to us, and our decisions bring God’s plan to fruition.

The idea that we are responsible for our decisions when we have no free will to do otherwise is ludicrous. You don’t punish a machine for functioning exactly as it was designed to function. That would make no sense.

Machines don’t have motives or desires. Machines don’t have wills. Machines don’t consider alternatives.

Let’s cut to the chase: You are willing to see God as a God without omniscience or omnipotence in order to preserve autonomous human choice—in order to have our choices determine the future. You are willing to make God smaller so that we can be bigger.

In your conception of God, human beings rule the future rather than God. Or you might say that human beings rule God rather than him ruling us.

I’m not willing to go there, because that’s not the way God reveals himself in scripture.

The Actual Contradiction of Autonomous Free Will

Continuing this conversation.

In this scenario, you are saying that nothing happens unless God intends it to happen.

Yes. That’s what the Bible teaches. God “works all things after the counsel of his will.” The worst crime in human history, the murder of God’s own Son occurred when people did “whatever [God’s] hand and [God’s] plan had predestined to take place.” God has his own good purposes in everything, purposes we won’t fully understand unless he reveals them.

Loss of free will is inherent.

Free will is a tricky term. Whether we have free will or not depends on how it is defined. But no, we don’t make autonomous choices.

If we have no free will, it matters little what decisions we make because God intended us to do them when he created the universe, and we can’t go against God’s plan.

It matters what choices we make because God works his plan through our choices. Our choices are means by which he brings about his plan. And we are responsible for our choices because they come from our own desires and motives.

Your scenario also suggests there is no omnipotence.

Omnipotence is defined as the ability to do everything he desires or plans to do. If God is “working all things according to the counsel of his will,” then he is omnipotent.

If he can see the future, he still can’t make any choices.

The future that he sees is the future that he chose to bring to pass. Everything that will happen represents a choice he made in eternity.

But if by “he still can’t make any choices” you mean that he can’t change his mind, then I agree. God is immutable and his plan for history is immutable.

No matter which way you look at it, free will is abrogated, if not in God, in us.

God is the one whose will is autonomous. He’s the creator, we’re the creatures. We can’t take our next breath unless he sustains it.

If God has autonomous free will, then we can’t. That would make for a contradiction.

God's Love

Old post from old blog. But you knew that already.

In the post on God’s goodness, I mentioned that God’s love and God’s goodness are closely related. God is both loving and good because he is by nature a giver. While the term love is sometimes used in scripture in relation to God’s general providence (the work of God in sustaining his creation), it is most often used in relation to redemption (the rescuing or saving work of God). In fact, throughout the New Testament, the redemptive work of Christ on the cross is revealed to be the way it is that God loves:

….God is love….. In this is love:…. that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. (1 John 4:8-10)

And again:

For this is the way God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son….(John 3:16 NET)

Redemption is the supreme example of God’s love. God is love, so he saves even at great cost; costly redemption is the way he loves.

Examining the cost of redemption proves to us the infinite depth of God’s love. He saves sacrificially, giving up his own Son, and his sacrificial giving is done, not for those who are in some way giving back to him, or even neutral toward him, but for those who are rejecting him. The kind of love God has is the kind of love that gives sacrificially to those who hate him.

But God demonstrates his own love for us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us….while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son (Romans 5:8,10 NET).

God’s love is a love that rescues the unlovely and unworthy by giving up something precious in order to do it. That’s mind-boggling love. God’s love is immeasurable in the same way that all the other aspects of his character are, for scripture tells us that his “love is great to the heavens.”

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