If God is all-powerful, aren’t we all just little chess men being moved around on a chess board?
First, we have to pin down the concept of free will. Because God LOVES His creation, most especially sentient beings, He gave all sentient beings FREE WILL. He didn’t want us to be his “toys”, because toys are mere objects. Instead, He created us as SUBJECTS. He wants to interact with us and have a dynamic relationship with us. The way He did this was to bestow upon us individual sovereignity – or free will. We can choose. We can, through our decisions and actions, alter the timeline. In fact, every decision and action we take does just that. As we travel through linear time, we are constantly shaping and directing how the timeline unfolds.
Now a quick point about these “sentient beings” that God created. There are two populations within that set. The first is human beings, who are spirits joined to a body. We are BODY-PERSONS. The other population is referred to as “angels”. Yes, angels are very real, as Our Lord makes SPECIFIC reference to them in the Gospels numerous times. Angels are PURE SPIRIT. They do not have physical bodies. They have, on occasion, made themselves manifest to people by taking on the appearance of a body, but that is just an illusion for our benefit. They are pure spirit. Satan is in this population, along with what we call “demons”. These are pure spirits who chose to rebel against God. Why did they rebel? Angels exist, like God, outside of time. They saw that it was God’s will, one way or another, to take on Human Flesh so that He could love us AS one of us. A certain percentage of the angels were repulsed by this – repulsed at the idea of bowing down and worshiping a mere Man, even if that Man was God, and so they rebelled. Since God made them free sovereigns, they were permitted to do this. Think about it. If God just started snuffing beings out of existence when they made a choice that wasn’t in accord with His will, wouldn’t that cheapen all life and existence to the point of meaninglessness? Wouldn’t all beings just be mere object-playthings at that point? Yep. Love means putting up with the periodic horseshit behavior of the beloved. Most ESPECIALLY for God.
So that explains how evil entered into the world and is allowed to persist. Now a little recreational physics. I have always LOVED physics, even though my math education was horrible. When I was in the 8th grade, my grandmother bought Steven Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” for me with her senior discount card at Waldenbooks. I was in heaven. One of the concepts that Hawking explained was the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. In a nutshell, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that we can never know the exact position AND velocity of any particle, because in order to observe a particle, you have to bounce a photon off of it – which then alters its position and velocity. Now, you might think that is no big deal, but it is a HUGE deal. You’re just going to have to take my word for this for the moment, but what this means is that when a particle travels from point A to point B, it traverses EVERY POSSIBLE PATH SIMULTANEOUSLY. I’m not kidding. This is experimentally proven.
What does this have to do with God and free will? God in His omniscience knows and sees not only the Real Timeline, which is the result of all of our individual decisions, but he also knows and sees all of the “Heisenberg Timelines” which are constantly and infinitely shooting and branching off from the Real Timeline. In other words, the Heisenberg Timelines are the timelines that WOULD have happened IF we had made a different choice. When we say that God is INFINITE and ALL-KNOWING, we really don’t comprehend the real scope of what we are saying. Infinite means infinite – not limited in any way. Hence, the infinite number of Heisenberg Timelines fit very easily into that set.
What God does is constantly reset His Perfect Will after every decision every person makes. He always has a clearly defined Will, which is always for the perfect good, given the timeline up to that point. Let’s say that right now in this moment His will is for Ann to do action Y, which is in accord with His Perfect Will, but I instead choose to do action Z. After I choose and execute action Z, He adjusts His Perfect Will to a new set given action Z. If action Z was a sin, His new Perfect Will now includes that I confess and repent of that sin, but the timeline continues given the reality of Action Z, which I freely chose. If I choose action Y, no adjustment is made on His part, because I have acted in accordance with His Perfect Will, and the timeline likewise continues. I cannot emphasize enough the infinite love, patience and condescension we are talking about here. There just aren’t words.
So what we see is that God is in an unending dance of love manifested in freedom with all of us. His Will is always for perfect good, but in His love for us, He allows us to act freely, and then in His Mercy, He resets according to our choices. He allows us to, in a sense, cooperate with Him in authoring reality. This is why wonderful things tend to come out of bad situations. Think of all of the husbands and wives who have met and fallen in love . . . because of a war. How many times have you heard a person recall a terrible childhood, or a terrible accident, and then say, “. . . .but I wouldn’t change a thing.” Now you know why. Does God ever enter into the timeline and “nudge” events? Oh, yes. Many times these “nudges” are barely perceptible and exist almost entirely within the conscious or sub-conscious mind. But He does also on occasion physically enter into spacetime to nudge the timeline, and those instances are called “miracles”.
And yes, He is managing to do all this while driving 1.659 novemdecillion fusion reactions per second.
“For My thoughts are not your thoughts: nor your ways My ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are exalted above the earth, so are My ways exalted above your ways, and My thoughts above your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8-9
Reader Theological Question: God & Evil
Posted by Ann Barnhardt - April 18, AD 2011 10:43 PM MST
http://barnhardt.biz
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