What do we learn from God's repeated failures?

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When a parent brings up kids to be good kids and their 20 yr old breaks the law and winds up in jail, who is responsible? The 20 yr old is responsible for his choices. This is why he goes to jail and his parent doesn’t.

You can be sure that parent continues to love their adult child, has great grief over the bad choices they made. So it is with God.

What conclusion do I come to about God? I look at the cross, that Jesus took on flesh and died, he took my place that I might have heaven. He came to take my place and my jail time. My execution.
There is no fail there. There is an incredible love that I can’t comprehend.
 
I wish I could like your post more than once, @PennyinCanada! 💕
 
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Sqrl said:
What is it we are to learn from this ?
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IF… and I mean the biggest IF ever known to man.

IF all that God has done in history to show us who He is, yet we are unwilling to accept Him for who He is, is considered a failure, then what we learn from history is…

You WANT TO know who He is.
You want to follow Him
You want to listen to Him
You want to respect Him
You especially want to LOVE HIM

To unwilling accept God for who He is, to love Him for who He is can leave you in a very dark place… it can lead you to war, famine, being left in a flood, in a city burned by fire and brimstone, filled with frogs and locust, left as a pillar of salt on the side of road, wondering in circle for decades, thrown out of the most AMAZING PLACE on earth, being tossed into the pits of hell upon your death.

History teaches us, if we are unwilling to accept God for Who He is, to love Him for who He is, can leave us feeling alone, unloved, unwanted, sad beyond imaginable.

That’s what we can learn from history if we are unwilling able to accept God for Who He is, unwilling to accept His love.

look at what can happen when you are willing to accept Him, love Him, follow Him…even if you are just willing to listen to Him, your world can change in unimaginable good, blessed ways.

Is that what you mean, by what we can learn from history when we are unwilling to accept God?
 
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So because human beings decide to turn from God and sin, this means God failed? This is not even close to any possible Christian interpretation of the Bible.

No clue why Jesus was mentioned as failing too? Since all the Pharisees didn’t believe Jesus he failed? He opened the gates of heaven and leads all to salvation. That’s failing because some chose to not accept it?

That’s like saying if I offer my neighbor a birthday gift and they rejected it then I failed at being a nice neighbor.

Strangest question I’ve seen in a long time.
 
Nothing is about winning or losing. It is about loving people so much that God willingly allows people to fall away from Him if they want. How can you truly love someone if you hold them captive? If you truly love someone you have to let them chose to love you back.

Free will is the ultimate expression of God’s love to us.
 
There is no mind blowing theological secret you just uncovered for us all to ponder. Your logic is that since everyone isn’t saved yet and the end of times hasn’t come and evil hasn’t been destroyed yet, then by definition God failed.

You are thinking of time in a linear way as humans do. God is beyond time. To God, the crucifixion was a second ago. To try to place God in the human conception of time will only make your “theological discoveries” more and more insane.
 
God knew, and went forward anyway.
That would make a sinner cry when looking at that kind of love.
 
Sqrl said:
Consider the falls of Satan, Eve/Adam, Noah’s contemporaries, Moses, David, so many others in biblical record, and most significantly, the Christ. While these (save the last) may have been creatures, they represent an acknowledged history of God failing.
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  1. the Last (the Christ) was also a creature (the Son is from eternity, the Christ is a human creature whose Person is both divine and human)
  2. None were failures of God, nor failures at all, but all necessarily happened in order that men might participate in divinity (eternal friendship with God found in reciprocal love, which is Justice to God).
    Eternal union with God was the Telos in the Beginning, requiring contingent creatures, both angels and men, who would contingently know all the knowings of God, but linearly, temporally, so that in time there would be the saving knowing together with the Father that Jesus knew on earth, and that we know, and his salvation then comes to be temporally even though he never changes.
I would suggest that along with the Bible, you read Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas (not necessarily in that order), if you wish to know what is really real in a fully reasonable way, if you wish to do philosophy. Be the Teachers Student and do not think to be the teacher of the Teacher. The combination of these three will open up to faithful students how the unchanging God can create a contingent and temporal creation, be in control in the midst of contingency and fully achieve his intent without misstep (without defect or failure of any kind).
 
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Sqrl said:
The basis of my question is that God’s failing to achieve His apparent (or stated) intent has a purpose. He does that to teach us something. What are we to learn? The replies seen this far (albeit so soon) are challenging my perception of God’s having failed. If that word is too strong, try another. What does it mean for us that scripture shows God’s will repeatedly frustrated? It’s most evident that God has not accomplished what He wants – unless we misunderstand what He really wants. What is it we are to learn from this ?
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I think I understand what you are asking. I also understand & agree with all the responses you’ve received.

That said… what we learn is how just & merciful God is. Faithful to the end, but true to Himself from all eternity.

Still I challenge your idea that God has failed. I mean He wants us to freely choose Him above all things. You & I wouldn’t understand that if we didn’t see what we see, and call failure.
I glorified you on earth by accomplishing the work that you gave me to do
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“I revealed your name to those whom you gave me out of the world. They belonged to you, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word.7Now they know that everything you gave me is from you,8because the words you gave to me I have given to them, and they accepted them and truly understood that I came from you, and they have believed that you sent me.
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Doesn’t sound as though He was defeated.
 
The “falls” of Christ? You are WAY off track. Christ never fell (unless you’re discussing his physically collapsing 3 times while carrying the cross, which doesn’t seem to be what you mean).

Can’t even begin to have a discussion with somebody who thinks Christ is a failure and who attributes human “fails” somehow to God and calls them “God’s repeated failures”. Just shaking my head at this. . . .
 
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Sqrl said:
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There was no failure by the Holy Trinity.

Catechism of the Catholic Church
302 Creation has its own goodness and proper perfection, but it did not spring forth complete from the hands of the Creator. The universe was created “in a state of journeying” ( in statu viae ) toward an ultimate perfection yet to be attained, to which God has destined it. We call “divine providence” the dispositions by which God guides his creation toward this perfection:
By his providence God protects and governs all things which he has made, “reaching mightily from one end of the earth to the other, and ordering all things well”. For “all are open and laid bare to his eyes”, even those things which are yet to come into existence through the free action of creatures.161
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310 But why did God not create a world so perfect that no evil could exist in it? With infinite power God could always create something better.174 But with infinite wisdom and goodness God freely willed to create a world “in a state of journeying” towards its ultimate perfection. In God’s plan this process of becoming involves the appearance of certain beings and the disappearance of others, the existence of the more perfect alongside the less perfect, both constructive and destructive forces of nature. With physical good there exists also physical evil as long as creation has not reached perfection.175
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311 Angels and men, as intelligent and free creatures, have to journey toward their ultimate destinies by their free choice and preferential love. They can therefore go astray. Indeed, they have sinned. Thus has moral evil, incommensurably more harmful than physical evil, entered the world. God is in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil.176 He permits it, however, because he respects the freedom of his creatures and, mysteriously, knows how to derive good from it:
For almighty God. . ., because he is supremely good, would never allow any evil whatsoever to exist in his works if he were not so all-powerful and good as to cause good to emerge from evil itself.177
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I love this, though I have shortened it here. It’s from Job 38

Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm. He said:

2 “Who is this that obscures my plans
with words without knowledge?
3 Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.

4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
6 On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone—
7 while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels[a] shouted for joy?

8 “Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb,
9 when I made the clouds its garment
and wrapped it in thick darkness,
10 when I fixed limits for it
and set its doors and bars in place,
11 when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt’?

12 “Have you ever given orders to the morning,
or shown the dawn its place,
…
“Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.

8 “Would you discredit my justice?
Would you condemn me to justify yourself?
9 Do you have an arm like God’s,
and can your voice thunder like his?
10 Then adorn yourself with glory and splendor,
and clothe yourself in honor and majesty.
11 Unleash the fury of your wrath,
look at all who are proud and bring them low,
12 look at all who are proud and humble them,
crush the wicked where they stand.
13 Bury them all in the dust together;
shroud their faces in the grave.
14 Then I myself will admit to you
that your own right hand can save you.

-To me, that is what we need to think about when we question God.

If a star implodes and becomes a deadly neutron star, is that a failure, or is it part of a “song” our ears cannot hear. When a ruined farmer living on the streets of Calcutta dies of exhaustion, does his soul curse God or does it sing its tune like those tiny pipes in a great Cathedral organ, with a harmony of breathtaking beauty?

We need to be wary of our own thoughts.
 
God does not fail, it is the creatures who fail. Your optic is shortsighted, seeing only this world. True justice will be shown by God in the judgment, after earthly death.
 
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