So, in all of this, are you trying to say that God lies?
I'm saying what the text says. Nothing more nothing less.
No, I do not have every page of the Bible committed to memory. Apparently, you do.
Not to memory, no. But I'm familiar enough with it to know that your pastor (practically every pastor) doesn't teach what it does. Pastors teach what they've been taught to teach and if the bible says something different, they either don't know anything about it or they ignore it or "interpret" it to mean whatever they need it to mean to conform to what they've been taught.
The vast majority of people who go to church are in worse condition when it comes to biblical knowledge because they simply believe whatever their pastor tells them to believe.
Your reaction to I Kings is proof to the contrary. It hasn't even caused you to think that your doctrine MIGHT be in error, never mind motivated you to do anything about it.
Are you trying to lump me in with Calvinists?
Not per se, no. But you don't have to be a Calvinist to make the same error that they do in this regard. Arminians, the supposed "opposite" of Calvinism is an excellent example. They too believe that God exists outside of time and they believe it for basically the same reasons that the Calvinists do, none of which are biblical. Their reasoning on this is entirely doctrinal/philosophical.
You think that God makes false claims about the future. Where does that put you in regards to God's nature?
Look, I'm trying my best to give you the benefit of the doubt and to treat you like you're at least half way intellectually honest but you make a statement anything similar to this again, I'll simply put you on ignore and you can go live your life in ignorance and debate with the rest of the idiots on this website.
God does NOT make false claims about the future. But, unlike what your pastor has taught you, prophesy is NOT pre-written history. This is not my opinion and it is not derived from some other aspect of my doctrine. It is simply the unvarnished reading of the text of scripture. God makes a prophecy and then things work out different than how it was prophecied. The bible not only records several instances of this but it explicitly explains why.
The Bible condemns lying as an act of unrighteousness. It calls that baring false witness.
Actually "bearing false witness" means what it says. We call it "perjury" today. Lying, whether as a witness in court or not, has to do with intentionally deceiving someone by saying something that you KNOW is false when you say it. I could tell my neighbor that it's going to rain tomorrow. If it doesn't rain as predicted, I didn't lie, I was simply wrong.
If God says that something will happen and it does not, what else would you call it unless there is some other caveat that makes the claim conditional? I know that you claim that I'm somehow cheating when I say that.
I never said anything about cheating. The point is that ALL prophecy is conditional! The only exceptions are those having exclusively to do with God Himself and His own actions. But when it comes to prophecies concerning mankind, prophesies function most often as warnings and it is not necessary for God to specifically stipulate that warning either.
Let's look at a specific, really clear, example.
Jonah 3:3 Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, 2 “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach to it the message that I tell you.” 3 So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, a three-day journey in extent. 4 And Jonah began to enter the city on the first day’s walk. Then he cried out and said, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”
Note that there is no caveat recorded. No "unless you repent", no "please repent so that God won't..." or anything like that. The text flatly states that Jonah preached the message that God told him to preach and that message was, "Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be everthrown!" I think in the original language the whole message is something like five words.
Then six verses later we read this...
Jonah 3:10 Then God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and He did not do it.
The intervening 5 verses detail the works that God saw but the point here is two-fold.
1. God said that one thing would happen in forty days.
2. God did not do it.
According to your understanding of what a lie is, God must be a liar!
OR
If we throw away the stupidity that makes up the lion's share of Christian doctrine in this area, which is essentially Augustinian doctrine, by the way, we can see that God simply responded to the people's repentance and He also repented of the disaster which He thought to bring upon them. This is in EXACT keeping with what is explicitly taught in Jeremiah 18...
Jeremiah 18:7 The instant I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, to pull down, and to destroy it, 8 if that nation against whom I have spoken turns from its evil, I will repent of the disaster that I thought to bring upon it. 9 And the instant I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it, 10 if it does evil in My sight so that it does not obey My voice, then I will repent concerning the good with which I said I would benefit it.
Jeremiah 18 is perhaps the single most important chapter in the entire bible. If you wanted to commit anything to memory, you'd not go wrong by starting with this chapter. Being familiar with this chapter is critical to understanding what God is doing and why He is doing it, both in the Old and New Testaments.
You might also notice that I changed the word "relent" which appears in the New King James version to "repent" which is the actual word used in the original text and which appears in the "Old" King James.
Notice also that there is no commentary needed here. It's just a matter of reading the text and taking to mean what it plainly states!
So, here's where the rubber meets the road. If you want to continue to make the claim that you base your doctrine on the bible and sound reason and nothing else you should be able to answer both the following questions with an unqualified, "No!"...
Does God lie? - NO!
Do God's prophecies always come to pass as stated? - NO!
It's so simple as to be nearly childish. It couldn't be any clearer if God Himself came down from heaven and told you to your face. The only reason you believe otherwise is because you believe what you've been taught to believe rather than what the text of scripture actually says. And you've done so quite innocently by the way. I do not intend to imply any dishonesty on your part here. You are, in fact, in rather good company. I mean, virtually the whole Christian world believes the way you do. The problem is that they all believe what they believe for the same reason you believe what you do. It's generations of the blind leading the blind. A pastor teaches an error, a member of his congregation grows up believing the error and becomes a pastor himself and before too long you've got whole seminaries full of faculty members that have been taught the same error and are passing it along to a whole new generation of young minds full of mush. The longer this goes, the rarer it is to find one brave enough to question the conventional wisdom and set out on his own with what his own mind has been convinced is the truth. It takes a special person to be brave enough to trust your own mind over the collective minds of all those around you. Martin Luther was one such person. And while he certainly didn't get all his doctrine right, he made one statement that will ring through the halls of history for all eternity; one statement that should be the motto of every human being that takes up the challenge of learning a systematic theology....
"Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason - I do not accept the authority of the popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other - my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen."
Resting in Him,
Clete
