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 2 Chronicles 12:5–8?
The Lord allows King Shishak of Egypt to almost conquer all of Israel because of King Reheboam’s rebellion. “You abandoned me, so I have abandoned you to the hand of Shishak” (vs. 5). The officers and king repent, so the Lord responds by saying, “They have humbled themselves; I will not destroy them, but I will grant them some deliverance, and my wrath shall not be poured out on Jerusalem by the hand of Shishak” (vs. 7).
This is another example of God modifying his sincere intentions to judge a nation in response to their repentance, a feature of God that is hard to reconcile with the classical understanding that the future is exhaustively settled in God’s mind from before the world began (cf. Jer. 18:7–10).
Category: Q&A
Tags: Open Theism, Q&A
Topics: Open Theism
Verse: Chronicles 12
Related Reading
How do you respond to Isaiah 44:28–45:1?
This passage is one of the most persuasive evidences of divine foreknowledge in the Bible. The verse proclaims the Lord as the one “who says to Cyrus, ‘He is my shepherd, and he shall carry out all my purpose’; and who says of Jerusalem, ‘It shall be rebuilt,’ and of the temple, ‘Your foundation shall…
How do you respond to Exodus 4:11?
“The Lord says to Moses, “Who gives speech to mortals? Who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?” According to some compatibilists, this passage teaches that all infirmities are willed by God. This interpretation is not required, however. Three things may be said. First, as a matter of…
How do you respond to Bart Ehrman’s book, “Misquoting Jesus”?
Question: I just read Bart Ehrman’s book Misquoting Jesus and it’s sort of rocked my world. How can we believe the Bible is God’s inerrant Word when we don’t even know what the original Bible said? Answer: I actually went to graduate school with Bart Ehrman (at Princeton). We used to smoke pipes together up…
How do you respond to Numbers 23:19?
The Lord tells Balak through Balaam “God is not a human being, that he should lie, or a mortal, that he should change his mind.” This verse (as well as 1 Sam. 15:29, which quotes it) is often cited in refutation of the claim that God genuinely changes his mind. However, since Scripture explicitly states…
Is it true you’re an “Open Theist” and that you don’t think God knows the future perfectly?
I am an “Open Theist” – though I honestly don’t care for the label, because as I’ll show, the uniqueness of this view isn’t in what it says about God but in what it says about the nature of reality. (I think it would be better to call us something like “Open Futurists.”) In any…