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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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How Could Someone Get That Much Control?

I see this as my “Eschatology 201” essay.

According to the book of Revelation, the Beast rises from the sea and takes control of everything, from buying to selling.  Kings give him their power and authority.  Who would ever do that?

Our government does that all the time with its treaties and regulations.  The maritime treaties we have already signed and ratified have given up much of our oceanic mineral and fishing rights.  The Kyoto Protocol would limit our use of energy.

Food rationing has been done in the past where you needed a coupon  to buy food, gasoline, and anything else that is needed to live and maintain a standard of living. Rationing can be implemented in the future (maybe with a mark on your hand?)  Voluntary meters on your A/C unit that restrict its use in peak times can become mandatory. Just take a few steps at a time until incrementally there are total restrictions.

Revelation chapter 17 speaks of ten “kings” without kingdoms who get authority and turn it over to the Beast (Rev 17:12-14).  One interpretation (among many) could be some kind of a UN commission.  Here’s a scenario.  But first let me set the stage.

How many of us have changed our standard of living since the price of gas has shot up from $0.99 a gallon to the current $3.50-plus a gallon price?  How many of us have traded in our cars and now ride bikes or walk everywhere?  How many have stopped driving and now take public transportation?  How many have moved closer to work (if you can sell your house, that is)?  Add to that the fact that our government has seriously crippled oil exploration and development in our country, limited the use of coal and uranium, and pushes ethanol that not only converts what can be used for food but also takes more energy to produce than it gives, and we have big energy problems.  How many of us make conscious efforts to reduce fuel consumption?

The price of food is going up, partly to higher transportation prices, partly due to increased production costs, and partly because of the “stimulus packages” that only seem to have stimulated inflation (sorry for the political point).  How many of us buy the beat up and nearly expired food in place of what we usually bought to save some money?

With the price of fuel causing energy prices to climb, how many of us have turned down the thermostat in winter and up in summer?

I think the answer to all of these is, “Not many.”  We seem to cope with situations and find ways around impediments.  It’s how God made us.  Adapt or die, as the evolutionists say.

We don’t or won’t voluntarily change our lifestyles in radical ways as the “doom and gloom” people require.  They claim we are causing Global Warming and we must stop using energy.  Add to that world-wide floods and droughts and we can easily have food shortages with high prices for transporting what we have.

It’s not hard to see that we could have a serious manufactured crisis.  Of course, everything is a crisis these days, but that’s a topic for a political discussion.  Nevertheless there could be a lack of food in some areas, lack of energy in some, all not caused by natural forces but by the “powers that be” for whatever reason making it difficult for people to live.

Now for my thesis.  It’s easy to see how a “UN Global Commission on Problems we have Created for Ourselves” could be tasked with “fixing” these man-made problems.  Appoint ten commissioners (kings without kingdoms) and have them work with a world leader who seems to have all the answers.

Democratically elected governments won’t make laws to severely impact their citizens.  They won’t get re-elected so they’ll sign treaties that turn the heavy decisions over to the commission.  They turn their power over to the Beast (that won’t be his name, of course.)   Step  by step, he’ll have complete control over commerce, energy and everyone’s life.

Will it happen this way?  I don’t know.  God’s not limited by my thought processes.  I just want people to be aware that dire things can happen for seemingly good reasons.

Does this mean we need to be selfish?  No, but Jesus told us to be “wise as serpents and as gentle as doves” (Matt 10:16). It’s time to start being wise to what is happening in the world. However there is no need to fear. If you lack wisdom, just ask (James 1:5).

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