Divine Wisdom

Why Doesn't God End Everything

Sustenance - Psalm 55:22

When a person comes into your life bringing their bag of problems with them, when a person carries grief and stress and pain into your world, when a person causes chaos over which you have no control, what do you do?

How do you deal with the pressure of painful encounters and fragmented relationships? With angry, rebellious people? With divorce, sickness, bitterness, and death? With loneliness? With the circumstance that you never dreamed would be a part of your life? With the weight of the burden that has worn out your emotions and left you physically exhausted? How do you handle it?

The Bible, our love letter, tells us in Psalm 55:22, “Cast your burden upon the Lord, and He will sustain you.” Let’s paraphrase that: “Get rid of that burden; throw it on the Lord; fling it at His feet. Don’t sneak up to give it to Him. To cast means to throw forcefully. He promises that He will take care of you, sustain you; He promises to be your sustenance.”

What sort of sustenance is the psalmist talking about here? I need emotional sustenance. Emotional relief. I need stability, strength, and wisdom. I need peace, the therapy of rest. I need the calmness that comes when I know that everything is under the control of an authority figure, someone I can trust, someone who knows what to do. That’s exactly the sort of sustenance Psalm 55:22 is talking about.

Anabel Gillham

The Confident Woman, Harvest House, 1993

Impossibility Versus Accomplishment

“Are you so foolish?”   Paul, after being a pastor for several years expresses that frustration.  However, even though the New Testament is a plain and clear testimony that Christianity is all about Christ, and not about us...we go and make it about us way too much.

Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? . . . Now that no one is justified by the Law before God is evident; for, “The righteous man shall live by faith.” –Galatians 3:3, 11

Many aspects of the believer's life have been made out to be nearly impossible to accomplish. We are given reams of material on how to be a good parent, partner, and child of God. There seems to be so much information that we must know. How can we take it all in? How can we always do the right thing? And those who present to us the much needed information seem so much more spiritual than we are; they have done the right things all along, and they even have degrees in how to be successful. 

However, Scripture does not indicate that being a brother or sister in Christ, a parent, or a mate is all that difficult.   In fact, there is very little in Scripture concerning what to do, but much about basic attitudes to have.“  And so, as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience; bearing with one another, and forgiving each other, whoever has a complaint against any one; just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you” (Colossians 3:12, 13). The Christian life is as simple as loving our wives, respecting our husbands, forgiving our enemies, not provoking our children, obeying parents, and working as unto the Lord. This is our long-term plan. In keeping it day by day we will see ups and downs, reversals, and the inevitable Christian hiccups, but we should never, never allow those daily things to sidetrack us from our long-term plan, which will reap its own reward in the fullness of time.

Often in our quest for immediate relief we see in others (and they see in us) things to change to bring instant comfort. Therefore, we set out to covertly or overtly change those around us through more control and more role-playing of God. Let me point out that if God believed a change in another person's behavior were as important as we believe it to be, He would already have changed it! A change in the behavior of Job’s friends would not have lessened his plight one bit. It was Job’s trust in God and the long-term result of faith that kept him. The whole test was calculated to clean up Job, not to change others. Others actually played very little into the scenario. God's role was primary, Job's secondary, and others' somewhere far behind.

Is that an incredible truth, or what…”there is very little in Scripture about what to do, but much about basic attitudes to have.”

Chosen of God, holy (God says so), accepted in the beloved, living in the Spirit…life is all taken care of by our Lord.  Do we believe that”  “God’s role was primary, Job’s (ours) secondary, and others’ somewhere far behind.”  Well, amen!

I can let Him accomplish what only He can accomplish, and I can just relax and live by His faith.

When God Needs an Intercessor

In the previous two posts, we have been exploring biblical narratives that point to how God’s knowledge is temporally conditioned and thus supports an open view of the future, or open theism as it is commonly called. The first addressed how God regrets and the second how God discovers. In this post, I want to briefly look at another example that demonstrates that God’s knowledge is temporally conditioned: the story of God searching for an intercessor.

The passage I want to explore is found in Ezekiel 22. Here the Lord declares his disappointment and righteous indignation with Israel. In a passage that emphasizes the urgency of prayer perhaps more emphatically than any other text in the Bible, the Lord says of his people:

The people … have oppressed the poor and needy, and have extorted from the alien without redress. And I sought for anyone among them who would repair the wall and stand in the breach before me on behalf of the land, so that I would not destroy it; but I found no one. Therefore I have poured out my indignation upon them (vv. 29-31).

If we take this passage at face value, the fate of Israel depends upon whether or not the Lord finds anyone to “stand in the breach” before him as Moses had done earlier in Exodus 32. Unfortunately, this time there was no one like Moses to intercede and alter God’s declared intent.

There are many examples of intercessors offering prayers to the Lord and God responding to them in such a way that he “changed his mind” in the light of human input and changing circumstances.

Examples include:

• Moses prayed and the fire of God’s punishment died down (Num 11:1)
• After God told Moses that he would raise up a nation around Moses, Moses interceded for the Israelites and God relented (Num 14:11ff)
• Moses and Aaron interceded for the assembly (Num 16:20-48)
• Moses prayed after the golden calf incident (Deut 9:13-26)
• David prayed on behalf of the land that was being destroyed by an angel (2 Sam 24:17-25)
• King Ahab repents and humbles himself and God delays the judgment (1 Kings 21:27-29)
• The leaders of Israel repent and God changes his judgment (2 Chron 12:5-8)
• The Lord relented after Amos prayed (Amos 7:1-6)

The genuineness of the Lord’s search for a person to stand in the breach is compromised if in fact God knew all along that no one would be found. Unless the Lord genuinely hoped he could raise up someone, genuinely tried to find that person and was genuinely frustrated at finding no one, it’s not clear what this passage communicates.

If God’s hope, attempt and frustration were genuine, the question of whether someone would stand in the breach had to be an open issue when God began his search. One can’t hope and try to find something one is certain does not exist. The open view renders the urgency that Scripture attaches to intercessory prayer intelligible precisely because it accepts at face value Scripture’s teaching that things genuinely hang in the balance on whether or not people pray.

—Adapted from Satan and the Problem of Evil, pages 107-108 – Greg Boyd

When God Discovers

 Scripture consistently portrays God’s knowledge as conforming to the ways things really are, and part of the way things really are is temporally conditioned. Scripture never expresses the commonly-held sentiment that time is somewhat illusory. God “remembers” the past and anticipates the future. Insofar as he empowers humans to freely determine the future, this means that God waits “to see” what shall come to pass.

In Gen 2:19, after God created the animals, he brought them before Adam “to see what he would call them.” This word “to see” means something like “to discover.” God’s sovereign control of the world does not rule out an element of uncertainty about the future. God empowers humans to be genuine partners in bringing about the future, and this means that the future is, to some extent, dependent on what we do. God waits to see how humans will choose.

Another example is found when the Lord forbids the Israelites from gathering more than a day’s ration of bread from heaven when they were in the wilderness because he wants to “test them, whether they will follow my instruction or not” (Ex 16:4). By the Lord’s own admission, there would have been no point for this testing if the Lord was already certain how they would behave.

God tested Abraham to see how he would respond when asked to sacrifice Isaac (Gen 22). Moses tells the Israelites that they wandered in the wilderness for 40 years so that they Lord would know their heart (Deut 8:2). The Lord temporarily withdrew support from Israel to “find out if they would obey the command of the Lord” (Judg 3:4). God leaves Hezekiah “to himself” at one point “in order to test him and to know all that was in his heart” (2 Chron 32:31).

If we take these passages at face value, they suggest that God was not certain how they would respond to his tests before he gave them. He tested them to find this out.

Opponents of the open view often argue that God tests people not for his sake but for ours. This interpretation would be possible except that each of the verses we just examined explicitly tells us that the testing was for God, not the people being tested. An interpretation that reverses what a text explicitly says is not a viable interpretation. Others argue that if we took these verses literally we would have to deny that God possesses exhaustive present knowledge, for the passages say God wanted to know “their heart.”

Since Scripture informs us that God knows all things while teaching us that God tests people to know their heart, the understanding of “heart” which this objection presupposes cannot be correct. The two teachings are easily rendered compatible by recognizing that the heart is the seat of the person’s will. To discover a person’s “heart” is to discover what their decision will be. Each of these passages, if read in context, makes this clear. The Lord tests people “to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments” (Deut 8:2). Since people are free agents, God wants to find out “whether they will follow my instructions or not” (Ex 16:4).

—Adapted from Satan and the Problem of Evil, pages 105-107 – Greg Boyd

When God Regrets

The openness of the future is illustrated in the Bible’s depictions of God as grieving the outcome of decisions he himself has made. Regarding the incredible wickedness of humanity before Noah, for example, we read, “The Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” (Gen 6:6). How could the Lord possibly be sorry for making humanity if he was eternally certain they would turn out exactly this way when he created them?

Some interpret this expression as anthropomorphic. But we must ask, “What is this an anthropomorphic expression of?” If the Lord didn’t really regret his decision to make humans, what does the expression that tells us he did regret making humans truthfully communicate to us? Suppose that God truly wanted to tell us that he sometimes truly regrets decisions. How could he do so in terms any clearer than in this passage?

Another example of God’s regret is found in the story of King Saul. God had intended to bless Saul and his descendants (1 Sam 13:13), but Saul’s behavior as king altered God’s intentions. After his appointed king chose a rebellious course of action, the Lord told Samuel, “I regret that I made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me (1 Sam 15:11). And again the author writes, “And the Lord was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel” (1 Sam 15:35). The Lord could only be sorry for making Saul king if he had hoped for a different outcome than what transpired. And this would mean that Saul’s fate was not a foregone conclusion when God made him king.

God took a risk in making Saul king. The risk depended on choices Saul made. When Saul thwarted God’s purposes, God suffered a loss. This created the experience of regret. The open view of the future teaches that God hopes each individual will turn to him and walk in his ways. But if love is the aim, then freedom is the means and risk is the price. Things may not, and did not, turn out as God would have hoped.

However, God is never at a loss concerning his response to rebellious agents. God knows all future possibilities, all future certainties, and is in control of the overall flow of history. He is never unprepared, and in his infinite wisdom he is able to redeem good out of evil in ways we could never anticipate.

Because the Lord possesses unlimited intelligence, he can attend to and anticipate numerous possibilities as thoroughly as if each one were the only future that could come about. Whichever possible course of action gets actualized, it is from God’s perspective as thought this were the only course he had to concern himself with.

The open view sacrifices none of God’s ability to respond to the future. Finite creatures have their intelligence stretched thin the more possibilities they have to entertain, but not God. When a person like Saul fails, God already has a person like David waiting in the wings. Scripture reveals a God who is utterly confident of his ability to achieve his overall purposes despite the sinful rebellion of his creation. So confident is he, in fact, that he is willing to risk some loss with free agents in order to open the possibility of fellowship with them throughout eternity. He is willing to suffer frustration, disappointment and grief in order to share the joy of this triune being with others.

—Adapted from Satan and the Problem of Evil, pages 102-104

What is Driving the Gospel you Believe?

If the DRIVING FORCE behind the gospel you hear is FEAR of hell...while...the DRIVING FORCE behind the Good News Gospel is the LOVE of God...Is the gospel you are hearing the True Gospel, or is it as Paul put it, "another gospel that is not the Gospel at all?"

Romans chapter 1 verse 21 it says, “Because that when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vein in their imaginations. And their foolish heart was darkened.”

The problem with the "fear based gospel" is that people's mind becomes darkened to this understanding of who they really are in Christ. People preaching the "fear based gospel" professing to be wise are foolish because they have changed the glory of the incorruptible, unfailing loving God into an image like unto man.

The preaching of the "fear based gospel" presents the wrong image of our loving Father God and His "Good News Gospel."