I wanted to encourage everyone to stop by overflowmag.com and read some some of the open letters to President Litfin. People have written in response to a email Litfin sent out to alumni asking for prayer for the coming soulforce event.
Please read and post your own thoughts!
http://overflowmag.com/81
I probably won’t get to my thoughts about the Biblical foundations about free-will and predestination in this post at all. Rather, I’d like to address one of the dangers that comes up when we start to get honest and talk about this subject. Listen carefully and you might pick up on which direction I lean.
First and foremost, I am NOT a robot. I know you where probably constructing your theories and questioning whether the pictures are real, but seriously I’m not. What I mean by saying this is to address the most common response I hear from people when they are presented with the idea of predestination. IF predestination is true they say, then no choice they make is their own, they are a robot pre-programmed for every action. Therefore, one might say, what is the use of doing anything? I’ll just sit here, cause obviously that’s what God predestined me to do right?
Whether I believe theologically in predestination or not, I am still personally physically and mentally making my own decisions. If I jump, sit, sleep, eat, smile, yell, or laugh, each I have complete control over those choices (whether I’m predestined to do them or not).
I’ll try to present a brief anology, but it will fall short of proving effective unless you do your best to stretch your imagination a little. The whole problem with an anology on this topic is it is an attempt to explain God with human consructs, I find that’s not quite possible. You’ve probably seen one of those magic tricks online where you read a series of things and then say the first word that comes to your mind, “carrot” and low and behold there it is when you scroll down the very word you where thinking of. The reason they knew is because people simply tend to choose that word. But they didn’t FORCE you to choose that word. Now, what if we just always chose that word, that’s just the way people are…would that mean we suddenly lost our free-will? Now multiple that infinity times.
To Be Continued… (In other words, at some point I WILL talk about which I believe [I’m not quite sure yet] and why).