07 July 2009 By Peter Young | TinyURL TM
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28, New International Version)
Do we know this fact? Do we really believe it when everything seems to be going against us?
“For who has known the mind of the Lord
that he may instruct him?”
But we have the mind of Christ. (1 Corinthians 2:16, NIV)
May the mind of Christ my Saviour
Live in me from day to day,
By His love and power controlling
All I do and say.
Katie Wilkinson
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July 7th, 2009 at 9:22 am
The interpretation is critical. Are we saying that:
a) God ‘engineered’ the bad stuff to make good out of our lives (in that case, He also planned/controlled everything we don’t like about M’sian politics)? OR
b) God is always fighting against the evil to overcome it for our good?
Till now I can’t fathom how people can ‘believe’ in option a) – and many do – but act/live/think/talk like the other option was the right one.
July 10th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
I have had a fundamental problem with evil being external to God. That is in conflict with the proposition that God is omnipresent.
Has anyone been able to reconcile this in a logical manner? Or is this one of the mysteries that we need to accept on faith?
July 13th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
God created us in His own image with hearts of flesh, not stone…capable of making choices, knowing right from wrong..fact that He is also not only omnipresent, but omniscient and omnipotent, does not mean that we are going to be spared from all the consequences of our fallenness (the greed, selfishness, power-abuse, corruption, s’times anarchy in affairs of state and nation..) because He gave us the power to choose..to repent of our sins and choose to love and worship Him and live acc to His ways or the free-for-all that abounds in the ways of the world since the day adam and eve fell
He could have have made us robots and solve the problem of evil and sin by just pressing buttons but that would make Him out to be a dictator, which He is not – but Father God with tender heart of all-encompassing, redeeming love that patiently seeks the sinner but hates the sin
July 15th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
Singam,
God’s omnipresence is, IMO, a sub-set of His omni-potence i.e. His ability to will whatever He so desires (within the limits of personal self-determination, as per Gapstander’s comments).
Just because one of his created agents freely chose evil has simply *nothing* to do with God’s attributes of infinite love and power and ‘trans-physicality’. God, in His sovereignity, *gave us the power to do good or evil* – that itself is an act of creative other-ness and love. That often we choose destructive paths reflects our short-comings and is certainly NOT ‘internal’ to God at all.
July 17th, 2009 at 6:36 am
Alwyn, thanks for that.
I guess that’s about as close to a logical resolution as one can get in this context. Any remaining gaps will have to be covered with faith.
Hmmm, Omnipresence as a subset. That’s something to think about.
Which gets me wondering… can Omnipotence then be a subset of Omnipresence?
Mystery of mysteries.