We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

What is the significance of 1 Chronicles 21:15?

“And God sent an angel to Jerusalem to destroy it; but when he was about to destroy it, the Lord took note and relented concerning the calamity; he said to the destroying angel, ‘Enough! Stay your hand.’”

This powerful passage tells us why God sent the angel and why he changed his mind. If God foreknew he was not going to destroy Jerusalem, he could not have genuinely intended to destroy it and the Scripture which explicitly tells us “he was about to destroy it” must be considered incorrect. Moreover, if God never really intended to destroy the city, his dispatching the angel for the expressed purpose of doing so becomes altogether unintelligible. Nor could he have authentically “relented” from a previous plan, for he never really planned this destruction in the first place.

The classical view of an exhaustively settled future introduces a certain artificiality into texts such as this one which depict God as changing his plans. For this reason, I believe we should reject this view of the future and accept that God can truly change his mind about temporal matters.

Category:
Tags: ,
Topics:
Verse:

Related Reading

Resisting Evil

The New Testament refers to Satan as the “god of this age” and the “ruler of the power of the air” (2 Cor 4:4; Eph.2:2). In the first century Jewish worldview, “air” referred to the domain of spiritual authority over the earth. The author, Paul, was thus saying that the spiritual environment of the earth…

Is God All-Powerful?

I want to answer yes and no. God is all-powerful in the sense that God originally possessed all power. Before Creation, God was the only being who existed, and thus had all the power there was. He could do anything, and nothing opposed Him. But with the creation of free creatures, I maintain, God necessarily…

How do you respond to Romans 8:29?

“For whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family.” One of the greatest treasures given to believers when they open their hearts to the Lord is the promise that they shall certainly be “conformed to the…

How do you respond to 1 Timothy 4:1–3?

“…in the later times some will renounce the faith by paying attention to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the hypocrisy of liars whose consciences are seared with a hot iron. They forbid marriage and demand abstinence from foods…” New Testament authors considered themselves to be living “in the later times” (e.g. Acts 2:17;…

Predestination: What Does It Mean?

When some people hear the biblical teaching that God “chose us in [Christ] before the foundation of the world” (Eph 1:4) and that “he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Christ,” (Eph 1:5) they think it means that God picked who would and would not be in Christ before the foundation of the world.…

How do you respond to Jeremiah 29:10–11?

The Lord says to Israel, “Only when Babylon’s seventy years are completed will I visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place [Jerusalem]. For surely I know the plans I have for you, says he Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give…