*God, the Ultimate Cause of Evil
This article starts off with a false presumption (no wonder its all wrong) that is mans will is not free. God’s foreknowledge isn’t as Luther nor Calvin proposed. God is in the eternal now, He didn’t just act long ago with one sovereign act but is actively involved in time although sees this time now through eternity.
'Commenting on Pharoah’s heart being hardened by God. Luther wrote:
“His [Pharoah’s] evil will would not have been moved or hardened of itself, but as the omnipotent Agent makes it act (as he does the rest of his creation) by means of his own inescapable will.”
This is where Luther goes wrong. God did not make Pharoah’s heart hardened for God’s active will didn’t impose upon Pharoah freedom to choose. God’s permissive will allowed Pharoah to take the path Pharoah chose. God doesn’t impede on the will of man without mans free will to choose.
Furthermore, God did not simply look into the future and see what Pharoah would do. God is the one who actually caused the hardening of his heart.
Again, this means God directly chooses to create people who are born into sin (original sin) yet have absolutely no chance at heaven; and that God directly changes a persons will without their free consent to that change. This is blasphemous to a God who is love. Of all things God is, love IS is the essence of God. God knows what people will do because of He subsists in the enternal now, but people still have the freedom to actively choose good or evil. God is sovereign, but man is free.
And why would God send Moses to tell him to repent and set free the Israelites?
Exodus 9:7 where it says God hardened Pharoahs doesn’t mean He actively made Pharoah in order to predestine him to hell.
Romans 1:18-27 clearly says God only allows people to go to hell who
choose to go there because after the knowledge of God is revealed to them, they actively choose not to follow God.
Romans 1:18-27–
The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness,
19since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.
20For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—**his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. **
21For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.
22Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools
23and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.
24Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.
25They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. 26
Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones.
27In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. (NIV)
On God’s foreknowledge, Luther wrote: “Had there been in Pharoah any power to turn, or freedom of will that might have gone either way. God could not with such certainty have foretold his hardening.”
Again, this is where Luther went wrong and it goes against Romans 1:18-27.
In other words foreknowledge is due to foreordination, not visa versa. Luther continued: “It would certainly be a hard question, I allow-indeed, an insoluble one-if you sought to establish both the foreknowledge of God and the freedom of man together; for what is harder, yea, more impossible, than maintaining that contraries and contradictories do not clash ? The apostle, therefore, is bridling the ungodly who take offense at his plain speaking, telling them they should realize that the Divine will is fulfilled by what to us is necessity, and that it is definitely established that no freedom or “free-will” is left them, but all things depend on the will of God alone”
Two things should be observed from the above quotations. First, to hold contradictories as both true is not the position of the Reformation, but the position of a muddle-headed thinker (or non-thinker).
Second Luther calls the free-willists “ungodly.” So the foreknoweldge and omnipotence of God are diametrically oppossed to our “free-will.” Either God makes mistakes in his foreknowledge, and errors in his action (which is impossible), or else we act, according to his foreknowledge and action. And by the omnipotence of God, I mean, not the power by which he omits to do many things that he could do, but the active power by which he mightily works all in all. It is in this sense the Scripture calls him omnipotent. This omnipotence and foreknowledge of God, I repeat, untterly destroys the doctrine of free-will. The hardening of Pharoah’s heart was not done by the passive permission of God. Nor did God merely forsee it as and observer passively observes the future. God caused it to come to pass by his "active power."This view certainly establishes God as the ultimate cause of evil. But does this view make man a mere puppet on a string ?
Luther answered, “It is true that Judas acted willingly, and not under compulsion, but his willing was the work of God, brought into being by his omnipotence, like everything else.”
No, Gods omnipotence doesn’t impede on mans will so that man does evil, this is objectively against the nature of God.
Man acts willingly. A puppet not only does not have free will; it does not have any will at all. Man has a will, but his will is in the hands of God, and he directs it wherever he likes (Proverbs 21:1). Therefore, God never causes man to act against his own will, for it is the very will that he controls. Judas acted willingly, not by compulsion.
That God gives man supernatural grace to make a good action, yes. That God changes mans will for man to choose evil is again truly false.
(And I’ve yet to meet anyone who does).
