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Why would a perfect being make an imperfect world?
RE: Why would a perfect being make an imperfect world?
(February 16, 2017 at 12:18 pm)Asmodee Wrote:
(February 16, 2017 at 2:57 am)Godschild Wrote:


No, I'm thinking it's your inability to understand the difference between Jesus the god and Jesus the man.  It is a difficult concept.  I'll give you that. 

I understand very well who Christ, Jesus and the Messiah "is" and no it's not difficult.

Asmodee Wrote:I'm not sure if you believe in the trinity, three distinct persons made of a single being (it sounds as if you do) or no trinity, they are all just manifestations of the same single being.  Regardless, you have Jesus the god and Jesus the man.  I can't believe I'm about to give you a Sunday School lesson, but here goes.

The trinity consists of three distinct beings who are the one Godhead. I can't believe you would ask that from a Southern Baptist and I thought my statement was quite clear.

Asmodee Wrote:God is perfect.  God it not subject to weaknesses of the flesh such as temptation.  Yet Jesus was tempted for 40 days.  Why would the devil bother to tempt a God he knew full well was beyond temptation?  Because Jesus was more than simply a piece of God, Jesus was also a man and it was Jesus, specifically, NOT just "God the son", who was the Christ.

God the Son has always been Jesus, Christ and Messiah, all four names/titles belong to the same person of the Godhead. God is omnipresent and in that has always existed all the time in all times. You're trying to separate them and that's not possible, Jesus, the Christ and the Messiah are all the same person in the trinity. You should read John 10:22-30, in verses 30 Jesus himself said, "I and the Father are one." Meaning that He is as much God as the Father is. Now that we have this established let's see why Jesus was able to be tempted. When Jesus left His place in heaven to come and fulfill the plan of salvation He had to suffer as a man and in that He had to suffer temptation. The only way this was possible was for Him to lay down His powers in heaven and not take them up again until He returned. If you're wondering this is in the scriptu

  Only as a man was he subject to tribulation, temptation and pain.  God is beyond all these things.  So while the argument can be made, and rightly so, that the three bits have always existed, the one bit WAS NOT "the Christ" until AFTER being born in flesh.

Your claim was that free will consisted solely of your ability to choose to accept or deny, specifically, Christ.  NOBODY in the twelve tribes of Israel accepted Christ because God the Christ had not yet been born.  While "God the son" may have existed, "God the Christ" did not.  As I said, I know it's a difficult concept.  But "the Christ" is also known as JESUS Christ because he's not "the Christ" until you add the fleshy bits.  So yes, before the birth of Jesus people worshiped the same God, but they did not "accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior".  Jesus was "the Christ".  PART of him was God the son.  The other part was man.  Until you put the two together you don't have a Christ.  People don't seem to understand that Christ is a title, not a name, and I think that might be where you are getting confused.

(February 16, 2017 at 2:57 am)Godschild Wrote: I know what free will means and I know God can act upon it because of His providence over His creation. Like I said before the only choice that God will not interfere with is our choice to accept Him (Jesus). Jesus said that He and the Father are one and that no one comes to the Son without an invitation from the Father.
God may or may not interfere in some decisions you make or have made but, you will never know if He has unless you are serving Him. God allows you many choices in your life without interference but sinful choices come with a price, non-sinful choices have no price against them by God or man.

GC

I think you do know what free will is.  And I think you know very well you're not using it correctly.  If you didn't know what free will was and you did think you were using it correctly then you would say simply, "God gives us free will."  That's the entirety of what you have to say when you know what it is and believe that you are using it correctly.  But that's not what you say.  You add a definition afterward.  You say, "God gives us free will and that means, specifically, the ability to freely choose to accept or reject Christ."  When you add a definition after a common word or phrase it tells me that you do know what it means and you do know that you're not using it correctly, which is why you feel the need to add the definition you are using, one which you know that no reasonable person would infer on his or her own.

So perhaps you could save some confusion in the future and just stop using the term "free will", using just your definition for it instead.  Because you are not saying we have free will, you are saying we are free to make a single, binary choice.  I know you would really like to shoehorn the concept of free will into what you're saying, but you and I both know very well that it doesn't fit.  So stop lying to yourself and stop lying to me.  Either we have "free will PERIOD" or we have "SOME DEFINITION OF WHAT WE HAVE".  We cannot have both "free will", a term which stands on its own and means the ability to act without interference according to our own will, AND "some restrictive subset of true free will".  It's one or the other AT BEST, and the Bible says it's not "free will", by it's real definition.

An interesting note here, I'm sure you didn't realize you were doing this, but you're confusing the argument as a means of increasing your authority in the discussion.  You start out saying, essentially, that God has a right to fuck with creation however she likes.  I never said she didn't.  If she wants to change what she made that is her right.  I concur with that one hundred percent.  I never even suggested that wasn't true.  But that's not the issue here, is it?  The issue is "DO WE HAVE free will?", not "IS IT GOD'S RIGHT TO INTERFERE WITH free will?"  You've added the issue of God's rights as a way of imparting authority into your position, even though I've never called those rights into question.  And this is why, a few months ago, I stated that, by instinct, I don't trust what Christians are telling me.  You don't even realize when you're slyly changing the conversation to artificially bolster your position, allowing you to argue from a position of more authority.  Rather than make a compelling argument, and let's be honest for a change, it's because you don't have one, you've chosen to assert authority.
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God loves those who believe and those who do not and the same goes for me, you have no choice in this matter. That puts the matter of total free will to rest.
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Messages In This Thread
RE: Why would a perfect being make an imperfect world? - by Godschild - February 17, 2017 at 12:30 am

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