Ookey! I will try answer as I understand this issue!
See God created men plainly out of his will to share love. God is love (do not mix in opposit es "is" is not comutative). Similary for yourself if you feel love you want that everybody else would feel the same and feel god. It is naturally (I guess) for men to wish that everybody around you feels good and love.
So God created men out of love for love and because of love. It is in nature of God to arrange everything around love. BUT there is this catch with love. Love is tightly binded with freedom. There can not be love without freedom to NOT love. If your only choice or way of act possibly is only to love, then it is not love. You can think about this and you will get to similar conclusion, that love without freedom to NOT love is not love. The nature of love itself implies that it is possible to not love. To deny it.
And God knows this for sure. But it is risky to assume that God knowing what he is doing would not predict possible outcome of his own action. So the Tree in the garden was actually there for TEACHING basics about love and freedom to men. God KNEW that man can not obey because God have given freedom to act to man because of God's love to his own creation.
SOOOOOO man was acting pretty well UNTIL something outside God and Man directed mans actions... the snake. Go and read this tactics the snake used... tactics is VERY clever (btw will notice WT tactis)... to ask question a little bit changed. Then give the answer but not telling ALL the truth... only part of it. And starting from weakest point of chain - woman in this case. And wholala... man uses his freedom to NOT obey God's commandment. The rest you know.
So answer is - God KNEW what COULD happen as it was HIS creation, and even there he did this creation and universe in such way that even THEN his plan can be fullfilled only now in "hard way". God would not started creation if he would not be able succesfully to lead it to the end of his plan or to the next stage of his plan. It is human nature to think only plan A... but God will allways have plan B and C and even the plans are part of the same plan A.
For those of you who are programmers it can be very eazy to understand (I am programmer)... when you create your programs you never code in stright line... you have IF THEN, LOOP, WHILE, RETURN etc. And still your program does perfectly what it suppose to do... Mars Rover gets from Earth to Mars, lands, keeps walking and getting info even that the soft is full with IFs.
Also - those of you who played RolePlayingGames (on table)... Game Master allways have plan... and because of rules of the game he allways can lead the players to some specific goal even that players are still free to do whatever they like in bondaries of the rules.
Sorry for so long stuff...
Short conlculsion. God is God of Love and God of Just... And because of Love he created man free... even free to not to be free... Decieved by snake Men binded themself to this state - not to be free - and Jesus have broken this slavery giving the freedom again through Holy Spirit who heals us and restores the previous state of freedom and love. We just need to hold to this with our faith... faith is this "spiritual hand" which takes gifts of God. And the hand itself is gift :)
Was Adam's "fall" part of God's plan?
by dorayakii 21 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Shazard
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dorayakii
I was also going to mention the Calvinist view of predestination Blondie. The insight book say this:
*it-1 pp. 852-853 Foreknowledge, Foreordination* Foreknowledge means knowledge of a thing before it happens or exists; also called prescience. In the Bible it relates primarily, though not exclusively, to Jehovah God the Creator and his purposes. Foreordination means the ordaining, decreeing, or determining of something beforehand; or the quality or state of being foreordained.[...]
*“Foreknowledge” translates the Greek pro'gno'sis (from pro, before, and gno'sis, knowledge). [...]
*“Foreordain” translates the Greek pro'o'ri'zo (from pro, before, and ho'ri'zo, mark out or set the bounds). (The English word “horizon” transliterates the Greek word ho'ri'zon, meaning the “bounding” or “limiting.”)
[...]
Factors to Recognize. To understand the matter of foreknowledge and foreordination as relating to God, certain factors necessarily must be recognized.
First, God’s ability to foreknow and foreordain is clearly stated in the Bible. Jehovah himself sets forth as proof of his Godship this ability to foreknow and foreordain events of salvation and deliverance, as well as acts of judgment and punishment, and then to bring such events to fulfillment. His chosen people are witnesses of these facts. (Isa 44:6-9; 48:3-8) Such divine foreknowledge and foreordination form the basis for all true prophecy. (Isa 42:9; Jer 50:45; Am 3:7, 8) God challenges the nations opposing his people to furnish proof of the godship they claim for their mighty ones and their idol-gods, calling on them to do so by foretelling similar acts of salvation or judgment and then bringing them to pass. Their impotence in this respect demonstrates their idols to be ‘mere wind and unreality.’—Isa 41:1-10, 21-29; 43:9-15; 45:20, 21.
A second factor to be considered is the free moral agency of God’s intelligent creatures. The Scriptures show that God extends to such creatures the privilege and responsibility of free choice, of exercising free moral agency (De 30:19, 20; Jos 24:15), thereby making them accountable for their acts. (Ge 2:16, 17; 3:11-19; Ro 14:10-12; Heb 4:13) They are thus not mere automatons, or robots. Man could not truly have been created in “God’s image” if he were not a free moral agent. (Ge 1:26, 27; see FREEDOM.) Logically, there should be no conflict between God’s foreknowledge (as well as his foreordaining) and the free moral agency of his intelligent creatures.
A third factor that must be considered, one sometimes overlooked, is that of God’s moral standards and qualities, including his justice, honesty, impartiality, love, mercy, and kindness. Any understanding of God’s use of the powers of foreknowledge and foreordination must therefore harmonize with not only some of these factors but with all of them. Clearly, whatever God foreknows must inevitably come to pass, so that God is able to call “things that are not as though they were.”—Ro 4:17.
Predestinarian view. The view that God’s exercise of his foreknowledge is infinite and that he does foreordain the course and destiny of all individuals is known as predestinarianism. Its advocates reason that God’s divinity and perfection require that he be omniscient (all-knowing), not only respecting the past and present but also regarding the future. According to this concept, for him not to foreknow all matters in their minutest detail would evidence imperfection.
[...]
This concept would mean that, prior to creating angels or earthling man, God exercised his powers of foreknowledge and foresaw and foreknew all that would result from such creation, including the rebellion of one of his spirit sons, the subsequent rebellion of the first human pair in Eden (Ge 3:1-6; Joh 8:44), and all the bad consequences of such rebellion down to and beyond this present day. This would necessarily mean that all the wickedness that history has recorded (the crime and immorality, oppression and resultant suffering, lying and hypocrisy, false worship and idolatry) once existed, before creation’s beginning, only in the mind of God, in the form of his foreknowledge of the future in all of its minutest details.
If the Creator of mankind had indeed exercised his power to foreknow all that history has seen since man’s creation, then the full weight of all the wickedness thereafter resulting was deliberately set in motion by God when he spoke the words: “Let us make man.” (Ge 1:26)
[...]
Infinite exercise of foreknowledge? The argument that God’s not foreknowing all future events and circumstances in full detail would evidence imperfection on his part is, in reality, an arbitrary view of perfection. Perfection, correctly defined, does not demand such an absolute, all-embracing extension, inasmuch as the perfection of anything actually depends upon its measuring up completely to the standards of excellence set by one qualified to judge its merits. (See PERFECTION.) Ultimately, God’s own will and good pleasure, not human opinions or concepts, are the deciding factors as to whether anything is perfect.—De 32:4; 2Sa 22:31; Isa 46:10.
To illustrate this, God’s almightiness is undeniably perfect and is infinite in capacity. (1Ch 29:11, 12; Job 36:22; 37:23) Yet his perfection in strength does not require him to use his power to the full extent of his omnipotence in any or in all cases. Clearly he has not done so; if he had, not merely certain ancient cities and some nations would have been destroyed, but the earth and all in it would have been obliterated long ago by God’s executions of judgment, accompanied by mighty expressions of disapproval and wrath, as at the Flood and on other occasions. (Ge 6:5-8; 19:23-25, 29; compare Ex 9:13-16; Jer 30:23, 24.) God’s exercise of his might is therefore not simply an unleashing of limitless power but is constantly governed by his purpose and, where merited, tempered by his mercy.—Ne 9:31; Ps 78:38, 39; Jer 30:11; La 3:22; Eze 20:17.
Similarly, if, in certain respects, God chooses to exercise his infinite ability of foreknowledge in a selective way and to the degree that pleases him, then assuredly no human or angel can rightly say: “What are you doing?” (Job 9:12; Isa 45:9; Da 4:35) It is therefore not a question of ability, what God can foresee, foreknow, and foreordain, for “with God all things are possible.” (Mt 19:26) The question is what God sees fit to foresee, foreknow, and foreordain, for “everything that he delighted to do he has done.”—Ps 115:3.
Selective exercise of foreknowledge. The alternative to predestinarianism, the selective or discretionary exercise of God’s powers of foreknowledge, would have to harmonize with God’s own righteous standards and be consistent with what he reveals of himself in his Word. In contrast with the theory of predestinarianism, a number of texts point to an examination by God of a situation then current and a decision made on the basis of such examination.
Thus, at Genesis 11:5-8 God is described as directing his attention earthward, surveying the situation at Babel, and, at that time, determining the action to be taken to break up the unrighteous project there. After wickedness developed at Sodom and Gomorrah, Jehovah advised Abraham of his decision to investigate (by means of his angels) to “see whether they act altogether according to the outcry over it that has come to me, and, if not, I can get to know it.” (Ge 18:20-22; 19:1) God spoke of ‘becoming acquainted with Abraham,’ and after Abraham went to the point of attempting to sacrifice Isaac, Jehovah said, “For now I do know that you are God-fearing in that you have not withheld your son, your only one, from me.”—Ge 18:19; 22:11, 12; compare Ne 9:7, 8; Ga 4:9.
Selective foreknowledge means that God could choose not to foreknow indiscriminately all the future acts of his creatures. This would mean that, rather than all history from creation onward being a mere rerun of what had already been foreseen and foreordained, God could with all sincerity set before the first human pair the prospect of everlasting life in an earth free from wickedness. His instructions to his first human son and daughter to act as his perfect and sinless agents in filling the earth with their offspring and making it a paradise, as well as exercising control over the animal creation, could thus be expressed as the grant of a truly loving privilege and as his genuine desire toward them—not merely as the giving of a commission that, on their part, was foredoomed to failure. God’s arranging for a test by means of “the tree of the knowledge of good and bad” and his creation of “the tree of life” in the garden of Eden also would not be meaningless or cynical acts, made so by his foreknowing that the human pair would sin and never be able to eat of “the tree of life.”—Ge 1:28; 2:7-9, 15-17; 3:22-24.
Both the Calvinists and the WT prefers to say that God can do everything and know everything. However, the WT say that he chooses not to use his omniscience and omnipotence in this way. However, this still conflicts with his omnibenevolence, as tetrapod said:
oh, well tetrapod, jehovah chose not to see into the future with adam and eve because they had free will."
and of course, you can always just turn around with dumb answers like that and ask:
- well, how is that very omnibenevolent of him? i thought he was looking out for us?
- if we have free will, then how is it that he is omnipotent? if he was, we would not have free will.
Yes tetrapod, free-will also is incompatible with omniscience which is inturn inompatible with his omnibeneolence, which is also incompatible with his omnipotence. It seems that one can only have two of these qualities at the same time.
Other theologians, philosophers and physicists have differing views on this.
Interestingly, the Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas said that "It is better to say that such things cannot be done, than that God cannot do them". Hence he redefines omnipotence as the power to do all that can be done and omniscience the power to know all that can be known. Like this, he can place the future into the category "that which cannot be known", even by God.
Greek philosopher Epicurus stated that if every event has a cause, and that cause is another event, then free-will cannot really exist. However the physicist Sir Arthur Eddington did not concur and instead said that "the revolution of theory which has expelled determinism from present-day physics has therefore the important consequence that it is no longer necessary to suppose that human actions are completely predetermined."
Pierre Simon de Laplace a famous french physicist formulated a thought experiment commonly called "Laplace's demon" in which a demon has omniscient knowledge and sufficient computational power to predict the entire future of the universe, down to the last movement of an atom or a sub-atomic particle.
So the questions arise, can an event really unfold in more than one way?...... Are our thoughts really random, or are they merely a result of a chain of determined events?......If we were able to wind back the clock, say, one hour, would everything still take place exactly the way it did before?......
Is there really such a thing as randomness? If one were able to turn the clock back, would the randomness of the decay of a nucleus really be enough to introduce a degree of difference in the macrocosmic outcome of an event?
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blondie
So are you saying that the Calvinst's view of predestination is the same as the WTS? I don't think so.
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dorayakii
Oh no far from it, the WT add the condition that he CHOOSES not to know whichever future its convenient not to know, whereas the Calvinist idea is simply that he knows the future and that all our lives are spread out before him like an unwound movie reel. Some of us are destined to go to Heaven and some to Hell no questions asked.
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flyphisher
Precisely considered, foreknowledge and foreordination is the same.
God is not omnipotent. Omnipotence would let emerge paradoxes. For instance, God cannot change laws of mathematics or logics. He cannot create a stone so heavy that he cannot lift it.
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Rook
Yes, It was a test of their Obedience. He foreknew the fearful consequences; and He also foreknew the Ultimate Outcome. We suffer and suffer, and wonder and wonder, why God has made such a world. But one day, after all has come to Final Fruition, our Suffering will be Over, and our Wonderment will Cease, and, with the Redeemed of all ages, we will join in never-ending Hallelujahs of Praise to God for Creating us as He did, and for leading us on to Life, Joy and Glory, in the Endless Ages of Eternity ( Revelation 19:1-8)
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Franz
Obviously, god and his sons are aliens, earth is
a mere farming planet to them. They seem to have left.
Unfortunately, they took their magic trees with them.
However, fortunately, we will soon have the full
genetic makeup of man known to us, and we will be able
to find out what genes God meddled with to keep
us shortlived, and we will be able to find out what
engineered materials the magic trees of the gods gave
us to allow eternal life and vastly enhanced mental
abilities.
Obviously, we are still in the crippled mode, slave mode
of god and his sons, they did not want rivals, they
did not want long lived geniuses, they wanted stoop labor
sex slaves and little more.
Possibly then, to explain their failure, and thus
their absence, they themselves were not more than
formen, themselves limited by even more advanced aliens.
The failure of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam was the failure
to remeber these things or realize what these verses really obviously
men.
These religions, played games, my god is bigger than your god,
ever inflating what they believed was god, until god has
become a big phantom, impossible, we have paradoxes of the
problem of evil, the problem of ominscience vs free will, ect.
But the world is natural, physics rules, not phantoms,
and science was what god used to rule this planet, and us,
biochemistry to be exact.
There will come a time, where we will again, live forever,
either recreating the tree of life and its genetically engineered
fruit, or by creating yeast cells that give us the stuff of
life immortal, or more directly incorporating purpose built
artifical genes that will makes us gods again.
We will all be geniuses, we will all be able to learn
any subject with ease, like the savants that seem
to be on a first name basis with numbers, the effortless
artist, the musician who creates as easily as he or she breathes,
the talented engineer.
Here is the real religion of the Bible, only the Toh'marekah can rightfully claim to understand the Bible,
only the Toh'marekah can understand, immorality and the universe
are ours, the gods are not our friends, and that we have been
enslaved, crippled and abused long enough. -
Mary
and where was adam when eve was off playing with the devil's "snake"?
Probably playing with his own 'snake' ......like men have always done when there's a problem.
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bikerchic
Probably playing with his own 'snake' ......like men have always done when there's a problem.
Oh my! Gumsnakers!!!!!!!!
