Friday, May 05, 2006

Who Said It? Part V

OK, these are probably pretty easy but they are at least revealing:
PERSON 1: "I was shocked when I found out who the biggest failure in the Bible actually is."

PERSON 2: "Okay."


PERSON 1: "You know everybody you ask, you say, ‘Who’s the biggest failure?’ They say, ‘Judas.’ Somebody else will say, ‘No, I believe it was Adam.’ Well, how about the devil?"

PERSON 2: (unintelligible sound of amazement.)


PERSON 1: "He’s the most consistent failure . . . but he’s not the biggest in terms of material failure and so forth. The biggest in the whole Bible is God. . . . Wait, wait. Don’t you turn that set off. You listen to us. I told you. . . . Now, you sit still a minute. You know me well enough to know I wouldn’t tell something I can’t prove by the Bible. "

He lost His top ranking of most anointed angel, the first man He ever created, the first woman He ever created, the whole earth and all the fullness therein, a third of the angels at least. That’s a big loss, man! I mean you figure up all of that, that’s a lot of real estate, gone down the drain.
"Now, the reason you don’t think of God as a failure, He never said He’s a failure. And you are not a failure until you say you are one."
Sadly, the best thing to come out of that conversation was "unintelligible sound of amazement."

However, in thinking of this quote, it appears to make a lot of sense for the free will theist and their more consistent cousin, the open theist. If God is going to grant libertarian free will to His creatures, then He is obviously taking some kind of "risk" that they will or will not love Him.

Do angels have "free will" in that libertarian sense that many want to assume for themselves? Here's a good article from the Pyromaniacs that attempts to address that issue: HERE

1 comment:

Jim Pemberton said...

I don't agree that it makes sense from a theology of libertarian free will. How can God be a failure if He intentionally gave people autonomous free will? What do these theological noodles make of Job? How can they claim in one breath that God is powerful enough to give them the authority to control their own destiny but lacks the power to maintain His holdings?

(Theological noodles: thin, pliable, and pasty.)