Christian Living

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHANCE AND DEATH PART 2

by GLENN PEASE
01/11/22
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This is a continuation of the study of the reality of chance and now we are going to look at what the Bible actually reveals about chance and death. You will need your Bible handy to look up these passages that we will be making comments on.

Gen. 2:15-17: Adam did eat and die. Was this God's will or not? Was the warning designed to promote or prevent death? If you tell your young child not to cross a busy street, what is your motive? Is it to give him ideas, or to save his life? God permitted Adam to have access to the forbidden fruit. Does God will something because He permits it? People assume that if God permits something it is okay with Him. Not so! He hates what He permits. He permits all the sin which He forbids and severely judges. God permitted Adam and Eve to sin, but if His warning was sincere, it was to prevent sin and the consequence of death. If you say it was God's will that they sin and die, then you accuse God of being insincere in His warning.

Gen. 4:8: Able was the first person to die. Did God will this murder? God cannot will what He forbids. Murder takes place everyday, and there is no way the Scripture would support the idea that it is God's will. This would make all of His commandments meaningless and insincere. God did not prevent the murder of innocent Able, and so we can call this God's permissive will. It means God permits evil to exist because that is a necessary reality if freedom of choice is real. You cannot have choice, and still allow only good and not evil.If both are not possible, freedom is not real. God cannot give freedom of choice and prevent evil, for evil is always one of the choices. If God prevented all evil, He would be preventing freedom of choice. As soon as God said do not eat of this tree, He made evil possible. But He does not will that men do the evil that is possible, for they can also not do it, and that is His will. In Gen. 4:13-15, God forbid that evil Cain be killed. God is opposed to the murder of one who even deserved it.

Deut. 19:1-7: This text makes it clear that God expects accidents to happen. He knows they are inevitable and so He makes provision to protect people from the anger that an accidental death can produce. God does not will accidents, nor does He will the revenge that can lead to murder, and that is why He had cities built to prevent unjust revenge and murder. Accidents are very real to God, and this means there is much that happens in life that is not a part of His plan, or anybody's plan. That is what an accident is. If it was a part of a plan it would not be an accident. The prevention of unjust or premature murder was important enough to God to spell it out again
in Num. 35:9-28.

Deut. 20:1-9: Death in battle is not appointed by God. It is all a matter of chance. Even though God will give them the victory, He does not prevent them from suffering casualties. War is dangerous and unpredictable, so all who are not ready to die should not be involved, for anyone can die at any time in war. If God controlled all death, all these people that God said should stay home could go and fight and be spared, but God does not pick and choose who will die in warfare. He leaves it to chance, and that is why certain people were to stay off the battlefield, for that was the only way to prevent their death. Sure, God could spare these people by miracles, but God does not work that way ordinarily. The way He works is to keep people away from war. That is always the best way to save anyone from dying in a dangerous situation-just stay away from it. To say nothing can hurt me until my time is up is folly, and not the thinking of God.

Deut. 20:10-14: This text makes it clear that men often live or die by their own choice. If they choose peace they live, and if they choose war they die. God did not make the choice for them. If they choose peace, God is perfectly willing that they be spared. They make the crucial choice. It was God's will that they die if they choose not to live in peace, but it was not His will that they die, for He left that choice to them. This whole thing would be superficial completely if their freedom to choose was not real, and God had already decided their fate for them.

Deut. 24:16: This text makes it clear as crystal that all who die are to die because of their own personal folly and choice, and not because of someone else's folly and sin. No one is to blame for death by judgement, except the person who dies in judgement.

Deut. 30:15-20: In this text God's own people must choose to live in obedience and live,or to choose rebellion and die. They make their choices, and so if they die, it is not because God wills it, for He gives warning to prevent such death. All judgment is due to man's choices, and not because God wills the evil that leads to judgment. Prov. 11:19 says,"The truly righteous man attains life, but He who pursues evil goes to his death."

Ezek. 18: This chapter stresses individual responsibility. People live or die because of their personal choices of life style. God does not will that anyone live in disobedience to His will. To do so would be to will what He does not will. So if anyone does choose to disobey and die in judgment, it is not because He wants it, but because they chose it. If a man chooses to practice dangerous behavior and he gets aids, that is not God's will that he do so and die. It is a reaping of what he sows. If people choose to take drugs and die that is their choice and not because God willed it. The Israelites were trying to cop out of their responsibility by saying the old proverb, "The fathers ate soar grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge." In other words, we suffer because of the sins of our forefathers. There is truth in this at times, but the point here is that this is usually escapism. It is an excuse to evade personal responsibility. If your father was an alcoholic and got a venereal disease, and you were born with faulty genes, then you are a victim of your father's sin. But for you to blame your father when you choose to rob a bank, is to be an escapist. That is your choice and your responsibility. If you die by getting shot by a policeman, you did not die because of your father's sin, or because God willed it. You die because of your own foolish choice to rebel against God's will. God refuses to take any blame for the death of those who chose to live in violation of the laws of life.

Ezek. 33:1-16: God makes it clear again that people die by their own choice. Here is a case where they had warning but did not heed it. God says their death was not necessary, for had they listened to the warning there life would have been spared. God did not will the death, for it was clearly the result of stupid neglect. Many people have died by not giving heed to warnings, and their death, God says, is on their own hands.

The reasons why determinism does not fit reality are these:

1. If all is determined, then man is not higher than any other animal, or even the plants, for his reason and will play no real role in life. Man is just a product of nature and does what he is programmed to do like the rest of nature. The idea of his mind being greater than instinct is a fiction, for he has no more freedom to do what is wise than does the bird or the tiger. If he is truly free, and made in the image of God, so that he can actually make a difference in nature, and in history, and in lives, then he is, indeed, a unique being in the creation of God. If he is just a more complex but determined animal, with no freedom to make choices that make a difference then he is nothing special at all.

2. Determinism destroys all blame. If I go too fast and end up in the ditch, you cannot say I had a choice and could have prevented it, for if it was already determined that I would go too fast, what choice did I have? Do not blame me for doing what I had to do. Anytime you blame someone for what they did, you imply they could have done something different, which is impossible if all is determined. Once something is done it had to be that way, and there was no choice, and where there is no choice there can be no blame. Blame implies freedom to choose, and if all is determined, there is no such freedom. This leads to nobody being responsible for anything they do. If everything is determined then God is the only one to blame.

If a stone comes breaking through our window, do we blame the stone, or the person who threw it? The stone is not a willing creature, and so we blame the person who threw it, for they had a choice not to throw it. But the person who threw it is just like the stone if they had no choice, but were compelled to throw it by a predetermined plan. Foreknowledge is not the same as something being predetermined. If I know you are going to let the air out of a persons tires on Monday morning at 7:00 A.M., am I responsible for this evil act by my precise foreknowledge? Not at all. And God is not responsible for all the folly and evil choices of man either just because he has foreknowledge of their folly.

This subject has been debated for many centuries, and I know their are good and godly people who will have a different perspective on this issue, but I think what I have put together makes a pretty good case for the reality of chance, and the reality of free will, as the primary causes of so much of the suffering in this world that is often blamed on God. The world is full of suffering people who are so angry at God because they do not understand these things, and assume that he is the cause of their sorrows. It is important for Christians to have this understanding of another perspective to help these people to stop forsaking God in their suffering, for he is not their enemy, but the one who will provide them with comfort and eternal hope.