Question 146, from Carol, United Kingdom
Why is there such as difference in God’s attitude to mankind between the Old and New Testament? e.g. If God gave everyone a free will why did he then override this and harden Pharaoh’s heart in Exodus so that he wouldn’t release the Israelites from Egypt?

There are two big questions here based on two very big assumptions. The first is the assumption that there is a major difference between the way God is depicted as acting towards human beings in the Old Testament compared to the New. The second assumption is that human beings have free will, which God ignored when God chose to ‘harden Pharaoh’s heart’.
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Comment from RS, USA

After reading your reply to MF’s question about God being unpredictable, I feel compelled to point out that God’s Being is Perfect and that the only reason we cannot know or predict His Perfect Doings is because we are all imperfect. beings, given to imperfect understandings and doings. Thus, God uses His Freewill Perfectly and we, being imperfect, are perplexed and mostly ignorant of His Perfect Doings.

Finally, God, our Infinite and Eternal Heavenly Father, has given us free will despite our imperfections and finite lack of life experiences, because it is His Will that we become perfect “even as He is Perfect,” by making our own decisions, both good and bad, and learning from them, on our path to perfection. Indeed, it is clear that if He made us perfect by fiat, we would have no choice, no credit, no dignity for us as perfect robots. We must come to know right from wrong and consistently choose right according to our own free will. This, of course, explains why there is evil and sin in the short run, but in the long run the opportunity for us to grow and progress spiritually and become increasingly more perfect children in our Heavenly Father’s Awesome Divine Family…

A reply from Jon the freelance theologian

There are two problems with this approach. Firstly, in the face of a difficult question for the believer, namely ‘why does God appear unpredictable’, RS seems to advocate a retreat into mystery, in this case ‘God’s perfect ways are over our imperfect heads’. But Christian theology has always contended that, while human beings were created physically finite, in other terms humans have a grasp of the infinite. This is echoed poetically in Ecclesiastes chapter 3, verse 11, where God is described as ‘setting eternity in the hearts of men’.

It is fairly reasonable to assume that as humans are the only creatures created in the image of God (Genesis chapter 1, verses 26-27, and repeated in chapter 9, verse 6), that part of bearing that image would include mental or spiritual alignment. Very few people would argue that it meant physical similarity, especially given that “God is Spirit” (John chapter 4, verse 24). Of course, the doctrine of the Fall of Man means that sin has marred the image of God, but that image can still be restored through belief in Jesus Christ. At some point in the process of salvation, it is believed that Christians will attain perfection, but to say that “we, being imperfect, are perplexed and mostly ignorant” seems to be a pious, yet unpersuasive, cop-out.

The second problem stems from the definition of free will. At a deeper level, free will that is forced on an agent is not free will. There is no choice in the matter. There is, of course, a danger of drifting into a philosophical debate about power and freedom at this point. However, to keep the discussion on course, it is worth pointing out that most of what RS states in his comment is bordering on philosophical speculation about the necessity of free will. Relying on human free will to justify the existence of problematic things like evil, has huge ramifications.

The dilemma is that, in allowing free will, God allows the possibility of sin. But if God is omniscient, then God should know what the outcome of giving free will to human beings would be. Therefore if God knew what the outcome of any action was going to be, it would be very simple for God to prevent that outcome or act in a way to influence it. Deciding not to change the outcome is as much of an action as changing it completely (a ‘sin of omission’). So, this argument relying on human free will is weak. Whatever happens, God has the final decision over whether an action happens or not (unless the believer is willing to accept the idea that there are some actions that God does not know the outcome to).

The Biblical picture of humanity’s choices does not dwell on the concept of free will. Human sin is the result of human rebellion and whether in Eden, or in any other place, the Biblical picture tends to be one of rebellion, not ‘misused free will’. Saying that God ‘had’ to give his creation free will in order for those created beings to mature, puts limits on God’s power. RS says that “it is clear that if He made us perfect by fiat, we would have no choice, no credit, no dignity for us as perfect robots. We must come to know right from wrong and consistently choose right according to our own free will.” But must we? Doesn’t this imply that God is limited in some way? If God is truly omnipotent, as believers tend to proclaim, then surely it would have been possible for God to create beings that knew right from wrong without sinning in the process.

Equally, saying “it is His Will that we become perfect “even as He is Perfect,” by making our own decisions, both good and bad”, is tantamount to saying that humans had to have the opportunity to misuse free will by rebelling against God in order to mature. This seems to imply that the Fall of Man was allowed or tolerated by God. If this is the case then God becomes a morally ambiguous being, who not only allows sin to happen, but also sets the situation up for it to happen, and is therefore the indirect cause of sin, evil and suffering.

Ultimately, of course, calling God ‘faithful’, like any other attribute ascribed to him, is a matter of personal faith on the part of the believer. However, when it appears that God is not faithful, then human beings, imperfect though they are, should be able to ask why that is. If faithfulness is part of God’s nature, then the appearance of unfaithfulness makes it difficult to emulate God as believers seek to we “become perfect even as He is Perfect.”

Thanks for your comment, RS – freelance theology welcomes comments on anything posted on this site, with a view to constructive debate or further discussion.

Two questions on a similar theme, now:

The first is from GT, United Kingdom:

What does it mean for God to be all-knowing?

The second, more specific, but covering the same area is from NP, United Kingdom:

Does human free will override divine purpose? If God knew Adam and Eve were going to fall, why didn’t he prevent sin in the first place?

The Christian description of God owes much to ‘classical theism’ developed by the ancient Greek philosophers, which states that God is eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing and everywhere (omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent). The ‘unmoved mover’ and similar ideas of a primal God that is the source of everything (including the pantheon of Graeco-Roman gods) can be found in the works of Aristotle and Plato. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, many leading Christian theologians had been extensively educated in the works of these philosophers, and so the classical conception of God was absorbed into Christian theology.

This view of God does however clash with the Christian assertion that “God is Love” (1 John chapter 4, verse 16), giving rise to the philosophical conundrum known as the ‘Problem of Evil’. This runs as follows: ‘God is omnipotent, omniscient and loving and therefore can prevent evil and would want to prevent evil. Yet evil exists.’ The reason evil exists has been the subject of much debate in Christian theology, with various justifications (‘theodicies’) being made.

If God is all-knowing, then he would presumably have known the results of giving Adam and Eve (or any human being) free will. The Biblical ‘Fall of Mankind’ (in Genesis chapter 3) is a direct result of God’s gift of free will. Under the classical model, God therefore allowed it to happen and so, through giving free will and not preventing the Fall, God becomes indirectly responsible for the state of the world. That is not to say that God is to blame for sin, but it does explain the extraordinary sacrifice of the Incarnation and death of Jesus Christ, who ‘bore the sins of the world’. The death of Christ took the experience of death, which is the punishment for sin, into the eternal Godhead, removing it from creation.

However, another way of viewing God’s gift of ‘free will’ is found in ‘kenotic theology’. This comes from a phrase in Philippians where Christ is described as ‘emptying himself’ during the Incarnation (Philippians chapter 2, verse 6-11, sometimes the Greek word ekenosen is translated as ‘humbled’, but its literal meaning is ‘emptied’). It could be hypothesised that in order for free will to be genuine, the outcome of any action cannot be known. Therefore, in a similar fashion to Christ’s humbling ‘emptying of himself’, God may have accepted a self-imposed limitation on his omniscience. This could be why later in the Genesis narrative of the Fall, God searches for Adam and Eve and does not know where they are (Genesis chapter 3, verse 9).

There are many competing arguments over why God felt it necessary to give human beings free will. By far the most persuasive is the idea that God seeks reciprocal love from created beings, but for such love to be genuine, it has to be the product of independent decision-making creatures. However, the insistence on adhering to the classical view of God being all-knowing, does impact on the belief in human free will. In short, knowing the outcome gives God the option of influencing any decision and it could be argued that as a result human free will is a total illusion because all consequences are dependent on God.

Thanks for your questions GT and NP.

Question from MF, USA

Why do we call God “faithful” when the #1 fact we know about him is that he is unpredictable – that we don’t ever know what he is going to do? How is it possible to reconcile these two notions of reliability and unreliability?

To say that the prime fact we ‘know’ about God is the unpredictability of the divine nature is perhaps an interesting starting point. But certainly, the experience of many Christians is that there are no formulas, scientific or magic, for determining the outcome of events in which God is involved. Much creative theology has been expended in this area, for example, justifying the existence of evil in a world created by a good God (or at least a God that Christian theology postulates as good).

A simple answer as to why Christians call God faithful is because of the self-declarations of divine faithfulness recorded in the Bible (see Deuteronomy chapter 31, verse 6, which is reiterated in the New Testament in Hebrews chapter 13, verse 5: “Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you.”). Accepting the Bible as the ‘Word of God’ naturally results in ascribing faithfulness to God, because the Bible describes God as being faithful.

On a practical level, it can be hard to reconcile those Biblical assertions with day-to-day Christian experience. Empathy-based understandings of God, revolving around the crucifixion event, aid an appreciation that sometimes Christians feel abandoned. The empathy comes from recognising that the revelation of God found in the Incarnation, directly reveals God’s own experience of abandonment. The cry from the cross, echoing the psalmist, ‘My God, why have you abandoned me’ (Matthew chapter 27, verse 46, cf Psalm 22, verse 1), indicates that this human experience of abandonment, is also experienced by God.

An interesting aside to this is that at the crucifixion, God not only experiences death within the divine nature (therefore neutralising the limited power of death by absorbing it into the unlimited Godhead), but also experiences the pain of bereavement, separation and loss caused by death, as the Father sees the Son die on the cross.

Ultimately, believing that God is reliable, despite what appears to be evidence to the contrary, is a matter of personal faith. It can seem trite to say that God works ‘for the good’ in all circumstances, regardless of appearances. It is a Biblical standpoint (see Romans, chapter 8, verse 28), but can lead to some interesting difficulties if pushed.

For example, it reduces God’s moral activity to ‘the ends justify the means’ and it can also be used to ascribe harm or evil to God. Not commenting on God’s ‘mysterious ways’ of working, is often a similar cop out used to avoid the tough question of what God is actually playing at. There are a number of other theological reasons (or excuses) for God’s inactivity. The tension between the coming of the kingdom of God now and the fulfilment of God’s intentions in the future is often used to explain why God has not healed, or intervened in a situation.

A final option is that the universe operates in a way that gives human beings a choice. What humans see as ‘unreliability’ is actually the workings out of probability. Some people are ‘luckier’ than others, if their life experiences are plotted out on a probability graph. (This idea has been popularised by Dilbert author Scott Adams in his serious book, God’s Debris). Living in an unreliable universe could be both the result of human sin – in choosing to no longer operate under God’s direct rule, humans become subject to the vagaries of chance – and the means by which human beings are brought to a realisation that they need God. The unreliability of life produces a ‘vale of soul-making’ designed to stimulate human expressions of free will that would not occur in a reliable universe. God’s withdrawal from this universe, and occasional interactions with it, add further to the unreliability of life, increasing the chances of human beings making free choices about whether to trust God or not.

Thanks for your question, MF.

Question from NP, United Kingdom

Does human free will override divine purpose? If God knew Adam and Eve were going to fall, why didn’t he prevent sin in the first place?

This is one of the huge debatable areas of theology, namely that of predestination, but couched in slightly different terms. It does of course rely on the ‘classic’ concept of God, namely that God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. It may be of interest to know that this view of God was absorbed into Christian theology from ancient Greek philosophy, as Christianity became the dominant religion in the Hellenistic world. Some people get around the problem of God’s foreknowledge of events by denying this classical description of God as being a later intrusion into Christian thought.

However, if we continue to hold what has become the traditional Christian view of God, we are faced with a conundrum. Either God created morally wilful beings and knew that would act immorally, but decided to create them anyway, or he did not know how they would act and therefore ‘sin’ could not be prevented. That leaves Christians with an interesting choice – either God allowed sin to occur, or God was unable to prevent it.

The former solution – that God allows sin as part of his divine plan – reaches its apogee in the hyper-Calvinist doctrine known as double-predestination. This is a view of God’s omnipotence that borders on fatalism, stating that God has predestined the ‘elect’ to eternal life and sinners to eternal damnation. Human free will is virtually negated in this doctrinal position. The latter option is often found in the various ‘free will arguments’, where God is assumed to have limited his own knowledge of what will happen in order to give created beings some kind of free will. Many of these arguments stumble because the ‘free will’ they describe is only ‘free’ because God wills it to be so. Human free will is thus just as tightly dependent on God’s will initially as in predestination.

The Biblical account is equally confusing. Certainly in the Old Testament, the children of Israel seem to thwart God’s intentions to the point where Yahweh gives up on them. In the New Testament there is a strong emphasis on God succeeding despite opposition from contrary spiritual forces or human agency. This opposition is credited with being real and possibly able to affect God’s plans, or at least delay the inevitable.

According to the Bible, God seems to want to work in partnership with human beings and, although wrathful when disobeyed, is portrayed as being unwilling to merely impose his will. The Genesis account, however literally we take it or not, is a touching story which seems to imply that God genuinely did not expect disobedience. That may be why God decided the only way to make amends for the disruption in creation was to enter it as a human being and negate the effects of sin through dying within the confines of the creation He had made.

The following exchange of views was conducted via e-mail with PR, United Kingdom.

Dear Jon, I’ve just come across your site and find it really interesting. I was looking through your response on Predestination, and wondered if you have considered the following:

That “Pre-destined” (Rom 8:30) actually refers to the promise that those who believe will be transformed into the likeness of Christ, and it therefore does not relate to the choosing or otherwise by God of those who will be saved or not saved. Foreknowledge (in Rom 8:29) is about God knowing the outcome of his decision to send Jesus to die, namely that it would be possible for man to be reconciled to himself, but not necessarily that any would actually accept the salvation. Hence, God has put in place the possibility for all to be saved but not all will be, due to human free will.
Would appreciate your thoughts…

Response from Jon the freelance theologian:

Thanks for your comments,

As I said in the answer about predestination, the problem with basing any doctrinal stance about predestination solely on Scripture is that the Bible can be interpreted in many different ways and does often seem to say different things in different places. On that note, the danger is that we can try to explain away a difficult passage, like the one in Romans, looking for meanings that are not obvious. That does not mean your interpretation is incorrect, but like everybody who approaches this particular topic our interpretation of various ‘proof-texts’ depends on our personal opinion, rather than our belief following on from a natural reading and comprehending of the texts.

Like most of Christian theology, predestination opens up a nice paradox – how can human free will co-exist with the Sovereign will of God? Especially as humans only exist in the first place because of God’s Sovereign will? And yet it is clear that we are beings who have been given the freedom to choose (the ‘terrible choice’ as some people call it).

I like your summing up, but the big question with pursuing a doctrine that emphasises human free will is why did God take a risk that humans would reject him? This throws up two further questions. 1) Did God know (does God know) who would (will) reject him – and why does he not do more to prevent that rejection? And 2) Ultimately, if human free will is ‘given’ to us, then we do not have a choice not to have it, so is a forced choice really a free choice?

To which PR replied:

My thought about your response is that we are created in God’s image (personality), and since God has free will, we inherit it – it’s something that he “forced” himself to do through creating us and so takes a risk on us rejecting him.

One other question… if we are not to base our doctrinal stance solely on Scripture, what else might we use?

The next response from Jon the freelance theologian:

Hi PR

I like the analogy. I am assuming, as I have never met you in person, that the main difference between you and your children and God and his creation, is that you are not eternal and able to see every outcome. No doubt your kids do things that continually surprise you – sometimes good things and sometimes not so good! Of course I might be wrong about your attributes and nature there – let me know if that is the case.

However, God is eternal, omniscient, all–powerful and so on. The implication is that he knew that, in giving humans the potential to rebel against him, they actually would. Yes, he reveals himself in love to humanity, in direct revelation, through the Law, the prophets, Jesus Christ, the canon of scripture and the ongoing witness of the Church universal. But (and this is the main point), sometimes this revelation fails to convince people to turn to him.

Now we can say that ‘failure’ is human free will, however, if God is all-powerful and all-knowing he knows what would be incontrovertible proof in each human situation to each human being and he would be able to offer that proof. Given that some people are still ‘free’ to choose yea or nay, we have to conclude that God has chosen not to reveal himself to the point where that person cannot turn him down. In fact, the Bible is full of references to God ‘hardening people’s hearts’ against him (see especially Romans 9 v18, a common passage quoted in this kind of debate).

The key element that God is searching for is faith. Believing in God is not like believing in something easily seen and touched (like your computer screen). So that might be why God does not overwhelm human beings with proof. The point is, though, that he could and chooses not to. Human free will? Or God’s Sovereign choosing will?

Jesus did indicate that humans have the capacity to choose to believe or not and, perhaps because he was aware of that need for faith, he urged people to believe. Jesus also said “Nobody can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6 v44), in a passage that is heavy on the idea that those who come to Jesus are selected by the Father. In Jesus’ words here and elsewhere we see this balancing act between God’s restrained impact on human beings somehow allowing human ‘free will’ and his desire for the entire world to be saved.

Regarding your final question about Scripture as a basis for theology, personally I think all doctrinal statements should be rooted in all of Scripture. The problem with an issue like predestination is that people root it in their understanding of certain parts of Scripture and that’s where it all starts to fall apart. I think at some point we have to accept predestination is a paradox and work from there.

Other things we can use as tools in theological inquiry include reason (quite legitimate as long as our minds are not conforming to the world – Romans 12 v2) and experience. Often an experience of the transcendent cannot be adequately expressed in words (Paul’s description of the third heaven in 2 Corinthians chapter 12 falls into that bracket), but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to express it.

One of the reasons to believe that the Bible is essentially true is because it is hard to understand, does not offer quick fixes and seems to contradict itself. Which seems to make it perfect for this confusing world of ours!

Thanks for the conversation, PR. If you would like to comment on this, or any other topic covered on freelance theology please email using the ‘contact me’ button.