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 Acts 15:7?
At the Jerusalem council, “Peter stood up and said to them, ‘My brothers, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you, that I should be the one through whom the Gentiles should hear the message of the good news…’”
The tense of the verb that locates God’s “choice” in “the early days” strongly suggests that it wasn’t made in the eternal past as the classical view asserts. The God of the possible decides among possibilities as he moves along with us in time. After considering every variable, the Lord decided that choosing Peter rather than anyone else to initially bring the Good News of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles best fit his sovereign purpose.
If everything is settled from all eternity in the mind of God, however, there is nothing really left to decide in time. Everything in Scripture, as well as in our own experience, which suggests that God makes decisions or reverses previous decisions as he moves with us into the future must be judged as mistaken.
Category: Q&A
Tags: Open Theism, Q&A
Topics: Open Theism
Verse: Acts 15
Related Reading
Podcast: What is the Difference Between Open Theism and Process Thought?
Greg openly processes the major differences between Open Theism and Process Thought. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0218.mp3
How do you respond to Romans 8:29-30?
Question: Romans 8:29–30 says that everyone God foreknew he predestined. You deny both that God foreknows and predestines individual believers. So this verse seems to refute your open view. Answer: First, as many exegetes have noted, the sort of “knowing” Paul intends in this passage is not merely intellectual knowledge, but rather an intimate affection.…
Is Free Will compatible with Predestination?
Question: Isn’t “freedom” simply our ability to do what we want? And if this is so there seems to be no incompatibility between saying that a person is “free” on the one hand, but predestined (or at least foreknown) by God, on the other. But why do you say that freedom is not compatible with…
What is the significance of Ezekiel 33:13–15?
“[W]hen I say to the righteous he will surely live, and he so trusts in his righteousness that he commits iniquity, none of his righteous deeds will be remembered…he will die. But when I say to the wicked, ‘You shall surely die,’ and he turns from his sin and practices justice and righteousness, if a…
Free Will in the Bible
Scripture portrays humans as having minds and wills of their own. They are, in a real (though limited) sense, creators of their own behavior and determiners of their own destinies—whether this behavior and destiny is in line with God’s will or not. This fundamental assumption is demonstrated in a variety of ways throughout Scripture. It…