A Sovereign God and our Free Will

I wrote in an earlier post how God is timeless. I believe a beautiful consequence of this is that He can give us complete free will and not once give up His sovereignty.  It’s a logical outcome of his timelessness.  Let me explain.

God has a plan.  His plan will come to pass because He is sovereign.  Because God is timeless, he is outside of time. This means He sees all of time before Him.  I almost typed “at once” at the end of that sentence but with God that’s meaningless because “at once” implies a moment in time and he’s outside of time.

I’m a mathematician so I’m used to working with many dimensions.  We live in a three-dimensional world of length, width and height (or depth).  Our fourth dimension is time.  We are stuck in time.  We are traveling through time at one second per second and we can’t go back (at least not with our current technology.)

God is not so limited.  Because He sees every event and knows every thought and hears every word that (to us) has happened, is happening, and ever will happen, it is “easy” for God to see the results of our decisions and His manipulation in our Universe.

I picture the Universe laid out on a table before God.  The difference is that one of the sides of the table is time.  Poke your finger at a place on the table and you are at a specific place at a specific time.  God can inject himself into this table of time (I almost called a “time table”) and speak to one of His prophets to write a prophecy about Jesus.  he can inject himself into this time line and touch your heart so you accept Christ.  He knows your decisions and he’s accounted for them.

It’s not unlike our taking a time line diagram.  We see time progress, usually from left to right and there may be events stacked on top of each other at various times.  The difference in my analogy is that the timeline is real and if you touch the timeline at a point you enter the Universe at that point in time.  It’s kind of freaky but a cool visual picture as well.

The result?  God can grant us free will because He knows every outcome.  At first glance this may seem like we don’t have free will but that’s not true.  Just because He knows the outcome does not mean that you didn’t choose.  I can offer you ice cream.  I could say, “I have vanilla and I have chocolate.  Which would you prefer?”  I may know that you have a chocolate allergy and so you’ll almost assuredly choose vanilla but I did not make you choose that.  The only difference is that with God you can’t surprise Him and take the chocolate and an allergy tablet.

He knows every decision we will make.  He knows every prayer we will pray.  He knows the consequences (both intended and unintended) of every one of our thoughts, words, and actions.  In a sense (and I have to drop into time to say this), He has already accounted for our mistakes and our victories; He has already seen them laid out on his table of time.  God knows that when he asks you to witness to that person that you’ll refuse or mess up the witness.  He has already compensated for it in his Grand Plan.  He gave you the opportunity for a blessing.  Every one of our decisions is geared to receive or refuse a blessing from God.  He knows which ones you’ll take.

This is true freedom. He gives us the freedom to obey and the freedom to fail.  The only thing we can’t do is thwart His plan for our lives or His plan for His Universe.

Is God Timeless?

“Since time itself began at the moment of the Big Bang, it was an event that could not have been caused by anyone or anything.”  This is the “proof” that God does not exist as was smugly stated in a recent episode of the Discovery Channel’s “Curiosity” series.

The question assumes that any god would be temporal, bound within time as we are.  As I said in my critique of the conclusions of the show, if the Universe consists of all matter, energy, space and time, and if God created everything, then God also created all the matter and energy within the space he created for the Universe. He also created time.

This makes sense if God is timeless.  I would like to explore this concept from four perspectives.

First is Cosmology.  The the current version of the Big Bang Conjecture (it’s not even a hypothesis that can be tested) says that the Universe was created out of nothing.  As stated above, the Universe just sprang into being with all matter, energy, space, and even time.  If this is true (and I don’t say it is), then since God created everything,  God would have also created time.  Therefore, since He created time, He would be timeless and not bound by it.  Cosmology agrees with my theology.

Prophecy also supports my thesis.  If God is outside of time then he sees all of time before him.  To God it is always “now”, the present, active, indicative “now”.  Now God is not creating the Universe, now God creates the Universe.  Now God floods the Earth.  Now God parts the sea.  Now God sends Jesus to be born.  Now the Father sends Jesus back for His Bride.  With time before Him, God can prophesy perfectly.  His prophets speak with 100% accuracy because God sees the perfect result of that prophesy.  How else could God tell Jeremiah that he was consecrated before he was born (Jer 1:5)?  If God were inside time, his prophecy would not be much more than wishful thinking of “this is how I want it to be” rather than “this is how it is.”

Concerning Free Will, let’s assume for a moment that somehow God was bound by time.  If God is bound in time then He has to work actively to make His plan come to pass.  He would have to work to the extent that He would have to remove or suppress our free will at times (or maybe most or all of the time).  He would not know for certain that Mary would allow herself to carry Jesus unless he forced her by removing her ability to say, “No.”  He would only hope that Moses would lead the Israelites from Egypt without having to remove his ability to refuse.  If God were inside time, he would have to manipulate every facet of everyone’s lives to make His plan succeed.  We become little more than puppets that He controls.  This is far from the Prodigal Father who lets his son take his inheritance and squander it but still receives him back once he’s hit rock bottom.

Salvation, too, is predicated on God being outside of time.  If God were in time and Jesus was trapped by it also, how could God be certain that Jesus’ suffering some 2,000 years ago was sufficient to atone for all of mankind’s sin throughout all of time?  God would have had to estimate the sin for which Jesus would receive judgment.  What if Jesus did not suffer enough?  Can you then be certain that his death was sufficient for your sins?  What if God overestimated the sin of the world?  Jesus would have been cruelly punished beyond that which was sufficient.  Jesus’ atonement for our sins was sufficient because God knows outside of time the level of sin for which Jesus would have to suffer within time.  Jesus, too, while He was in Glory before He came, knew for how much sin he’d have to pay.  We have no fear.  Those of us who have put our trust in Him can be certain that all of our sins are taken away because He knew our sins before we were even born.  His grace is sufficient because it can’t run out.

God created us to be eternal beings.  Our spirits know this and this is our greatest frustration.  I believe that being trapped in time: being born, living and then knowing that we will die within a fixed time span is the ultimate curse of the Fall of Man.  When God said that we’d die that eliminated the ability to live forever in these bodies and accomplish all that we could or would want to accomplish.  Now we can only hope that we have done enough before we go on to Glory.

Reject God and you reject eternity.  This finite. limited existence is all you’re left with.  Oh, and also the reality of eternal separation from God as well.  Time for the Universe may have started when God said, “Let there be light,” and the Bang banged.  Eternity, however goes on forever.

A Rebuttal to Dr. Hawking

I would like to condense my argument against Dr. Hawking’s assertion that I recorded in my post from last night. He asserted in the Discovery Channel’s “Curiosity” program that since we can explain the Laws of the Universe by science then we don’t need a god to have established them.

This argument is not dissimilar to the argument that since we could explain the laws of the federal government then we don’t need Congress to have passed them. As appealing as that that idea may be to some, even if we don’t need Congress, we do need the Executive branch to enforce them and the Judicial branch to ensure they are being enforced equitably.  Needless to say, however, that from a logic standpoint, the premise does not support the conclusion, either in politics or creation.

In the natural Universe we don’t have three branches of government. We do, however, have three persons in the Holy Trinity. Jesus may have established the Laws of the Universe when all things were made by Him and through Him (John 1:10). Similarly we also have the Holy Spirit to enforce these laws as He holds the Universe together (without the need for external “negative energy” as the current hypothesis argues).  In addition, the Father judges to ensure they are being enforced equitably.  (Unless He chooses to intervene, of course – sort of like granting a pardon.)

God made the Laws of the Universe and He can suspend them whenever He wishes. I believe we often call those times “miracles”.

Maybe the current understanding of Science can explain what might have happened to create the Laws of the Universe (nobody has yet to prove how they came into being). However, science is knowledge.  It is not the cause of creation. Science may explain the laws but does nothing to reveal the Law Maker.  For that we need theology.

The current contention is that the Big Bang happened out of nothing, with no cause behind it.  So why waste so much money and energy in these huge colliders trying to replicate what happened shortly after the Big Bang? If the Big Bang came from nothing, why don’t the scientists simply create their own Little Bang out of nothing as well?

After all, isn’t that how God did it in the first place?

The Laws of the Universe

The Discovery Channel started a new series tonight called “Curiosity”.  I don’t know if their choice of a first episode was designed to be inflammatory or if the series will simply go downhill from here but the first episode is entitled, “Did God Create the Universe?”  The argument was posed and answered by Dr. Stephen Hawking.

Dr. Hawking is a brilliant man.  He has done a lot to extend our knowledge of cosmology and astronomy.  However, when he makes the statement, “… It’s these laws of nature as we now call them that will tell us whether we need a god to explain the Universe at all,” I have to question if he is actually curious or simply trying to justify his preconceived notion and his foregone conclusion.

Whether we need a god to explain the Universe at all does not in any way, shape or form prove the existence, or non existence, of God.  Whether you can explain how the Universe works (and scientists still can’t tell us really how it all began) does not negate one’s need for redemption.  Salvation and forgiveness of one’s sins it not predicated on if one can explain how a solar eclipse happens.

Hawking asks, “If you accept, as I do, that the laws of nature are fixed then it doesn’t take long to ask, ‘What role is there for God?’” For a brilliant man, I wonder why he does not see how logically corrupt his statements are? To ask this question is not dissimilar to a student asking, “If I accept the premises of this text book, it does not take long to ask, ‘What role is there for the author of the book?’” They guy who wrote the book is every bit as important to that study as the Guy who wrote the laws of nature is to understanding how the Universe works.  His arguments are purely non sequiturs, completely unsupported by his premises.

And all this is only 13 minutes into the hour-long program!  It appears the Dr. Hawking relies on the “straw man” argument that just because some religious people have had superstitious or incomplete understandings of the workings of the  universe then all religious positions should be rejected.

Sadly, for me, Dr. Hawking should be the poster child for Rom 1:22. He and his cronies profess to be wise and understand the laws of the universe but they are fools in that they simply reject the Lawmaker Himself. After all, the Bible does say that the fool has said in his heart that there is no God (PS 14:1).

Hawking’s “simpler alternative” of replacing God with science makes Science his god.  After all, he’s putting his faith and trust in science.  That makes it his god.  Sadly, his god cannot answer all of his questions.  Our can, however.

God has made the universe so wonderful and so orderly.  To believe that this order came out of the chaos of the Big Bang is astounding to me.  To believe that the laws of nature could miraculously spring from a swirling soup of the proto universe takes more faith in my opinion than simply believing that God said, “Let there be . . .”  Oh, and one more thing, to believe in the Big Bang, you have to believe that nothing caused it.

So, people think that they have explanations for how the Universe works and how it began, even though there is no proof or even experiments to support their theses.  The theory is that since time did not start until the Big Bang then there is no Creator because there was no time for the Creator to cause anything to happen.

In a nutshell, the argument goes like this: “I have a mechanism whereby the Universe might have come into existence.  It’s untested and unprovable but I like it.  Because my scenario does not need a god to create the Universe then, obviously, God does not exist.”

I think the technical term for this kind of argument is “stupid”.  Who said that the Creator has to exist in time?  If God created everything and to have a Universe you need matter, energy, space and time, then God created all of them as well.  In fact, I’m working on another blog entry that addresses this very same issue.

Hawking and his cronies are men of faith.  They have just as much faith as those who believe in evolution.  In both cases, neither one has an explanation or even good hypothesis of how things got started.  Both put their faith in the creation rather than the creator.

To them we Christians have taken the “simple minded” approach where we believe that God did it all.  Funny how their “simpler alternative” trumps in their minds our “simple minded” belief, but that’s the way o f the world, isn’t it?

How do you explain to the Judge of the Universe on your judgement day that you have conclusively proven that He doesn’t exist?  Is God expected to say, “Oh, I guess you’re right,” and simply vanish?

Modern day Pharisees

In the New Testament the Pharisees get a lot of bad press. Jesus accused the them of making burdens so heavy that they themselves could not carry but required others to do so (Matt 23:1-5). I’m not going to dispute this. After all, Jesus said it. I do, however, think that in some respects we should cut them a little slack.

One of the reasons they got that way, I believe, is because they wanted to learn from history. The Jews spent 70 years in captivity because they did not follow the Law.  They did not worship God alone and devolved into paganism. The people did not take the Sabbath year rest and who knows how many other mandates from God they ignored?  Part of the Pharisees’ thinking became that if the people followed the Law more closely, then God would not send them back into exile.

Unfortunately, the interpretation of what it means to obey the Law became more and more restrictive over time to the point where their rules squeezed the life out of the Law.  Not boiling a kid in its mother’s milk became you cannot mix milk and meat.  Not doing any work meant you had to cook your Sabbath meals the day ahead.  Not saddling your donkey or yoking your ox meant you had to walk to the synagogue.  Following the Law became an end in itself and not a means to the end of being “holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (Lev 19:2 and elsewhere).

What gave these teachers of the Law the “street cred” to mandate such behavior from the people? Well Rabbi So-and-So studied under Rabbi What’s-his-Name who was taught by Rabbi He-Published-4-Books. And we all know that he must have had authority because he has such a large congregation.

Sadly, being holy became an impossible chore because it was no longer a state of being (“be holy”) but rather of doing (do holy things). Any time you get into “doing” it becomes a contest.  Without a metric to guide you, can you ever do “enough” things to be holy? (I ask this rhetorically because the answer is obviously “no” since God is holy and we fall short of Him.) Our works will never match up to the single “work” Jesus did on the cross so how can we ever (to paraphrase) “do holy because I the Lord your God am holy”?

Holiness became a “do as I say and not as I do” endeavor as the leaders heaped more and more rules on the people so they could prove their holiness.

Sadly this same Pharisaical mentality is alive and well today. We see it in politics where we’re constantly told to conserve energy by people who fly around in private jets to give their conservation speeches. But I don’t want to get political here so let me move on.

My point is that we see it in the church. We have our own modern day Christian Pharisees. Christian Pharisees heap rule upon rule and stifle freedom in the spirit. Don’t believe me? Let me cite a few examples.

• Many church leaders take the warnings about not being drunk and taking personal responsibility and condense them into a “thou shalt not drink at all” law.
• Many churchs are so concerned about doing all things in order that you’re not allowed to raise your hands when you sing praises to God neither are you allowed to kneel when you sing in worship to Him.
• Single Christians are treated as second class citizens simply because they’re not married.  Obviously because the church leaders could not control their actions or hormones, neither can anyone else.
• Your spiritual credibility comes from where you went to Bible School and not by how much you love Jesus and devote yourself to studying His Word.
• Your spiritual worth as a pastor is measured by how big your congregation is and not by how much they are involved in the community and spiritual growth.

I’m not saying that we should ignore our church leaders. What I’m saying is that we need to each take the admonition to study the Scriptures for ourselves seriously (2 Tim 2:15).

Not all things are profitable (1 Cor 6:12). I think that goes for stifling the spiritual growth of others as well simply because they won’t cater to your model of Christian behavior. The Bible has only a relatively few “Thou Shalt” and “Thou Shalt Not” mandates. The rest is up to each of us to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling (Philip 2:12).

People will stumble. Our job is not to make sure they don’t stumble but rather to be there when they do to help them get back up again. A righteous man falls seven times (Prov 24:16). You can’t fall the second time unless you get up after that first fall.  If you’ve fallen, get back up and keep going.

In God we Trust? — Eschatology 301

“The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law (Deut 29:29).”  We’re not under the Law but under Grace.  Nevertheless this is a powerful promise.

I’d like to continue where my other end times essays have left off.

When the Beast takes over, as the Book of Revelation says he will, we all will be under a law so tight that we cannot buy or sell anything without complete government control (Rev 13:17).  If you don’t have the Mark of the Beast, you can’t buy food.  If you do have the Mark, you will be doomed for eternity (Rev 19:20).  Talk about being between a rock and a hard place!  What’s a Christian to do?

To answer that, let’s look at what God has revealed. It’s for us, after all.

God has revealed that He can heal the sick (Matt 4:23).  Who needs a doctor?

God has revealed that He can cause oil to keep flowing for cooking (2 Ki 4:1-7).

God has revealed that He can cause a flour bin not to run empty (1 Ki 17:16).

God has revealed that He can feed 5,000 with a small boy’s lunch (Luke 9:16,17), and let’s not forget that that was 5,000 men plus women and children, so conservatively that might have been over 12,000 people altogether.

God has revealed that He can feed 4,000 with a few morsels of food (Mark 8:20), and let’s not forget in both cases there were leftovers.

And the list goes on.  In desperate times, we will desperately need God to move.

Whether you are a cessationist or believe that miracles happen today, one thing is certain: we will need miracles in the days of the Great Tribulation.  If God does not shorten those days, nobody will be able to live (Mark 13:19,20), and those are the ones who have taken the Mark.  How much more will we need God to move in our lives when we don’t take the Mark?

When the you-know-what hits the fan, will you trust in God or trust in man?   We write “In God We Trust” on our money.  Is it written, however, on your heart?

I pray we all stay strong and keep the faith.

A Boring Story of Reconciliation

In many respects I was a tremendous disappointment to my father.  As the elder son there were so many ways in which he wanted to live vicariously through me, however I failed him in every one of them.  Needless to say, although we were friendly, we were not all that close.  To my dad, nothing I did was ever good enough if it wasn’t perfection.

The crowning achievement in my disappointing him, however, came one day during my sophomore year in college when I told him that I was not going to pursue the career path he wanted me to take.  He didn’t yell or put up an argument.  He only said something like, “Well, son, you have to make your own choices,” but I knew something was wrong.

From that day on, we rarely spoke.  I finished college and went on to get my Master’s degree.  I got a very good job.  Eventually I moved far enough away from home that I could not come home each week for a visit.  I would, however as a dutiful son, call home every couple of weeks.  When he’d answer the phone I would say, “Hi, dad!”  He would simply reply, “Hi, son.  Here’s your mother,” and pass the phone on to her.  Mon and I would catch each other up on the news from both sides and then the call would be over.   Needless to say the few times that I called and mom wasn’t home were painful.  In those cases the call was very, very short.  It usually went like this.  I’d say, “Hi, dad!” and dad would say, “Hello, son.  Your mother’s not here.  I’ll have her call you when she gets in.”  Mom would call and we’d catch up.

One year when I flew home for Christmas I decided things would change.  God had been doing a work on my heart bringing me to forgive my parents for the stuff I thought that they had unfairly done to me.  So with a clean slate from my perspective having forgiven them, it was easy to decide to do something.  Doing it, however, was a different story.

I flew home and the days for my visit passed.  We had our usual very wonderful family Christmas.  We were always cordial.  There was no animosity, just the usual wall.  On the day that I was leaving, my dad drove me down to the big city from our home in the mountains.  I was going to spend my last night with my sister and her family and fly out from there.

As I said, dad drove me down there and I think he triple parked in the road to let me out.  He opened the trunk and I removed my bag.  He closed the trunk and as he did, I said, “Dad, you know I love you.”  He replied, “Yes, son, I know,” closed the trunk, got in the car and drove off.

I think I had expected angels singing, heaven opening, and a tearful reconciliatory goodbye.  All I got was, “Yes, son, I know.”  I was flooded with a mix of disappointment and laughter at the irony of the situation.  I flew back home and that was that.

But that wasn’t that.  The next weekend after I got back to my place I called home.  Dad answered.  I said, “Hi dad,” but this time he replied, “Hello, son.  It’s good to hear you.  I hope you got home safely.  What’s been going on?”  We must have talked for a good 30 minutes before he said, “Here’s you mother.  She’d like to talk to you.”  Mom and I would also talk a good 30 minutes and the call ended.

I was flabbergasted at how God used my simple step to soften my dad’s heart toward me.  The calls continued like this over the next several years before my dad died.  My phone bill doubled but I didn’t care.  I had a dad with whom I could talk.  Granted most of our talk was about the weather, the economy, his business and my work, but it was many, many orders of magnitude more talking in one call than we had spoken to each other over several years previously.

Did dad and I become best friends? Not really. Did we ever have a tearful reunion? No. But my dad and I had a new-found respect for each other and a very civil relationship.  I looked forward to my visits home and I could tell that he was genuinely happy to see me.

I write this to encourage everyone to shorten accounts with people you know and be at peace with them (Rom 12:18). You may not hear angels singing and your phone bill may double but it’s a small price to pay for a healed relationship.