Topic 7-8 - Providence, Free will and Suffering.

God's Providence

Bible records God's providence for His people.

• as Creator, He has provided everything we have - food, shelter, family - everything - so we should thank Him for everything!

As the God of His people Israel. Many acts of providence.

• manna in the wilderness
• delivery from Egypt
• victory in battles
• he promised land

For Christians, the greatest providence was the provision of a means of reconciliation with Himself through Christ's death.

Often God's promises are hard to believe! As an old woman, a son is promised to Sarah and she laughs!

God promises to make Israel a great nation - Pharaoh orders all the new-born Hebrew boys be thrown in the Nile. How would their mothers feel about that promise?

Christians believe that God's providence works in their lives. But often only see it in retrospect.

In the present much faith in God's promises is often required.

Question is: Do we trust God's Word or our experience?

'God has a plan for my life'?
How do we find it?
'Opening and shutting doors' Acts 167
How does God do it? Throws ideas into people's brains?
Exodus 7³ God hardened Pharaoh's heart.
Isaiah 44²⁸ God uses Cyrus.

Difficulties with Providence

• the story of Mr Jones.

Free Will

Donald Mackay 'Science, Chance and Providence'

Are we puppets, play-actors or agents?

Puppet
Not conscious being, Look like persons but actions determined by conscious human string-puller.

 

Play-actor
Conscious person who simulates another. The actor may have different ideas, morals etc from the person simulated.

 

Agent
Conscious person whose actions are determined by their own ideas, morals and purposes.

We relate to God as created agents.
As agents, we are responsible for our own decisions.
But we are created, so our continuing existing life depends on God's sustaining (immanent) power.

We cannot disobey God's creative will ('Let there be ....')
But we can disobey His normative will ('Thou shalt not ...')
Creative will functions from God's (5D?) standpoint.
Normative will is worked out in our 4D world.

Play-acting metaphor: we are characters in an historical play - we don't know the future and we can make decisions.
God can see the whole drama from his standpoint - right up to the closing curtain.

Distinguish between:

1. God creates a world-history in which you make a correct moral choice.
2. God makes you choose right.

In case 1, God is acting creatively form 5D - you are a free agent.

In case 2, God forces your action in the 4D world.

In case 1, God is in 5D and is not answerable to anyone in 4D, certainly not for what one of His free agents does.
God does not make people act wickedly. But He does hold in being the world history in which they do so.

The nails.

Case 2 - In 4D world God sends his Agent, the Holy Spirit, who inspires us to choose right. Not forcing.

SUFFERING

The balcony and the road.

Suffering the price we pay for being alive.
Suffering animals are 'put down'.
'pathemata mathemata' suffering is education.
Greatest creativity arises - Van Gogh, Beethoven.

Orson Welles: from Switzerland? The cuckoo clock!

To be human is to want freedom - civil rights etc.

Freedom - to make mistakes, hurt, cause evil.

Jean-Paul Sartre: "condemned to freedom".

Some fear freedom - choose legalistic religions?

Tragedy of the human predicament - we cannot control the suffering which inevitably comes.

Many cultures have developed ways of coping.

Problem seems worst in the comfortable West! - cultural Pelagianism.

Pelagianism - 5th cent. Rome: humans in total control of the situation, including relation to God.

We want to be in control - use science and technology to achieve it.

But tendency not to face facts of life - suffering is one fact.

Suffering "pricks the bubble of optimism"

An offence. An outrage.

Dissatisfaction with our world. -> Utopia.

Marxist solution: Problem is capitalism. Revolution will solve it.

New Testament: Second coming of Christ is the only hope. Revelation 22.

Some facts about suffering:

1. It is unavoidable.
2. Often we cannot explain why they occur.
3. Sufferings test our faith.
   if your life was perfectly pleasant, how could you prove that you were a Christian to yourself or anyone else?
4. God is with us in our trials.
   Behaviour shows what Christians believe is true.
5. Trials remind us of the uncertainty of life. TV not enough. We need to experience our own fears of death.

Further Information

Contact

• Associate Professor Robert J. Stening