Family of God: [Church_of_Christ] Something To Think About

>Picking up where I left off on 5/29:Foreknowledge.
>Logic:To assert that"proginosko"means only precognition is to strip
predestination and election of any real meaning.

>This conclusion seems unavoidable.If God's elective action is based upon what he already knows is going to happen....what is there to elect.
In the free willy view,God has already seen who will trust in Him
and who will not.Futhermore,He has done nothing to infringe upon the will of any individual in order to cause this trust.What then is the content of this predestination?To what is God predesting them?It cannot
be salvation,since He already sees that they will be saved.

>What this view does,in essence,is to make God a cosmic plagiarist.He
has read the book,decided He liked it,and then has simply declared Him-
self to be the author.In the free willy reality,however,He has had nothing to do with the production of the book.Those who will freely trust Him are actually the ones who wrote it.And yet God comes along to take the credit.Although Paul says that God performed the actions of pre
destining and calling,the free willy denies these actions by posting a series of future decisions in which God has had no part.If the decisions of individuals to trust Christ is foreknown,and yet,man is free,God has no real role in the process descbibed by the apostle.The
concepts of predestination and calling have no real content.They have
become empty vessels that communicate no true reality.

>This should become even more obvious as we see the next implication of
this inadquate view of foreknowledge.

>Futility:The denial of a real predestination provides no escape from
certainty of outcome.

>The stripping of predestination and election of their full force of
meaning does not accomplish what the free willy wishes.Indeed,he is left with the same difficulty.If God knows what I am going to do,whether or not the cause of my action is His preordination,then it must be certain that I will perform that action,make that decision,speak
those words,etc.The free willy then is faced with the same lack of freedom that he finds so abhorrent in the concepts of predestination and
election.The only difference is that he has now lost not only his freedom,but also the very existence of a completely sovereign God.

>Simply put,what God foreknows,must,by necessity,be as fixed as that
which He has decreed.Therefore,to argue for froeknowledge over against
predestination by appealing to the freedom of the will is to argue in a
self-contradictory fashion.No event can be foreknown unless,in some sense,it has been predetermined.If it has not been predetermined ,it would not be certain,therefore God's foreknowledge,as the free willys of foreknowledge,would be useless since the free willy idea of fore-
knowledge posists the fact that God is seeing what will actually take
place.And so,the free willy is left with inconsistency.He must admit to
the certainty of future events or forgo the foreknowledge of God,yet he
also wishes to maintain the absolute freedom of the individual in regard to their decision making process.Unfortunately for the free willy,these two positions are logically irreconcilable.

>As I've said before:foreknowledge demands certainty,an certainty de-
foreordination.

>There is yet one additional argument against the free willy position
that needs to be addressed.It is probally the most important argument
to be made.

>Don't want to make the post to long,so I'll stop here.It will probally
be sometime Tues. before I can get back on.
>Bill.

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