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 Ezekiel 12:1–3?
The Lord has Ezekiel symbolically enact Israel’s exile as a warning and remarks, “Perhaps they will understand, though they are a rebellious house” (vs. 3).
Though Israel repeatedly surprised God by their persistent rebellion, he nevertheless continued to hold out hope and thus to strive with them to participate in a covenant relationship with him. He thus gives Ezekiel an object lesson to carry out, hoping that “perhaps” this approach might succeed.
If everything about the future is settled and thus all future free decisions are certain to God, however, neither the “perhaps” of this verse nor the hope it is predicated on makes sense. God would have been completely certain all along that this object lesson was going to fail (because it did). Indeed, one wonders why the Lord would even waste Ezekiel’s time (while telling him he thinks it might work!) if he was absolutely certain it didn’t stand a chance.
In the open view of creation the verse is allowed to say what it seems to plainly say. God had Ezekiel go through this dramatic sermon because God genuinely thought it might work in bringing the people around to God. People are free, however, and unfortunately they sometimes used their freedom to thwart God’s plan for them.
Category: Q&A
Tags: Open Theism, Q&A
Topics: Open Theism
Verse: Ezekiel 12
Related Reading
The Future is Not Like the Past For God (or Us)
Image by seier+seier via Flickr Everyone agrees that we are not free to change the past. No sane person would claim, for example, that I can now make any free choices about whether John F. Kennedy will be assassinated or not on November 22, 1963. This deed, like all past deeds, has already been accomplished. Now consider,…
Lighten Up: I’m Not Worried Frank
http://youtu.be/kQFKtI6gn9Y?t=1m19s Well, my dear friend Frank Viola has been spouting off again about how my “logic will be shredded, excoriated, and turned into confetti before a watching world” when we host our debate on Open Theism this fall. I’m not too worried though, since Frank studied the art of debate in the clinic featured in…
Podcast: Does the Cruciform Hermeneutic Sabotage Open Theism?
Greg plays Peek-a-Boo with God and considers whether those verses Open Theists use to support Open Theism might simply be times when God is accommodating for us. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0236.mp3
God of Sense and Traditions of Non-Sense
As the title suggests, in his book, God’s Problem: How The Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer, Bart Ehrman argues that the Bible has nothing compelling to say about the problem of evil. Well, I just put down a beautifully written four-hundred and fifty page book that compellingly argues…
What is the significance of Numbers 14:12–20?
In response to Israel’s bickering the Lord says “I will strike them with pestilence and disinherit them, and I will make of you [Moses] a nation greater and mightier than they” (vs. 12). Moses asks the Lord to forgive the people, and the Lord eventually responds, “I do forgive, just as you have asked” (vs.…