B
Bob_Crowley
Guest
God does have a plan. For a plan to work, it has to be pre-planned, in the sense He cannot just react to our choices as they occur. If all that mattered was our free will, there would be no plan, since He would have no control over the outcome.
Even Judas appears to have been lost as part of Scriptural necessity.
John 17:12 NIV "While I was with them, I protected them and kept them safe by that name you gave me. None has been lost except the one doomed to destruction so that Scripture would be fulfilled."
Yet we still have some freedom of will. Nobody forced you to argue on this web site. That was your decision, even if God foresaw it happening before time began.
I’ll give you another example from personal experience. I had a wise old pastor in my Protestant days who died himself in January 1992. But I found out from experience that he was prophetic. If he said he thought something was going to happen, it invariably did, although it took years sometimes for a specific event to occur.
For example he thought his own eldest son would have a stroke, and that my sister wouldn’t live very long, and I’m pretty sure he mentioned leukemia. His eldest son had a stroke circa 1996 or 1997, and my sister died at age 45 from leukemia in 2005, which is not very old these days in the West (anniversary of her death was yesterday incidentally, 4th July).
But the one that got me was “I think you’ll be doing some cleaning work. You won’t like it much, and you won’t be doing it for long, but I think the Lord will just want you to hear about a ghost.”
Now I thought that was silly at the time, and pretty much ignored it, even though I knew how accurate he was. But in 2006, about 14 years after he died, I did some cleaning work for about four months (not long), didn’t like it much, and heard about a ghost (former manager of an old store I was cleaning who committed suicide sometime back in the 1960’s).
I’m not going too much into the background of the “ghost” etc, but things used to happen. The young bloke who was cleaning the store said that one night **all the stock **on one complete row of shelves just jumped up and landed on the floor. At other times he could push a very heavy buffer with one finger, as something was pushing it with him.
So the old pastor could sit there and predict what happened, and the only reason I think was that God was telling him.
Now I still had free will, and when I took on the cleaning job I hadn’t given a thought to his prediction. I’d forgotten about it. It was only after the young bloke pointed out the bit about the “ghost” that the penny dropped.
And it had a direct link to this forum as well. I’d already phoned a local priest about getting a mass said for the suicidal “ghost” circa 2008. This was in Ipswich, Australia, which you’ve probably never heard of. But I had my doubts as to whether he did. I was just a strange voice on the phone with a strange story.
So I was wondering what to do about it. In 2010, I happened to notice an Australian priest on the forum, who was the only one I think I’d seen at that time on the forum. I looked up his bio, and guess where he was located? He was the auxiliary priest*** at the very same church ***where I’d asked the main priest to have a mass said. So through the email facilities of the forum, I sent him an email, and after a brief exchange he said he really would have a mass said.
I sometimes wonder where that peculiar incident will lead. If “… the Lord just wanted me to hear about a ghost…”, then there’d be a reason for it. It wouldn’t just be to satisfy my curiosity as to whether ghosts exist or not (which is not something I cared about anyway). But I’d better leave that to Him, and let Him work out the reason why He bothered.
Now … I had free will about the cleaning job, the priest had free will about being on this forum, the “ghost” had free will about committing suicide, but somehow God brought it together. The creators of the Forum had free will about creating it, and putting in an email facility so members could communicate with each other.
And the old pastor was able to predict it. But he could only predict it if he was being told about an event that wasn’t destined to happen for another 15 or 16 years.
God sees the future all right, and somehow works around our free will.
But we’ve still got a determinative choice - are we going to believe and obey Him, or ignore and resist Him?
:
Pretty obvious I am sorry. That would be giving the burden of one’s sins to others, ultimately (by burden I mean consequences, since someone who is not created cannot carry any weight), and this is not true in Christianism, excepted for Jesus, as God Himself, who took the punishment for us.