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Thread: Did God Predestine Judas to Betray Christ?

  1. #41
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    Quote Originally Posted by JeffDoles View Post
    I don't know that foreknowledge is limited. I don't know that it is exhaustive. It seems to me that, if a thing does not exist, then that thing cannot actually be known. I affirm that God knows everything that can be known, and that everything that actually exists is actually knowable. But it seems logically incoherent to me to think that things that don't actually exist are actually knowable as well.

    If God could make a rock so big he could not lift it, then there would be at least one thing he could not do. But that conundrum is based on a misunderstanding about what it means that God is almighty. Likewise, the inability to make a triangle with four sides. If it has four sides, then it is not a triangle, because a triangle is defined as three-sided.

    No, I don't know that the future actually doesn't exist yet. Nor do I know that it does. But you have not demonstrated why the burden of proof should be on the one who doesn't think it exists yet rather than on the one who does think it already exists. It is a meaningless bit of burden-shifting, as well as question-begging.
    Isaiah 41 sets up knowing the future as a requirement for being divine. It does not set a limit on that knowledge in any way.

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  3. #42
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    Quote Originally Posted by JeffDoles View Post
    I understand that as a philosophical and theological point, and it may be quite true. I was taught that view since my youth group days and in Bible college. But it occurs to me that, although the Hebrews understood the creation of the world ex nihilo, they may not have viewed time as a created thing. And so the way the Hebrew Scriptures speak about God in relation to time was not meant to be viewed through the lens of Space-Time relativity, as if time itself were created. So I am looking for the biblical clues to how the Jews understood time.

    The Hebrew word translated as "everlasting" or "eternal" in the OT is olam. But it does not actually mean "everlasting." It has to do with an age or epoch -- IOW, periods of time. They could speak of an "age without end," but that does not mean they took it as an age without time.

    Likewise, the Greek word that gets translate in the NT as "eternal" or "everlasting," is aionion, and again, has to do with an age or epoch. So, zoen aionion (usually translated as "eternal life") is an age-enduring life (Young's Literal Translation has it as "life age-during") or the life of the age to come. Again, an age (or ages) may be without end, particularly when it has to do with God, but that does not necessarily mean, in the mind of the biblical authors, that it is without time.
    No it does not, aionion is used in the Septuagint to refer to the duration of God's dominion. From reading your posts in this thread it seems to me that you are influenced by authors and researchers who do Bible related studies and who do not believe that it is divinely inspired at all. They would tell us that everything that is written in the Bible depends completely on the mindset of the times of the authors, for instance.

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  5. #43
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    Titus 1:2 In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began;

    Literal Greek :

    apo chronos aionion

    before times eternal

    That is pretty much the same as saying that he promised that before time began (at least the time related to the creation that we are situated within). If he promised that after time began then it would be within "times eternal".

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  7. #44
    Quote Originally Posted by Colonel View Post
    Titus 1:2 In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began;

    Literal Greek :

    apo chronos aionion

    before times eternal

    That is pretty much the same as saying that he promised that before time began (at least the time related to the creation that we are situated within). If he promised that after time began then it would be within "times eternal".
    Excellent.

    He didn't say "after time began". He said "before time began".
    This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity (futility) of their mind, having the understanding darkened...
    (Ephesians 4:17-18)

    Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly...
    (Psalm 1)

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  9. #45
    Quote Originally Posted by Colonel View Post
    ... They would tell us that everything that is written in the Bible depends completely on the mindset of the times of the authors, for instance.
    That's what I'm kind of getting from him too.
    This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity (futility) of their mind, having the understanding darkened...
    (Ephesians 4:17-18)

    Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly...
    (Psalm 1)

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  11. #46
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    Quote Originally Posted by GodismyJudge View Post
    Excellent.

    He didn't say "after time began". He said "before time began".
    Not quite. Chronos is in plural so it has to be rendered "times"

    But it could still be interpreted as "before eternity" which would mean the same thing, even in the absolute sense (relative to this creation and to any other)

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  13. #47
    Quote Originally Posted by GodismyJudge View Post
    Kind of like what you did with Annihilationism?

    Kinda. Let everything be measured by the Scripture, even if it upsets some of the theology we have grown accustomed to.

    St. Augustine, near the end of his career, wrote a book called Retractationes ("Reconsiderations"), in which he reviewed his theology from his younger years and offered some revisions or "second thoughts." I'm not at the end of my career, but I've been reexamining some doctrines I held in my earlier years. I believe that what is true will hold up to scrutiny.

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  15. #48
    Quote Originally Posted by Colonel View Post
    Isaiah 41 sets up knowing the future as a requirement for being divine. It does not set a limit on that knowledge in any way.
    I already addressed that in an earlier post. Isaiah 41:21ff does not set a limit, nor does it say it is limitless. That is not the point of Isaiah 41. God can tell what he is going to do; something the gods of the nations could not do. That is quite sufficient to satisfy that passage.

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  17. #49
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    Quote Originally Posted by JeffDoles View Post
    I already addressed that in an earlier post. Isaiah 41:21ff does not set a limit, nor does it say it is limitless. That is not the point of Isaiah 41. God can tell what he is going to do; something the gods of the nations could not do. That is quite sufficient to satisfy that passage.
    The passage doesn't say "tell us what you are going to do in the future".

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  19. #50
    Quote Originally Posted by Colonel View Post
    No it does not, aionion is used in the Septuagint to refer to the duration of God's dominion. From reading your posts in this thread it seems to me that you are influenced by authors and researchers who do Bible related studies and who do not believe that it is divinely inspired at all. They would tell us that everything that is written in the Bible depends completely on the mindset of the times of the authors, for instance.
    When God is the referent of aionion, then it can refer to something that is everlasting. But that meaning derives from God as the referent, not from the meaning of the word on its own. Even with God as referent, in which aionion takes the sense of "everlasting," it does not mean "timelessness." It is age or time without end.

    Your conclusion in the latter half or your paragraph above fails. For one thing, I do not suppose that everything depends completely upon the mindset of the times of the author, nor do the authors/books I've read on the matter. They take the Scriptures as divinely inspired, as do I. But I do think authorial intent and context are important considerations, and it simply does not follow that taking those seriously indicates a lack of faith in the Bible as divinely inspired.

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