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 - Endorsed - Indifferent - Contested
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| The Nashville Statement
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Name:Daniel
Home: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
About Me: I used to believe that evolution was reasonable, that homosexuality was genetic, and that people became Christians because they couldn't deal with the 'reality' that this life was all there was. I used to believe, that if there was a heaven - I could get there by being good - and I used to think I was more or less a good person. I was wrong on all counts. One day I finally had my eyes opened and I saw that I was not going to go to heaven, but that I was certainly going to suffer the wrath of God for all my sin. I saw myself as a treasonous rebel at heart - I hated God for creating me just to send me to Hell - and I was wretched beyond my own comprehension. Into this spiritual vacuum Jesus Christ came and he opened my understanding - delivering me from God's wrath into God's grace. I was "saved" as an adult, and now my life is hid in Christ. I am by no means sinless, but by God's grace I am a repenting believer - a born again Christian.
My complete profile...
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Daniel's posts are almost always pastoral and God centered. I appreciate and am challenged by them frequently. He has a great sense of humor as well.
- Marc Heinrich
His posts are either funny or challenging. He is very friendly and nice.
- Rose Cole
[He has] good posts, both the serious like this one, and the humorous like yesterday. [He is] the reason that I have restrained myself from making Canadian jokes in my posts.
- C-Train
This post contains nothing that is of any use to me. What were you thinking? Anyway, it's probably the best I've read all day.
- David Kjos
Daniel, nicely done and much more original than Frank the Turk.
- Jonathan Moorhead
There are some people who are smart, deep, or funny. There are not very many people that are all 3. Daniel is one of those people. His opinion, insight and humor have kept me coming back to his blog since I first visited earlier this year.
- Carla Rolfe
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| What does the size of the earth tell us? |
As I was riding the bus yesterday morning, I imagined some fruit being entirely consumed by a fungus. I thought to myself, at some point, there would be no more fruit left, but only fungus - and at that point the fungus would starve and die. I happened to be listening to an R.C. Sproul lecture as the thought was passing through my head, and R.C. was talking about how in 1950 the world population was two billion people, and how in 50 years it has tripled to over six billion people. As the two thoughts knit together in my thinking, I realized that because the world is limited in size and resources, if it weren't for death we would already have run out of both resources and room in and on planet earth.
That in and of itself is no great revelation, but coupled to the notion that if procreating beings did live forever on a finite globe, or even in a finite universe - eventually their infinite capacity to procreate, and inability to cease to be, would consume and fill completely whatever space their was.
Given that this is not only so, but inescapable so, it follows that God, having created Adam and Eve with procreative power, and having placed them into a finite reality, must have done so fully aware that the world He set them on could not contain both them and their progeny.
In hindsight, it strikes me that sin (and through sin death) was something God knew was going to happen even before Adam was ever created.
Now, this is no revelation to me, as I have believed this ever since I came to understand that it would be impossible for a truly sovereign God to "surprised" by sin - which means that God not only anticipated sin, but that this creation was designed to accommodate it.
We who believe in God's sovereignty and control do not charge God with creating sin, because we understand that sin has no substance - it is rebellion: the absence of obedience, and through that rebellion a departure from God who cannot rebel against Himself. To rebel against God is to play a note that isn't on the score - it doesn't change the score - but cannot be reconciled to the score having departed from it. So God did not "create" sin, for it required no act of creation. We speak in terms of God "allowing" sin, for God could have prevented it - but most Christians think of sin as a tragic accident. We see that it was a cosmic failure, we see that it has eternal consequences - the magnitude of such a fall is open for all to see, and the only way most of us can process such a thing is to presume that it could only have been an accident because no "good" God would have planned it.
Yet creation itself testifies that far from being caught off guard by sin, far from failing to prevent it - God actually built creation around the certainty that sin would come.
Thoughts?Labels: sin, sovereignty |
posted by Daniel @
7:23 AM
 
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| 9 Comments: |
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I know - someone will protest. God "could have" made the earth infinite, and then when Adam and Eve sinned made it finite. He could have made it finite intending to grow it along with the population. etc. etc.
There are all sorts of speculative ways we can examine the size of the earth and mine is no more likely than several others.
But it is a thing to think about.
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Well, you certainly have given me something to think about today, dear Daniel.
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Rose, these things are thought worthy I think.
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As always you show yourself to be a very cerebral guy. I admire that. Your logic here is hard to refute. Great post!
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Mark, I consider a post a "success" when it either instructs another in the truth, or provokes a person so that they seek the truth.
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Very interesting. Reminds me of a Star Trek episode in which disease had been eradicated from a planet which then became so crowded there was standing room only.
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David, that episode was called, "The Mark of Gideon" (third season).
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I figured you'd be able to name it. I couldn't remember.
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David I had to look it up, I knew which episode, and I was pretty sure it was a third season one, but I couldn't remember the name, so I googled it.
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I know - someone will protest. God "could have" made the earth infinite, and then when Adam and Eve sinned made it finite. He could have made it finite intending to grow it along with the population. etc. etc.
There are all sorts of speculative ways we can examine the size of the earth and mine is no more likely than several others.
But it is a thing to think about.