Posted by DK on 6/22/2001, 4:18 pm

God calculates it all Posted by Marvin on 4/18/2001, 7:13 pm , in reply to "So who cares if God is a Trinity or One? What I really want to know is..." Dave, I can understand your difficulty in grasping why these things in the Old Testament had to be. But remember that God has foreknowledge about which people are going to choose to walk with him and which people aren't, and whose descendents are going to choose to walk with him and whose aren't—even thousands of years ahead of time. From the beginning of time, he set it so that the largest number of those whom he foreknew were going to walk with him would be born. And when there came some individuals who would only have children, grandchildren and descendents who would reject him, in his divine foreknowledge he decreed that the time had come for that person's lineage to cease, and he allowed that person to die or be killed before having his children, which was an act of divine mercy on all those who would be born from that person and not walk with him. He didn't create this world desiring for bloodshed to take place, but how much less did he want many more myriads of souls to come into existence than did, who would only reject him and spend eternity in hell. I know it was a dirty job, his people going among all the "-ites" and putting them to the sword, men, women and children. But humans, even the Israelites, had hard hearts, sometimes with the desire to kill, and God just made that all play right into his plan. If they didn't, he would have allowed disease or something else to get them. And it would have been worse watching billions from each person have to suffer throughout all eternity because they did come into existence and were born. When the spies went into Jericho and promised Rahab they would spare her if she'd help them escape, it was God who was pulling the whole situation all together. It was to spare the one single soul in the entire city who chose to repent and walk with him. She was even listed in the faith hall of fame in the New Testament: "By faith Rahab the harlot...." Every single time somebody back then disobeyed God and didn't put someone to death as they were commanded to, it was God who was overseeing the situation, calculating (as we say it, speaking according to the ways of man) which persons it would be from whom would come souls who, either in later generations now past, or at the end of the ages, would finally come to walk with him, and it was God who was deciding that—although Satan thought each time he was gaining a victory in leading some Israelites to disobey—he, God, was going to allow each case to live, again, for the same reason: because of what they or their descendents were going to decide about walking with him, which God knew ahead of time. Every time somebody gets killed walking across the street or dies of disease or something before having children, God is calculating it all. I am not stating predestination now. Quite the contrary. People's free choice to accept God or reject him, but his divine foreknowledge about who is and who isn't going to. It's the analogy about the canoe (that one person on this board dislikes so much). When I read the Old Testament and saw how the Gentiles were afflicting God's people on all sides, there came a time when I wondered to myself, 'Why didn't God just... VAPORIZE the Gentiles?' Until I stopped and thought about what I was saying. And if he had, where would I ever have come from? (I want to believe I am walking with him today, still carrying with me the truths I learned in the days when I was at Chapel.) Though it may have been THOUSANDS of years in advance, he knew from the beginning that from among the Gentiles there would one day come many, many, people who would embrace the Gospel of his Son, who would walk with him, and who would be with him in glory for all eternity—including us—and that's why he didn't "just vaporize" our ancestors the Gentiles. But, you may ask, what about all those billions of souls in India and China all throughout the ages who never even had a chance to know him and had to end up perishing eternally? Again, in his divine foreknowledge, he knew that from those people, at the end of the ages, hundreds of millions (maybe billions, what do I know?) would come to him, and that was why he didn't allow them all to die (as Don Barnett would have decreed). This has yet to happen, but I know it's going to. I'm seeing it happen in the country where I live. As I cut a corner walking through the courtyard of a Catholic cathedral near where I live and see a huge bronze statue of Friar Bartholomew of Las Casas, I am reminded of what he did. It seems like an abomination—it is, in fact—but I know God was overseeing it, and I know why he was. De Las Casas lived during the later part of Columbus' lifetime, and as the native people were refusing to accept Roman Catholicism and were being slaughtered en masse by the Spanish soldiers under the direction of the Catholic clergy, he went through the old Catholic books and found what was supposed to be done in cases like that. He took some time to study their pagan religions, then altered Roman Catholicism—as if it weren't pagan enough already—so that it was almost identical to them, in the rural regions where these people lived, but with Roman Catholic names attached to everything, while the Spanish version of the Catholic religion in the capital city, where all the Spaniards lived, remained pretty much the same as it was in medieval Spain. The native people accepted it that way, and as a result they weren't slaughtered. Now what has happened to their millions of descendents today? As I spend the equivalent of a few dimes to take peasant busses to these rural areas today and walk into their Pentecostal churches and see them wearing the same colorful clothing their ancestors wore before Columbus ever set foot on the continent, I see these people there on their knees, in the pews, clapping, singing, throwing up their arms in praise to God, praising him in tongues, worshiping him—in mass numbers, literally millions today, in a country of only a few million population (12 million, to be exact). Friar Bartholomew of Las Casas doesn't display any more signs of having been born again than any other average Roman Catholic monk in medieval days, but I see that what he did resulted in bringing MILLIONS of souls into the kingdom of God. Same thing everywhere in the world. "Wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many there are who go in through it, and strait is the gate, and narrow is the way that leads to life, and few there are who find it." "Many are called, but few are chosen." But God wants many to be born, even when it's only a few from among them who will walk with him. The more people there are who are born, the more there will be in the kingdom of God, even if it's only a tiny percentage. The more lives that are saved in poor countries through charity, the more souls there will be in heaven in eternity—even if it's only a tiny percentage. I disagreed with Don Barnett when he screamed from the pulpit, "Let 'em starve! Let 'em starve!" as he preached against charity and then explained that it was because in pagan countries they were only procreating more darkness and more souls that were going to end up in hell. There was only one problem with that rationale. Don Barnett is not God (as his followers have always had such a hard time understanding). He doesn't know which people in which lands are going to have descendents who are going to walk with God. And therefore he, Don Barnett, does not have the authority to decide who should live and who should die. After the day came when I figured all this out, I later applied it to the Chapel doctrine of pro-choice which Don arrived at from the same kind of reasoning (he, Don Barnett, thinking he has the divine authority to decide who's going to walk with God and who isn't, and therefore, who should live and who should die) which I had grown up believing, and then, for the first time in my life, due to the same corrected rationale, years after leaving Chapel, I came to the conclusion that abortion was wrong. It's murder, and we mustn't be doing it, nor condoning it being done by others. And again, Don Barnett isn't God and he doesn't have any more authority to decide that than anyone else. Maybe I got off onto a little tangent here, but I hope with this I can help you to understand why it is that our loving God permitted—and even commanded—all the bloodshed in the Old Testament. He is a merciful God. Not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. And God causes all things to work together to good for those who love him and are called according to his purpose.