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We have faith in God to do what is good. We have faith in God in the form of trust that He does not waiver. Whatever He says and does is a reflection of absolute truth and knowing what the consequences will be and what the future will hold, because He controls all of these things. Whatever he created and caused to be created, He controls. To the extent He created the heavens and the earth, He controls the heavens and the earth. Because He controls these things, there is no need for him to speculate. If He seems to speculate, He is doing so from our point of view when He reasons with us and when He implores us to reason with him as it says in Isaiah 1:18 and as He reasons with Job in Job Chapters 38-41, causing Job in 42:5 to imply that unlike God, he can only act according to what he hears and sees, and so he, unlike God, is left to theorize because unlike God, Job has no knowledge of everything that went before, and no awareness of all the consequences of his own actions.
What does it mean to speculate? A dictionary defines it as forming a theory or conjecture about a subject without firm evidence. God HAS firm evidence since He created the evidence along with the heavens and the earth. So, God doesn’t speculate for his own benefit, but in reasoning with us He may let us see how He sees things from our point of view.
One might say that the Bible supports God’s having no need to speculate since He knows all things. 1 Corinthians 14:33 says, “For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.” Well, there is peace when things are settled and no further pursuit to that end is necessary. When man speculates, or theorizes, even doing so for good, it creates some confusion which in a sense disturbs the peace in that area as the people who are involved scramble to find an answer. God already knows the answer, so with God there is peace and the matter is closed.
We can say that God discerns. A dictionary defines discerning as the act of perceiving or recognizing something. That definition could be carried further by saying that to discern is to perceive something BASED on recognition.
God perceives based on His own recognition of what He has created. One incident from the Bible come to mind. In Exodus 32:11-14, Moses attempts to reason with God to change His mind about killing the Hebrews in for being a "stiff-necked people" as He says in Verse 9. He says to God in Verses 11-13, “O LORD, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did he bring them out, to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your burning anger and relent from this disaster against your people. 13 Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self, and said to them, ‘I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your offspring, and they shall inherit it forever.’” In Verse 14, God "relented."
If we take Exodus 32:11-14 on its face and not “speculate” on the possibility that God already determined that He wouldn’t kill the Hebrews before he told Moses in Verse 10 to let Him alone to kill the Hebrews, that maybe He just wanted Moses to appreciate the mission that God gave him in bringing the Hebrews to the Promised Land. So putting that aside, God recognizes the effect He would have on neighboring nations like Egypt and on His own vision for the Hebrews if He was to kill the Hebrews, in a sense that He knows how Man would react to such a thing as well as the consequences to His vision. So one might say that God relented before He actually “relented.”
With all this, we must keep in mind what it says in Isaiah 55:8 – “’For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the LORD.” And a true and pure faith in God involves trusting in Him without knowing everything there is to know about him. I tell you that even if we managed to read every book alluded to in the last Verse of the Book of John, IF they were even available for us to read, we still wouldn’t know all there is to know about God. All we know is in a sense that we would not speculate on something we already know, God does not speculate; He does discern.
What does it mean to speculate? A dictionary defines it as forming a theory or conjecture about a subject without firm evidence. God HAS firm evidence since He created the evidence along with the heavens and the earth. So, God doesn’t speculate for his own benefit, but in reasoning with us He may let us see how He sees things from our point of view.
One might say that the Bible supports God’s having no need to speculate since He knows all things. 1 Corinthians 14:33 says, “For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.” Well, there is peace when things are settled and no further pursuit to that end is necessary. When man speculates, or theorizes, even doing so for good, it creates some confusion which in a sense disturbs the peace in that area as the people who are involved scramble to find an answer. God already knows the answer, so with God there is peace and the matter is closed.
We can say that God discerns. A dictionary defines discerning as the act of perceiving or recognizing something. That definition could be carried further by saying that to discern is to perceive something BASED on recognition.
God perceives based on His own recognition of what He has created. One incident from the Bible come to mind. In Exodus 32:11-14, Moses attempts to reason with God to change His mind about killing the Hebrews in for being a "stiff-necked people" as He says in Verse 9. He says to God in Verses 11-13, “O LORD, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did he bring them out, to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your burning anger and relent from this disaster against your people. 13 Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self, and said to them, ‘I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your offspring, and they shall inherit it forever.’” In Verse 14, God "relented."
If we take Exodus 32:11-14 on its face and not “speculate” on the possibility that God already determined that He wouldn’t kill the Hebrews before he told Moses in Verse 10 to let Him alone to kill the Hebrews, that maybe He just wanted Moses to appreciate the mission that God gave him in bringing the Hebrews to the Promised Land. So putting that aside, God recognizes the effect He would have on neighboring nations like Egypt and on His own vision for the Hebrews if He was to kill the Hebrews, in a sense that He knows how Man would react to such a thing as well as the consequences to His vision. So one might say that God relented before He actually “relented.”
With all this, we must keep in mind what it says in Isaiah 55:8 – “’For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the LORD.” And a true and pure faith in God involves trusting in Him without knowing everything there is to know about him. I tell you that even if we managed to read every book alluded to in the last Verse of the Book of John, IF they were even available for us to read, we still wouldn’t know all there is to know about God. All we know is in a sense that we would not speculate on something we already know, God does not speculate; He does discern.
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