@Bill Sorensen: I agree. God was under no “legal” obligation …

Comment on Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull by Sean Pitman.

@Bill Sorensen:

I agree. God was under no “legal” obligation to save mankind, nor even to offer a way out of our dilemma.

He was under no moral obligation to save us either. And, this is only possible if God is not at all responsible for our actions. If He were found to be responsible in any way for our actions, morally or legally, He would then be bound to “fix” them or in some other way make restoration.

This wasn’t the case. God was not legally or morally obliged to save us. He only did it because He wanted to save us of His own free will – independent of any legal or moral obligation to us. He just loved and still loves us with a crazy sort of love.

None the less, love has its own reasons and obligations that goes beyond what is “legal”.

The very definition of love means that it is not obligated to do what it does. Love is often irrational from any other perspective. The same can be said for what God did to save us – completely irrational and way way over the top outside of the perspective of crazy love.

So, we may say to a mis-guided apartment owner who is about to evict a poor widow lady who is late on her rent.

“You can’t do that.”

Meaning, it would be immoral and less than ethical to do such a thing, especially if she could pay her rent in a few days. But the fact is, legally he can do that and still be within the law if it is in her lease.

You forget that this situation is not the situation that God was in. God was under no obligation of any kind to save us – not even a moral obligation.

The situation is more like the parable that Jesus told where the people who had rented God’s land tried to steal God’s property. They abused the land and the people on it. They abused the rent collectors and messengers sent by God. Then, they even killed God’s only Son in an effort to steal the land from God. – Matthew 21:37

Where is the moral obligation on the part of God here? God is not faced with evicting some poor innocent widow who is a bit behind on her rent. God is faced with sacrificing Himself for rebels who are out to steal and murder for what is rightfully His.

What is amazing here is that, “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”. – Romans 5:8.

So, my final point is this, don’t try to over simplify a paradoxical problem with a limited application of some aspect of truth and then deny the paradox.

The only possible paradox here is God’s love for us scoundrels. That’s it. The rest of it is straightforward and logical – perfectly rational.

By the way, the OT generally attributes everything to God both positive and negative. And this is not a false perception. But it must also be understood in light of God ordaining freedom in human choices and accountability.

It is a false perception. To understand God in the best light possible, you must take the Bible as a whole – especially to include the New Testament view of God once God was more directly revealed to us in the life of Jesus.

For example, consider the following account written in the Bible:

But the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart and he would not listen to Moses and Aaron, just as the LORD had said to Moses. – Exodus 9:12

Then, in apparent contradiction, here’s a different perspective of the same event:

Why do you harden your hearts as the Egyptians and Pharaoh did? When he treated them harshly, did they not send the Israelites out so they could go on their way? – 1 Samuel 6:6

This passage suggest that Pharaoh hardened his own heart while the first passage suggests that it was God who was actually responsible. Which one is correct?

Here’s another similar example:

Again the anger of the LORD burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, “Go and take a census of Israel and Judah.” – 2 Samuel 24:1

It seems like God is the one who incited David to number his people. However, compare this with a different perspective of the very same event:

Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel. – 1 Chronicles 21:1

So, who did the inciting? – Satan or God?

Consider a few possibilities here. One possible solution is suggested by Bullinger, a Hebrew scholar, in his fourth list of idiomatic verbs dealing with active verbs that “were used by the Hebrews to express, not the doing of the thing, but the permission of the thing which the agent is said to do” (p. 823, emp. in orig.).

To illustrate, in commenting on Exodus 4:21, Bullinger stated: “ ‘I will harden his heart (i.e., I will permit or suffer his heart to be hardened), that he shall not let the people go.’ So in all the passages which speak of the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. As is clear from the common use of the same Idiom in the following passages” (1968, p. 823). He then listed Jeremiah 4:10, “ ‘Lord God, surely thou hast greatly deceived this people’: i.e., thou hast suffered this People to be greatly deceived, by the false prophets….’ ” Ezekiel 14:9 is also given as an example of this type of usage: “ ‘If the prophet be deceived when he hath spoken a thing, I the Lord have deceived that prophet’: i.e., I have permitted him to deceive himself.”

James MacKnight, in a lengthy section on biblical idioms, agrees with Bullinger’s assessment that in Hebrew active verbs can express permission and not direct action. This explanation unquestionably clarifies the question of God hardening Pharaoh’s heart. When the text says that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, it means that God would permit or allow Pharaoh’s heart to be hardened.

Of course, in the case of Pharaoh, it could reasonably be argued that “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart” in the sense that God provided the circumstances and the occasion for Pharaoh to be forced to make a decision. God sent Moses to place His demands before Pharaoh. Moses merely announced God’s instructions. God even accompanied His Word with miracles—to confirm the divine origin of the message (cf. Mark 16:20). Pharaoh made up his own mind to resist God’s demands. Of his own accord, he stubbornly refused to comply. Of course, God provided the occasion for Pharaoh to demonstrate his unyielding attitude. If God had not sent Moses, Pharaoh would not have been faced with the dilemma of whether to release the Israelites. So God was certainly the instigator and initiator. But He was not the author of Pharaoh’s defiance.

www.apologeticspress.org

Yet, you go on to write:

Thus, we are only as free, as God chooses for us to be. He is sovereign in the ultimate sense, and we are as sovereign as God ordains and controls the boundries.

The boundaries are indeed God’s responsibility. However, those actions that we are given liberty to freely choose are in fact our own responsibility. God has removed all responsibility for these actions from Himself to us. We are actually truly free to make certain kinds of decisions – choices and decisions that are completely our own to make. We cannot therefore blame God, in any sense, when we deliberately choose to go against Him and His express will for us.

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com

Sean Pitman Also Commented

Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
Consider the following comments from the E.G.. White Estate regarding the origin of disease, suffering and death:

Suffering, other than sickness due to neglect of physical laws, is also caused by Satan and not the deliberate intervention of God. On many occasions she reinforced the teaching of Jesus on this point…

Her teachings regarding the cause of death, as well as suffering, flowed from the big picture of the great controversy between God and Satan:

“It is true that all suffering results from the transgression of God’s law, but this truth had become perverted. Satan, the author of sin and all its results, had led men to look upon disease and death as proceeding from God—as punishment arbitrarily inflicted on account of sin… Sickness, suffering, and death are [the] work of an antagonistic power. Satan is the destroyer; God is the restorer.”

Ellen White, The Desire of Ages, p. 471. and The Ministry of Healing, p. 113

http://www.whiteestate.org/books/mol/Chapt7.html

So, again, neither the Bible nor Mrs. White see diseases, like childhood leukemia, as being the result of a deliberate act or intervention of God…

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
@Ron:

Where talking about the ability to detect the need to invoke intelligent design to explain various phenomena that exist in nature – regardless of if the intelligent agent is God or your wife or some alien from Zorg.

The loaves of bread that Jesus made by Divine power were the obvious result of intelligent design. They looked like regular loaves of bread that your wife might make. No one could tell the difference by looking at them if they were placed side-by-side. Yet, one loaf would have been made by God and the other by your wife. The fact is that God can make what humans can make. What would be obvious, however, is that both loaves of bread required intelligence to produce. In other words, they weren’t the product of mindless process of nature or natural laws that had no access to deliberate intelligence.

In short, just because your wife’s intelligence is “natural” doesn’t mean that all natural processes have access to intelligence or that every natural phenomena requires intelligence to explain beyond the basic non-intelligent laws of nature.

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
@Ron:

So, you think that if God is directly responsible for the death of anyone that He is therefore the direct cause of all sickness, disease, death, and destruction? Every natural disaster is God’s doing? – a miracle of Divine design and creative power?

Do you not see the difference between the miracle of something like Lazarus being raised from the dead and a tornado wiping out an entire town the other day in the Midwest?

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


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