We humans are a curious lot. We are creatures, created by God. Yet, almost without exception, we believe that it is our right, our responsibility, perhaps even our duty to evaluate God and decide whether or not He meets our standards. Imagine that! We judge God. It is, of course, not rational or sane. The creatures don't have the ability let alone the right to properly evaluate the Creator. But most of us do it. "If God is like that," I've heard, "I am going to have a problem with Him." Really? Yes, that's how we think. That's typically the source of atheists, where God has let them down or made them mad, so they reject Him entirely. More of us may even be believers, perhaps even devout, but we're still thinking, "If God is like that, He's not a God I can live with." So we carefully make sure our theology excludes "that" and go on our happy way.
I'm a little bit different on this. On one hand, I try to draw my version of God from the pages of my Bible and I try to let it speak to me rather than have my preconceptions shape my view of who He is. Still, I have found a version of God about whom I would say, "That's a God I can't live with." I think, however, I mean it in a different way. Let me explain.
In a recent conversation with a friend, we were rambling through big subjects -- God's Sovereignty, God's Omniscience, God's Omnipotence ... those kinds of things. My friend was certain. God has sovereignly configured our world so that Man's free will can actually contravene God's plans. God is certainly omniscient, but He can make choices that He regrets and repents of. God is omnipotent and can do anything at all, but He will not violate Man's free will. (I capitalized "Man" simply to indicate "humans" as opposed to "males" and not to deify Man.) Those are the facts that my friend held to. No amount of Scripture would sway him. And, quite clearly, I disagree with him.
Now, logically, there are only a very few possibilities here. Perhaps neither of us is right. Maybe I'm right and he's wrong. It might be that he's right and I'm wrong. The last option -- we're both right -- is not a possibility because our views aren't divergent; they're contradictory. I know it doesn't look like it here in my blog, but I tend to be the kind of person that says, "If there's something or someone wrong, it's likely me." And I'll look to see where I made my mistake. You have the benefit of years of this approach; I've corrected an embarrassingly lot of mistaken thinking in my life, so I appear more confident, but I still prefer to approach a disagreement assuming I'm wrong before I simply discard a differing opinion from my own.
So, let's say I'm wrong here. God is not the Sovereign God I believe Him to be. If God sovereignly surrendered some of His sovereignty to human free will, He's not Sovereign. Maybe lowercase sovereign, but not absolute. The same would be true for omniscience and omnipotence. If God can know all things, past, present, and future, and regret or repent of something He's done, then His omniscience is clearly limited. He didn't see that it would be a bad choice. Omnipotence is the same. Omnipotence says that God has the power to do anything He wants. But if human free will is capable of preventing Him from doing what He wants, whether or not it's self-imposed, it is not omnipotence. It's only mostly omnipotence ... at best.
Where does that leave me? This particular God is not a God I can live with. He is sovereign, not Sovereign. Like Westley in The Princess Bride who was only "mostly dead," God is only mostly sovereign. In the end, it is Man who is finally sovereign. God plans to do this for me and, oh, look at that, that person chose not to do what God required to do this for me and, sorry, it just can't happen now. God's omniscience is faulty. He knew everything in advance and opted to do things He knew He would regret and repent from? Either He's not very bright or He just didn't actually know. And if God cannot do things that Man's free will doesn't allow Him to do, then God cannot have Omnipotence. Someone once told me in a difficult set of circumstances, "You know, the Father never intended any of that to happen." In this view of God, he would probably be right.
The implications here are staggering. I can no longer trust that "No one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand" because the truth would be that I can. (My friend agreed with that.) And if I can, I have. And if I have, I cannot regain salvation (Heb 6:4-6). I can no longer have confidence that God works all things together for good (Rom 8:28) since God is limited by Man's free will and if the good He intended is denied by Man's choices, God is stuck. I cannot count on "Do not let your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me" (John 14:1) because this God I'm supposed to trust to relieve my fears turns out to be too limited to trust to relieve my fears. I can only conclude that the God I was trusting to sustain me through all of life's twists and turns isn't as trustworthy as I had thought. In this case, I don't mean I reject this God. I mean that life with this God is not possible. If this is God, I am a man without hope, without joy, without peace. In a world gone crazy like ours, I need a solid Rock to stand on, and this God is not it. This is not a God I can live with, quite literally.
I admit it. Part of the reason I defend God's Sovereignty and Omniscience and Omnipotence -- all absolutes -- is because that's the only God that gives me any hope. The truth is, however, that I have not always believed in this God. I did think I could have a self-limiting God and still be okay. Then I was faced with too much Scripture to refute and too much logic to untangle to make any sense of that God. So it's a good thing that the God I need to survive is also the God I find in the pages of my Bible. I've been convinced, at times against my will, forced by clear Scripture and obvious logic and forced to conclude that God is that Sovereign, Omniscient, Omnipotent, Holy, Good God that I've come to know. Now that is a God that I can live with.
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