What’s the point of trying to save people if people’s fate is decided?
than again God had allowed his choice people to looked into sodom to see if any good people in there or stopped to allow his people to change. Even those God doesn’t change his mind. So I’m a little confused
God sees our future actions, but He doesn't
make us carry them out.
If He sees a thief break into your house five years in the future, complete with the key the thief had copied and manufactured at the local locksmith, along with the discussion he might have had with a few of his mates about his intention, that doesn't mean God made him do it.
The thief still made his own choice. It's just that God sees him doing it in five years time (what we might these days call virtual reality I suppose), and when the real time rolls around, He sees Him doing it in actuality.
I have a personal issue with the business of predestination, but ultimately it's more a question of God's love, rather than a philosophical discussion of whether we're predestined or not.
I've made the claim ad infinitum, and I'm sticking to it, that the night my father died, he appeared in my bedroom at the same time. During our discussion, he blurted out at one stage, "I always was doomed! I didn't really have any choice!"
I was an atheist at the time, but I argued back "That can't be right!". Even as an atheist, I thought this was unjust. He replied, "Oh, it's right, all right. You can see that from here!" I presume he had some sort of insight I lacked - all I could see was him, but he spent most of the time looking at something over my head and behind me. His appearance varied from a look of awe, to sometimes hiding his face behind his hands and seeming quite distraught when he did so. Then the look of awe would resume. At the very end of the whole episode, he gave this blood curdling scream and just disappeared. It was obvious something was coming for him.
When I turned around to see what he was looking at, all I saw was the bedroom wall. So I was blocked from seeing what he could see. Nor was I able to see what came for him that terrified him so much. I could only see him at all times.
But ... later in the same conversation, he said "I was
WILLING..." (to do the things that condemned him, including a lifetime of deliberate cruelty as he admitted. He
deliberately destroyed my confidence for example, as he admitted viz. "I did it deliberately...").
Since as a child himself he'd had a very austere childhood in the depression years, including having whooping cough; then fought in the Second World War in Papua New Guinea (getting Malaria into the bargain), and never had a great job in his life (although he nearly always had some sort of work), then I wonder how God justifies His claim (or is it merely our claim) that He is "LOVE"?
I also think my father's relations with his own father weren't the best, although I suspect that he was very rebellious.
My argument is not a philosophical bun fight about whether we're predestined in the sense that God can see all the future in His unbounded "Now" (which is a by-product of His omnipotence), but if we're predestined in the sense of "I didn't really have any choice!"
That's my beef about it. If so, what does His "LOVE" really mean, and is it true? As my old pastor once said to me when I was still Presbyterian, "I sometimes wonder if it's true (that God is Love). He seems to write people off pretty easily".