What should a father do?

God ISn't angry about or with His own plan.
His "plan" isn't limited to one justifiably irritating incident.
You have inadvertantly abused the word "plan" in this instance, replacing what includes thousands of years of both good & bad incidents with the one single one, or only the maddening ones.
Do you agree, brad?

Sproul was simply "rollin' with it".
God is satisfied that His plan proceeds exactly the way He intended. He didn't jump for joy when His Son was crucified, but it pleased Him that the reconciliation He intended came to pass. I think you're insisting on calbrating God's motives according to your own temporal values based on your finite concepts of good & evil, pleasure & pain, rather than God's eternal perspective. You value the experience of humanity above the purpose for it perhaps.

I think your questions have much to do with the old arguments against the truth of God's absolute sovereignty which is that it makes us mere puppets or robots. That is just not the case. God is sovereighn and man is responsible. He has every right as our creator to demand obedience and every right to punsih those who are disobedient. He is angry with all those who are not seen in christ and will pour out wrath without mercy on them because they deserve it and have done all they could to earn it. As far as believers are concerned He is wisely brining to pass His purpose in their lives for their ultimate good. Men do evil acts because they are evil men and even though God did ultimately purpose that it happen they did it because they wanted to not because God forced them. He has wisely ordered all things and it will one day show itself to be very good, even the evil that exists.

bradfordl said:

I saw RC Sproul Jr. at a homeshool convention last year. Approached him, introduced myself and after pleasantries asked this: 1. Is God In absolute control of all things at all times? He immediately answered, " Yes". Then 2. Then why is He angry about His own plan? He thought a moment and said, " Because it pleases Him to do so." I smiled, shook his hand, thanked him for his input and went my way.

But why would that please Him?

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I agree with Rick Otto, here. God isn't angry about His plan at all. He's quite pleased with His plan. He's angry at the unrighteous, who suppress the truth in their unrighteousness. But they fit into His plan, a plan of wrath against the unrighteous.
I can't confirm it for certain, but it does seem to me your point about why God's anger questions why the unrighteous wouldn't be judged in that anger, as sinners. So it seems to me this verse fits. God is just -- so His angry condemnations of sinners are just.

in trying to understand.

But your objections so far seem "compartmentalized". In other words, the objections can only arise by isolating one truth & excluding others.

I agree with you on the "wimpiness" complaint. I don't deny His total sovereignity or our total depravity to any degree.

It would NOT be correct to say God "planned" to be angry, simply because He doesn't need to plan His own being... a fact of eternality I suppose.

I don't think Paul basicaly shut up.
The way it is, is that God is good & to question His motives is simply not to believe that. The reasons we may claim for disbelief aren't very numerous, but ignorance is has to be the most sincere among them.
The others mostly involve holding God up to our standards which typicaly include believing there is redeeming value, some innate goodness in every human being. We are ultimately unable to judge their motives, being unable to discern their true heart condition, so we look at their actions forgetting our most noble and altruistic actions are filthy rags if they are products of our own wil instead of His.
Otherwise why would we care and be offended? I wonder how heavily if at all, slaughtering the women & children of Jericho was for the Isrealites. On what do we base our empathy & sympathy? Where does it come from?

You've sort of answered your own question by allowing that God is the PRIME mover, the 1st cause, not a secondary cause. That describes the seperation of motives between God & man. When God created evil(Isaiah 45:7) He dit it for good reason, not because He is evil. Perhaps what is meant by "the perfecting of the saints" necessarily includes suffering - both our own & that of the "vessels chosen for dishonor" & "brute beasts made for destruction".
Thank God it's always been easier for me to reflexively think there must be something unholy about my thinking than there be something unholy about God. Not that I haven't thought that, but it would lead me to think I've been taught something untrue about God. It was easier to have confidence in that thought.

Our electro-chemical processes are predestined, but they are predestined to be "carried out" by US. Biological Determinism (B.F. Skinner) is the Godless logical extreme of that behavior model.

Realy brad, I can't imagine being any closer to these truths and still having them slip thu your fingers.
I have to tell ya brother, predestination & my being responsibe for my own sins was the issue I had to wrestle the longest & hardest with. One thing that always helped was how little I've ever felt like a robot.
THAT feeling has seemed the worst, most real & valid, when I was cavin' in to sin.

You go, brad! You inspire me bro.

I heard a quote somewhere that whenever one has a problem with understanding a doctrine of truth it is most always because they have faulty knowledge and understanding of either 'depravity' or 'sovereignty' or both!

bradfordl said:

You may say that men commit evil acts because they want to, but you also must say they do so because God wants them to, and God is the prime mover. Its not as though God has to allow some unpleasant things as a means to an ends, He can do what He wants.

Still don't understand why.

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I don't think of actions being inherently attributed as good or evil, but I can see how this would cause the problems you're running into. The only time I ever saw particular actions as being attributed simply good or evil was in Moore's ethical philosophy, from 1903 I think.

I think good and evil lie within our motives, not the actions that result. So an action which has the intended good consequences, which result from good motive and whatever evil is ultimately resolved for the good -- I consider that a good and wise action, be it ever so heinous in a microcosm.

You can say you don't understand God's motives, and I would agree, sometimes He's unfathomable. I just don't think He's untrustworthy.

I believe I managed to post it, but it might've been destroyed with a browser crash (happening alot lately). I have been in philosophy before. Maybe my words are hard to track, too. But I think God has some moral desire to put unmerited favor and redemption on public display. To me that says there's a right need for God's creation to lack apparent merit and to need redemption.

If you're interested in this and willing to read through some of John Calvin's anger, I can suggest a book. However, you have to realize, it's in reaction to someone essentially repeatedly calling Calvin a fool for thinking he could claim God's sovereignty in this way -- and there's a sense of anger in his book for having been so shallowly discounted.

In any event, it's Eternal Predestination. This is a long URL, and the this issue is heavily embedded. You can try to tackle around page 185-186 or so to cut down on the sizable reading; just keep in mind a whole lot of groundwork went before this section.

bradfordl said:

Thanks Rick and McWilliams for your comments, and I must tell you they have been helpful even if it doesn't sound like it in what I say. It is good food for thought.

Wrote a long post but it got deleted somehow, which is probably good. Must mean I need to edit.

Short version: I probably do have faulty knowledge of both God's soveriegnty and man's depravity, and that may be the root of my problem. My limited intellect has left me thinking that God is in complete, precise, and active control of all things from quarks to galaxies and motion and time and space. I think that man is totally depraved and deserving of whatever punishment God deems just, and that is hell. I accept both those things as true.

What I'm looking at is basically the idea of God writing all our days in His book before any of them were. Leaving aside who is culpable, who is it that first concieves of things done? I guess I have this mental picture of God as screenwriter, coming up with all the horrors that humanity has and will commit. That idea scares me, and not in a good way. Rapes, murders, crimes against children, grotesque torture, beasts like the BTK killer, whole cultures fixated on blood and beheadings (mohammedans) all created in the mind of God. And then the horrors of "natural" disasters, the slow, tortuous deaths of people buried alive, drownings by storm or tsunami, death by fire, etc., etc. over and over billions of times over history.

Predestination appears logically necessary to me, but then doesn't that logically extrapolate that every single thought, idea, and action had to be concieved of by the Predestinator before any of it began? I don't know what to think of a mind that comes up with all this. I have trouble rectifying that with holiness and righteousness.

So obviously I'm all messed up, but God is soveriegn, and He's gonna resolve all this for me in one way or another so I'll just have to hang and rattle until He does.

Thanks

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Think of it this way. Man knows as much about God as a worm knows about man.

Romans 11:
[33] O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!
[34] For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counseller?
[35] Or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again?
[36] For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen.

My only advice is to pray alway and cling to the only one worth clinging to, Jesus Christ.