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Showing posts from January, 2010

Haiti!

It seems that every few years on planet earth, whether it be a tsunami, an earthquake or some other disaster, something terrible happens. Haiti is another example. At this stage we don't know how many will die, it seems somewhere between 50 and 500,000 people! Whatever the number, this is a catastrophe. If one life is precious as I believe it is, this is a horror! This will also decimate a nation. According to http://www.haiti-micah.org/haiti-facts.html Haiti, even before the earthquake, is the poorest nation in the western hemisphere. Its unemployment rate before the quake was 80%. More than 50% lived off less than a dollar a day. The infrastructure was totally inadequate with few paved roads, an inadequate water supply and few utilities. 60% of the population lived in abject poverty! Less than 20% of Haitians over the age of 15 could read and write. Less than 75% of Haitian children attended school. The health care system before the disaster was already patently inadequate w...

Predestination and Free Will

A friend of mine has asked my opinion on the challenging theological question of the relationship of predestination and free will. That is, if everything is predestined it is predetermined, and if it is predetermined, then there is no such thing as freedom. On the other hand, if there is freedom in the sense of alternate possibilities, then there is things are not determined. The issue is complex and in my view there is no definitive solution. Here is my take on this issue. Rather than go through the whole thing, I will suggest some ideas I use to deal with the issue. 1. The Bible Affirms God's Knowledge of the Future and Thus, In One Sense, All is Predestined. As I read the Scriptures, the Bible affirms that God knows all things, that is, he is omniscient. We see this at work in predictive prophecy, where Jesus for example, can know that Judas will betray him, and that Peter will deny him. There are also a range of OT prophesies which are fulfiled in the NT indicating God's...