Are you alright, friend? I haven't heard from you in a bit...
Apologies. I have been writing all over CF - and elsewhere - and lost track of our discussion. It seemed, too, that we were largely agreed and so I thought further remarks would be a sort of "gilding the lily." But I'll run through your comments again and see what I might respond to.
As explored in the instance of Ahab's prophets, the Lord did actually assign a lying spirit to them on purpose,
To men who were
already liars and telling lies. God did not impose on them anything contrary to their freely-chosen, well-established bent. I think this is the case in every instance one might find in Scripture where God acts upon a person very directly (ie. God hardened further an
already-hardened Pharaoh).
but we are warned in Scripture that lying spirits or individuals will come in the last days to try to decide the followers of Christ to follow falsehoods, but always the true followers can turn aside and refuse. The prophets of Ahab would have had to choose to follow the spirits guidance, I think, even though the Lord did actually send the spirit on purpose and knew that they would fall to it.
Right.
Second, motives are crucial to the morality of an act, and the hypocrisy of the priests is what made their sacrifices evil. The act of sacrifice itself was righteous, if performed with a pure intent, as first prescribed. This act was good, and the evil intent of the priests is what made their sacrifices evil.
Which priests are you referring to here?
If a pagan priest sacrificed a human baby to Jehovah, thinking to please Him as the priest would have pleased his demonic, pagan gods, would the priest's intent make human sacrifice acceptable to God? I don't see how.
However, there are a few misunderstandings I would like to clarify. I do not believe that the righteous ends and ways of the Lord are very obvious even to us Christians, and while we can understand them a lot better with study and pursuit of Him, we don't always recognize His decisions as beautiful ones.
Yes, I agree. God will pursue His ends - even at our expense, at times. It certainly didn't look to anyone at the time like Jesus was successfully fulfilling God's plan by being crucified, right? I think this is what C.S. Lewis meant when he wrote in the Narnia series that the Christ-character, the lion Aslan, was "not a tame lion." Christ - God incarnate - will act to accomplish his will in and through us, even when it costs us everything (in this world). The Bible is replete with such examples, eh?
Everything that happens is, of course, according to His will, but that's where the Problem of Evil comes up, I think.
I don't think I could say that
everything that happens is according to God's will. If this were so, how could He judge the wicked, who were, then, only ultimately fulfilling His will? God
allows evil to happen, for our human free agency to introduce moral evil into the World, for the devil to act in evil ways in the World, too, but God is not actively
willing human and Satanic evil to come to pass.
However, the natural consequences of my sin, as you refered to them, are not forestalled, yet they are still used by God.
In every instance? Does God turn
every wicked deed to the service of His will? How would this not make God the ultimate Source of our wickedness - especially in light of what you wrote in the following quotation:
"I agree that the Lord often let's the consequences of what we've done to come to pass, yet I maintain that He still planned it and uses it."
If it was God's plan to have a man rape a five-year-old child, if it was God's plan for the serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer, to kill and eat other people, if it was God's plan for Hitler to murder six million Jews, how is it not ultimately
God's fault that these evil things occurred? And if it is His fault, how are those who simply carried out
His plan to be blamed?
I do contend that giving a thirsty child a glass of water out of an evil motive is an evil act. It would be one example of the Lord using our wrong intent to help a child, to do that child good despite us. But we would be sinning.
How would you support this view from Scripture? You seem to contradict yourself here by identifying the giving of a glass of water to a thirsty child as a helpful act, while asserting it is, nonetheless, evil. It looks to me like you're mixing up the nature of the act with the nature of the motive behind doing it. The
act of quenching a child's thirst, it seems to me, is always fundamentally a good thing, but this doesn't, as you've noted, necessarily extend to the
motive one might have for doing so. An evil motive for giving a thirsty child a glass of water only makes one's
motive evil; for an evil motive is not present
in the glass of water itself, or in the act of giving the water to a thirsty child, but is solely the possession, the characteristic,
of the giver of the glass of water.
The example of the Christian firefighter is not entirely fair, I think. One can't really say "Im doing wrong because I'm saving the child because I want to ensure the child doesn't burn to death, and not because I love God." That doesn't make sense.
Exactly. This is why I offered this extreme example. It brings to the fore the problem of making evil every act that doesn't arise from a God-honoring motive. Would it have been more moral for the firefighter to have left the child to burn to death because his motive relative to God was awry? As you've illustrated here, we know intuitively that such a conclusion is wrong, that it "doesn't make sense."
If you love God, you don't want the child to burn to death.
Yes, but this isn't the case for every - or even, I suspect, most - instances of child-rescue. All humans possess the "law of God written on the heart" (
Romans 2:15), a moral sense expressed in what we call our conscience, but following this moral sense doesn't necessarily have anything at all to do with a love for God - even for believers. Believers and non-believers follow their conscience, even at great personal expense sometimes, for reasons they can't often explain, for instinctual reasons, or to avoid the pangs of an injured conscience, or to prevent moral censure from others, or to avoid the penalties of the law, and so on.
Also, as fundamentally changed people, most things a Christian does are already motivated by a love for God.
Do you really believe this? Really? Friend, most Christians, I believe, are frequently acting out of motives that have nothing whatever to do with a love for God. This is why the various books of the NT so often urge Christians to love. If doing so was natural, inevitable, for the Christian, why would such urging be at all necessary or useful? Paul's words in
1 Corinthians 13:1-3, especially, challenge the moral but unloving conduct of born-again believers. The apostle John, also, kind of harps on the love issue in his letters to the Early Church, clearly indicating that he thought his fellow Christians were not acting out of love, as they should have been. (See
1 John 4)
To save the child from burning to death is loving God, and obeying His image and law within our hearts.
I've known Christians who refused to do what God had commanded them in His word to do because their "motive wasn't right." They actually believed they shouldn't act unless and until they were sure they were doing so from a "right motive"; to do so from a wrong motive would have been evil. In one case, this meant a Christian brother refused to give financial aid to a fellow brother in Christ whom he knew was in desperate financial straits. This Christian brother had the wherewithal to help a fellow believer, and had been commanded in Scripture to do so, but withheld his aid because he wasn't sure he could give "in a right way." This is one of the serious practical problems with equating motive with the moral character of an act.
So the scenario doesn't make much sense because the Christian firefighter would simply go save the child and in doing so, love God. They're not mutually exclusive.
Not inevitably or naturally so, no. But there can be, nonetheless, a separation between the moral character of an act and the motive for doing it. This separation occurs often, in my experience, which is why the morality of an act must not be tied directly to one's motive for doing it. When it is, you get Christians refusing to do moral things when they should because they believe their motives for doing those things aren't "right." And when this happens, as in the case of refusing financial aid to a Christian brother that I mentioned, disobedience toward God and suffering were the result.
Now, in the case of the thirsty child, if one's motive is wrong, the answer is not to refuse the child water. That would to trade on wrong for another, one sinful agenda for another. Nor is it to wait until the motive changes.
Amen! It is better to do a right thing from a wrong motive than to fail do what is right entirely.
I would hold that of one's motive is crucial to the morality of our decisions, then we should practice analyzing our motivations constantly, finding out whether we are doing things for the right reasons, or just for ourselves. This can be exhausting at first, but as you stated before, we all tend towards sin, and therefore should be suspicious of ourselves. If Satan is imminently crafty and subtle, should we not always be on guard?
Yup. Good stuff. I would add, though, that ultimately we must rely on the Holy Spirit to illuminate our minds to our own self-deceptions and faulty motives. We are just too prone to telling ourselves lies, to justifying evil motives, to rely upon ourselves to clean up our own thinking. We desperately need the Holy Spirit to do this for us (in tandem with God's word), which he does as we walk in humble submission with him all day, every day.
This is why we must analyze our motives constantly, with the Lord and Scripture as our overriding basis for judgement.
Amen.
But since one cannot commit any act without motive,
Oh? What about reflexive, instinctive actions?
The act has no moral standing on its own.
I don't think this is what we understand to be true intuitively. Whatever our motive, we know it is better, more right, more moral, to give a thirsty child a glass of water than to withhold it; whatever our motive, we know it is a better thing, a moral thing, to save a child from a burning building than to not. I don't see, then, that one's motive defines the morality of any particular act.
If a robot arm hands a child a glass of water, the robot arm cannot be congratulated.
No, the
robot arm deserves no congratulations, but this doesn't mean
the act itself of helping a child was not good. Would it generally be a better thing, a more right thing, to keep a thirsty child thirsty?
I do understand that what I have stated above is a hard position to argue, and I ask your patience if I stumble or seem confusing. I'm not very good at debate. Thank you for your carefully thought out responses, I enjoy reading them and am grateful for your time.
