Perseverance of the saints

In Reviewing this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perseverance_of_the_saints

It states the following, “The central tenet of the Arminian view is that believers are preserved from all external forces that might attempt to separate them from God, and further that God will not change His mind about their salvation, but that these same believers can themselves willingly repudiate their faith (either by a statement to that effect, or by continued sinful activity combined with an unwillingness to repent). Thus, their salvation is conditional on remaining faithful.

Traditional Calvinists do not dispute that salvation requires faithfulness, and the point of difference between these Calvinists and Arminians is over whether God allows true Christians to fall away. Free Grace advocates agree with traditional Calvinists that salvation cannot be lost but with the Arminians that true Christians can backslide or fall away. However, the Free Grace advocates and the Arminians do not define repudiation in the same way: the former sees backslidden believers as merely “carnal,” hindering their sanctification process, whereas the latter sees them as having fallen from the saving grace they once possessed.”

My personal opinion is probably close to Armianism but more targeted. Grace is freely offered to all BUT one must choose to accept the grace; One must WANT the life that God offers (we must knock then he opens the door; grace is freely given but we must choose to recieve) and not just use grace as licence.  To me “backsliding” or the sin of believer is covered by grace because that person desires the life God offers. If a person states “I don’t care what God wants I’m going to do what I want. Forget Gods way of doing life, I want to do life the way the rest of the world does it”, and this is truly the condtion of thier heart then I would say it is possible they are not covered unless they later (prehaps sometime later) come back and ask for grace in earnest.

Additionally are we truly preserved from all external influence? Of course not! There are daily challenges to our relationship with God.However no external force on its own can separate us from God. It would be only of our own volition.

Practically this has issues; if a person says they’re done with God, they walk outside after ’sinning’ and get hit by a bus; are they saved? My answer is that only God knows the true condition of their heart and THAT is what he will judge.

An even more difficult situation would be the one where an person is incarcerated for their faith and tortured, or worse made to be addicted to mind altering drugs; and there by renounces their faith or does sinfulacts while under the influence. What of this person? How then will they be judged? If evil men were to “break” a believer, would this man in fact be saved? Or since in some way the man might have acquiesced, is he then responsible for his own actions? It maybe then that only God can know the answers to these questions since it is he that will judge the heart.

And of cource this immediatly goes back into the freewill discussion about how much frewill do you have, and if God is pursing you can you still tell him no etc. But hey, food for thought.

Dew drops like radiant sapphires cling to the morning grass.
The tranquil moment is disturbed by the scintillating caress of a cool morning breeze.
A man stands in the midst of a field, eyes closed, enraptured in an introspective moment.
The crash of an airliner casts sonic dispersions below.

The man drops his denim clad knees to the moist earth, the Sapphires burst.
The wind increases its bite; whipping leaves… wet denim chills the flesh below.
Time breaks, shatters and reforms in the gasp of this one wily moment.
The unavoidable, inconvenient, and absurd; it is decided; it happens today.

My Relpy to an ex-coworkers My Space post.

—————– Bulletin Message —————–
From: Franklin Carpenter

Date: Nov 29, 2007 1:07 PM
Like a lot of folks in this state, I have a job. I work, they pay me. I
pay my taxes and the government distributes my taxes as it sees fit. In
order to get that paycheck, I am required to pass a random urine test
with which I have no problem. What I do have a problem with is the
distribution of my taxes to people who don’t have to pass a urine test.
Shouldn’t one have to pass a urine test to get a welfare check because
I have to pass one to earn it for them? Please understand, I have no
problem with helping people get back on their feet. I do, on the other
hand, have a problem with helping someone do drugs, while I work. . . .
Can you imagine how much money the state would save if people had to
pass a urine test to get a public assistance check? Pass this along if
you agree or simply delete if you don’t. Hope you all will pass it
along, though . . . Something has to change in this country — and
soon!

——————–My Reply————————–

Interesting thought. I’m not sure that I agree with that entirely but I’ll add these two thoughts.

1) Not everyone that has a job has to take urine tests. And, quite frankly I’d be a bit insulted if I was getting an outstanding job performance rating and then asked to take a drug test.
My question would be if my employer does not have a cause have to issue me a test for business reasons why should they at all? (this is in reference to random/regular drug testing not for initial employment, which is more justified, being that they don’t know you yet.) While I don’t support drug use anyway, the implied accusation/suspicion is upseting.

2) I’m not sure I like the idea of the government administering drug tests to people without probable cause; makes it seem like your guilty until proven innocent.
HOWEVER, I could see this for someone that is applying for welfare, and has prior convictions (felony or misdemeanor) for possession or what not.
Also, would these drug tests be grounds for a criminal/misdemeanor charge or just suspension of benefits? And for how long? One screw up and you can never get benefits again? or is the cooling off period a month, a year…? Putting this type of legislation in place would have to involve a careful examination of how it would impact those it is supposed to be helping. For example, a family where the father does drugs but the mother is clean and there are kids involved for instance, do you cut off the whole family because dad’s a deadbeat? Do you call CPS based on this positive test?

3) Okay 3 points then. Finally, this is why I question the validity of the government being involved in “charity” like this in the first place. If this were a private organization; they could place whatever rules they deem to be necessary for to ensure a proper disribution of benefits. With the end of the of the welfare state and the presumed reduction in taxes we (as a nation), would have more disposable income to donate to the aforementioned charities. Those charities that one believes will distribute the funds in a manner that one believes to be proper, would receive ones donations. This puts you in control of how your money is charitably distributed. But that’s the libertarian in me =)

Open Theism

UPDATE 12/1/2007 - I’ve been thinking more about this topic, and I’m realizing that this is probably too limited a conceptualization of this whole idea. I’m going to ratiocinate more about it and write an updated post at another time. What’s really important any way is loving God, loving people, and staying connected to/through the holy spirit.

Extract: God can predict the future very accurately but does not know absolute certainties of future events. These predictions have higher confidence in some areas than others based on the amount of influence of free will beings. God gave us (mankind) free will because without free will we can not be moral agents.

That God changes in some respects implies that God is temporal, working with us in time. God, at least since creation, experiences duration. [1]God is everlasting through time rather than timelessly eternal. Once he chose to create the universe, time existed regardless of it’s prior state, and God has experienced it’s flow. After the lengthy creation process (I’m a “day” is a period of time not 24 hours person, see: http://home.teleport.com/~salad/4god/genesis.htm for statistical proofs), he creates free-will agents, humans, in his image to rejoice with him in his creation. At that point he has removed a degree of certainty from the future, because as John Elseth states, (in order to be in God’s image, indeed capable of good)
” You may keep your boy’s hands out of mischief by tying them behind his back, but to the extent to which this takes away from him the power of doing wrong, to the very same extent does it deprive him the power of doing right. To ask why God did not give Adam a more perfect will is as absurd as to ask why the square has not been endowed with the properties of a circle. God could not have given Adam a more perfect will. Every will is a perfect will. The perfection of a will consists , not in being able to choose only one course, but in being able to choose either of two courses. Right-doing is praiseworthy just because it implies that wrong doing might have been done but was not. To make a man virtuous is an impossibility even for an omnipotence. To make a man virtuous is a contradiction of terms. A forced goodness is always a contradiction of terms. Omnipotence, it must always be remembered , is not the power to do the impossible; it is the power to do all possible things. A man might be divinely compelled to refrain from evil, but if he were so compelled, there would be no moral value in his refraining. Hence compelling him to refrain form evil is not, after all, compelling him to be virtuous. A virtuous character can not be bestowed upon any one by a creative act from without. It must be the outcome of his own free will within. God can create innocent beings, every child that is born into the world is innocent; but He cannot create a perfect character, for character is the result of a man’s own voluntary choice.
The origin of evil, then, just like the origin of good, lies in the power of choice. God must have been (if I may so state) necessitated, by His very goodness, to create beings capable of goodness. Such beings must be free. This freedom carries with it the possibility of sin. It lies in the very nature of things–that if there is free choice the possibility of good and evil must exist”

So in order to create beings in his image they must have free will. That free will led to sin/evil. God from the issuance of free will may no longer know any of the future as it relates to man because free will creates variables in the equation. However, God can predict, with a high level of precision, what ones actions may be. This is true of everything. The closer to the present the higher the degree of confidence in the probabilities. Also the further removed from the variable the higher the degree of confidence. In other words, human beings actions have scope. (see Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger) The amount by which our actions affect other people and things. So people and things that are far away from me are not as readily affected by my actions. For instance a planet in a galaxy on the other side of the universe is not affected by what I choose to eat for lunch in any appreciable way at this moment in time. However, it could have an effect in 10 million years because of the chain of events it unleashes in the present. In the lunch example, I chose to eat at a cafeteria, that decision made the owner money, it employed people that worked there, my simple being there as a person in line changed the timing of peoples days, what I chose to eat meant that someone else could not have it (perhaps they ran out later). This effect cascades out from there on every choice we make. Perhaps, the person I made late, didn’t get hit by a car and so taught a class on Physics later on to a brilliant child that found some new principals that opened the door to further development that in 10 million years means that we’ll be visiting that planet. So while you could deal with ALMOST absolute certainty with certain object for a specified time, beyond a certain point humanities free will sphere of influence grows. So God knowing all possibilities can predict the next 10 min, 1year 10 years, 100 years quite accurately on that planet across the universe, however the more local influences of my lunch choice while predictable are far more dynamic. In other words, my actions on a local scale and their immediate interactions with other free will agents makes earth a quandary that is very difficult to predict indeed. Not by any means impossible for God, who know the thoughts and intents and the histories of all humans at once, but it makes it harder to know with certainty precisely what will happen next on a longer time line.
Now obviously God is greater than humans in immediate knowledge and thus because of that knowledge can predict very accurately over a much longer time line than we can. This is because God knows everything that is and was and he can predict much of what will be, however they are just probable possibilities until they occur and become knowable fact. The end of days is interesting in that God determines when the event occurs but it seems that it will occur at a point when man has, unfortunately achieved the markers set forth in Revelation.

Let me be clear, we do not control God. As the creator of the universe he has the option to end our free will at once and destroy everything, it would seem against his nature to do this though. (See God sparing places for the sake of a righteous person) God by creating the universe with a certain set of rules, while still being the MOST powerful, MOST knowledgeable and the MOST GOOD; created a schema for the way this reality will function. He also seems to work within the bounds of this physical reality in most cases. This, as mankind has progressed has led some people to call “miracles-workers” charlatans. To me when Isaiah called fire down on those that came to kill him as he sat upon the hilltop, it very well could be that God cause very targeted meteor fall to land right there at that moment. Other than solving where the hell fire and brimstone came from, I see no problem with this interpretation, it would take a miracle of God for a man, in God’s name to speak and cause asteroids to fall. Use of objects from physical reality does not lessen the miraculous nature of the event, but shows God’s own desire to use his creation on itself to his own end (and for OOP’s out there like data crunching data- lol ed.). To me the explanation of miracles through our limited scientific means, simply reflects that God knows a lot more about the physical universe than we do; most miracles can’t be replicated today by any means and future replication doesn’t negate their significance from the past or their importance in the present.

More quotes from “Did God Know?” by Elseth - See my post on “Good?”
“If we use the word goodness as a synonym for God, we must remember that God is good because He chooses to be good. If we say that God is simply a “blob” of good in the sky who can do nothing but good, because He is good, you then destroy the factor of choice. If you eliminate choice you eliminate virtue. This would make God no different than a machine operating out of necessity in proportion to the quality of its construction and the ability of its operator”

Also, some quick caveats here:
In this article, Greg Boyd, Open Theist refutes John Piper (http://www.twtministries.com/articles/9_openness/piper.html)
I have a problem with Greg’s statement in this paragraph:
“Third, I have no difficulty affirming that God can and does at times unilaterally intervene and work in a coercive way to bring about a certain state of affairs. I would only add that a) he doesn’t do this all the time, and b) he doesn’t coercively use persons in violation to the character they have acquired by their choices and then hold these persons morally responsible for what he made them do.”

Any direct coercive intervention would break the foundations of open theism; in so much as if it ever occurs in this fashion, to bring about a desired result… ends cannot be seen to justify the means; a forced goodness is always a contradiction of terms. In the same vein though, when God “hardens pharaohs heart” to me that is God stepping back, which is his choice and allowing Pharaoh to follow his nature. This could also allow demons more direct access.? I still hold that if Pharaoh had at any point dropped down and said, “Holy is the LORD woe is me and my inequity, God grant me grace for my transgressions.” The LORD may have spared Egypt some plagues; besides Pharaoh had lots of opportunities to let the Israelites go; he CHOSE not to.

I’ll caveat on myself now. Once we are Christians and ask God to take a dominate and controlling interest in our lives through the Holy Sprint, we have invited God to do life with us. This results in a blending of wills wherein our old self dies and we are recreated is a new person in Christ. Can we still choose to go against God? Sure, we all sin and fall short and will continue to do so until the LORD comes again. However, I’m comforted in knowing that I’m loved by God and that as one of his own, he will pursue me when I stray, even if he directs events to occur that would seem to invite the assumption of causality.

The final piece on this is PRAYER. Open theists, which I will now state, I generally agree with but not completely, hold that since the future is unknown prayer has POWER. The kind of power the Jesus professed that it had and has. I’m fascinated and want to look into further how praying about someones choices might provide God a pathway by which to exert his power through the holy sprint. Ex. I was far from God and I had a lot of my family praying for me, and I believe that that prayer had a lot of influence in bringing me to where I am today, even perhaps in violation of my free will. I’m conflicted in a way because when Saul was on the road to Damascus (whoops to much WOW almost put Darnassus) he was blinded by the LORD and asked why he was persecuting Jesus’s people. Some pretty direct intervention there. But that presupposes that God acted of his own accord only. If there was a man that was persecuting Christians today, should our response not be to pray for him to receive Christ’s grace? How many martyr stories are there where those that held the believers captive were themselves converted. God responds to our prayers and I’m very fascinated and intrigued by the interplay of this… So, whose to say the early church was not praying for his conversion as well, prayer for your enemies is powerful.

[1] Opentheism.info

Good?

Some recent thoughts:

What is the nature of GOOD?

Good is a definition.

It holds value because of a choice for it and not for evil. This is virtue.

God at the beginning of the universe could, along with the physical laws
(gravity, physics, etc.) have created spiritual laws.

This would in effect DEFINE what good is in the context of the universe.

Two questions stem from this.

Is God’s essence the definition of good, where by if God was to do something
“bad” the boundary of where good stops and evil begins would move in real time?
(IE God murders someone so now it is good to murder?)

OR

Is it defined by God at creation in the abstract and he chooses to be a good,
loving God. Wherein he CHOOSES to always do good. In this hypothetical, God’s
choice to murder would not make it Good action. It would be a breaking of his
own predefined rule and Profoundly disturbing but not definitively changing.

I tend to lean toward the second option. Since we are made in Gods image we can
attempt an examination from that vantage point: and our primary
difference over other creatures is free will the things that define some of the
special nature of God might be found in a comparison of man to
animals.

Man:
Free but imperfect will
Desires to do good, but fails
Sees the beauty of creation and the repulsive nature of mans evil.

God:
Free and perfect will
Desires to do good and does
Sees the beauty of creation and the repulsive nature of man’s sin; sent his son
for their redemption and restoration.

Now the one lingering question is what IS good, if God defined it as the
beginning, what was that definition?

Drilling down on good through m-w.com reveals that good is defined by one’s
moral standard.

So to find what God defines as good one should look in his book (bible).

(This since God was the original definer of good for the universe)

God’s moral standard was used as the basis for the universal definition of good
and he chooses to be good in relation to self predefined standard. Note that if
God we’re outside of time that then this would equate with the first option
wherein God’s essence continually defines good, if however as I presuppose that
at least since the creation of the universe he has experienced a liner
existence; then that event is predefined and thus immutable in the present.)

Someone with a humanistic Point of view might hold that since moral standards
define what is good who is to say that there IS a universal good? Isn’t good
just what I make it out to be? No. Because at the end God will stand in
judgment using his standard. This makes it important we know what good IS to
God.

I am Jacks monolithic marketing machine:

So, we went to IKEA for the first time yesterday and as any person that has watched Fight Club 48 times could tell you, it was not as I had expected. The movie had led me to believe that I should expect a furniture floor room that had prices spinning about every item on display. The reality was far more commonplace. IKEA is a marketing machine, using every possible marketing scheme known to man and every corporate cost saving tip ever coined.

The store is a maze, which we went though backwards initially. Perhaps, it was this that granted insight in to the inner mechanizations of this sales behemoth, kindred to proof reading an easy backwards; not that one does not still fall prey… Starting at the beginning is good and so after having previewed all that I shall discuss here, we began in the living room display area.

I had envisioned some sort of standard furniture store setup, seen at the likes of LACKS, or HAVERTY’s. Such setups have the stigma of when I last darkened those doorways. This was a decade or so ago with my parents, in their never ending and notoriously boring, search for the perfect “X” piece of furniture. I’d swear we went to 95% of the furniture places in a 50 mile radius of town. So this was actually a good thing for IKEA, but, a difference from my expectation none the less.
Attempting to find that which you have seen on line is somewhat hampered by the fact that there are multiple locations for items of the same style but different types. Thus when we had found the section for the style of coffee table we wanted, we still couldn’t find the specific one we wanted.

This brings us to asking an associate. On this occasion there was one close at hand and we quickly we directed to where we needed to go. All of our dealings with associates seemed efficient and our requests answered satisfactorily. Finding them however is another issue. They seemed to move about the store like centaurs, owners of the maze. They other attribute they all had in common is that they all seemed to be late for tea with the mad hatter….

So the way that IKEA handles large items. Larger items are tagged with their location in the warehouse, checkout section of the store. This is cleaver in that you can go, “this looks great, we’ll get one of those” and you don’t have to carry it around with you while you shop their smaller wares. This deceases your consciousness of how much your spending (usually governed by how dull your cart is). The system is very similar to that which BEST used back when they were still around. However, best had warehouse monkeys that brought you stuff out for you. At IKEA your the warehouse monkey. That’s cost savings baby.

Now I’ve alluded to this store being a maze, and it is. So leaving from one section trying to move forward is like two steps forward on step back and waltz waltz waltz. So it takes awhile. It also tends to remind you, as you walk though replicas of every room in your house, of those few things your missing in each room. Score another one for IKEA. Now the first part of the display area is almost done after wandering in the kitchen area for forty years (ok, minutes) when you realize they put all of the kids toys right at the exit. While we didn’t have too much trouble on this day (a testimony to our “you don’t have to walk if you ride in the cart” plan) however it is one of those last gasp actions that you might expect so that you will waste just enough time so that when you get to…

The food court, cafeteria, “Swedish Diner”, whatever you want to call it. It is an ingenious money sucking plan. Now I had not previously mentioned, some of the carts have an advertisement on them, that proclaims that IKEA offers child’s meals for 99 cents (where their marketing team put the other penny consumer never know but it sure is better that way somehow)
So, while this was supposed to have been a small, casually trip to check out the store, it was now getting kibd of late. So after eating their bait we had dinner, after going through the cafeteria line, and sinking into a chair. As we got up to continue though the “Bed bath and beyond” portion of Swedish branded Chinese goods, I couldn’t help but wonder where the hook was. Then I realized that I had eaten where I was shopping so I could shop more, this is never a good sign.

After several misadventures involving the acquisition of coffee, a really sweet coffee tea thing, bed pillows, bamboo blinds and a cheese grater. We came upon the duvet covers my wife had been looking at. Only, neither one of us was particularly impressed with the quality of the cheaper one we had seen on line (it was jersey knit), and our comforter is midnight navy (and would probably show through)…so now we see a higher quality one down the row. Clunk, Ca-Ching, and IKEA scores again!

The next illuminating (sorry couldn’t help it) location was lamps. Where the price you see on line was just the pole not the shade. Skewed again by IKEA’s clever marketing. Although, we actually got a good deal on their florescent bulbs.

Now remember when I mentioned that you were the warehouse monkey for your large items earlier? So, now you have a cart full of these heavy items you’ve loaded up and finally you arrive at the check out line. Towering over your head, so that there is no possible way a person with any ocular ability at all could miss them, are the worlds largest value menu signs. $1 and you too can have ice cream cones and cinnamon rolls. This appeals to the sweaty warehouse monkey, I mean customer. We did not indulge despite the 4 year olds protests and gyrations.

This was in part because the line took about as long to move an inch as it takes for teenagers (or tired parents) to get out of bed on the weekends. As such they has closed by the time we made it through. IKEA had, as is obligatory, used the checkout isle as a place to purvey those last minute goods. While they had avoided the parentally aggravating wall of confectional doom, decried by all administrators of good nutrition everywhere; they had a new item that at first seemed peculiar. Bags. That’s right bags. Not too strange, but the accompanying sign was. Basically, to help save the environment (read reduce the bottom line) IKEA has decided that you will either need to buy a tarp that was moonlighting as a bag, or make a charitable contribution of 5 cents for every regular “grocery” style bag you desire. So either donate or buy our spiffy new bag at 59 cents. Luckily, God gave me arms, and thankfully he doesn’t charge me to carry stuff out of the store (or as it was, push our bag less shopping carts out).

So in conclusion after spending no less than 3 hours at IKEA, I’m all for the original Fight Club plan.