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"In fighting against the God of the Absolutist, I am fighting for the God of Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob."
A God near, and not afar off.
A Person, not merely an unfeeling power.
100: 100: J. Webb writes:
"A God Who cannot be limited by His character were a wholly indeterminate Being, a
mere directionless impulse and therefore ineffective and impotent."
Power in itself may heed no limitations, but power working by love will stoop and
deny itself, for such is the very essence of love, and love is of God.
Let us worship Him, the almighty and self-sufficient One, but let us remember that we
never could have worshipped Him as such, had He not in His love as well as His power,
made the world and man as they are.
#6.
The Foreknowledge of God.
pp. 230 - 233
In the teachings of men there are two main schools of thought concerning the
foreknowledge of God. One school teaches that with God there are no limitations of past,
present and future. His knowledge is underived and immediate. He knows infallibly all
that will come to pass without necessarily being in any way the cause of it. This view
leaves man a free moral agent who can rightly be rewarded or punished for his deeds.
The alternative view is tantamount to fatalism. It suggests that whatever God foreknows
He Himself has planned to be so, and inasmuch as God knows all things, the evil as well
as the good, this doctrine makes Him morally responsible for all human sin. If every
human action is inevitably fixed, "law" and "gospel" are indifferent terms, and invitation
and warning meaningless mockery. The revealed meaning of sin is denied, for sin is the
missing of a mark, the transgression of a law. If God from all eternity has predetermined
all that is to come to pass, then all is in obedience to His will, and sin cannot exist.
Wherever we find a denial of the freedom of the moral agent, we shall find, either latent
or expressed, this emptying of the meaning of sin, and the attributing of God of the
authorship of moral evil.
Professor Hamon in his book "The Universal Illusion of Free Will" writes:
"Scientifically, man is the inevitable product of the surroundings in which he lives and
in which his ancestors lived. Logically, he is not responsible for his actions, for he could
not help wishing them, the conditions once given . . . . . we ought no more to consider the
man who acts responsible, for he is as much an automation as the tiger and the falling
rock. General irresponsibility, such is scientific truth."
What a conclusion to reach! This indeed is the fruit that grows from a denial of
freedom of choice to the moral agent.