#53 UNDERSTANDING OPEN THEISM + Dr. Greg Boyd

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Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host. Today, we're going to get into a topic that I've heard a lot of Christians discuss openly, and I'm really excited today to get some answers because right now,

I want to know, do we have free will or is God in control? It almost seems like both exist at the same time, but I don't know which one

I'm leading with because if God knows that horrible things are going to happen, why does he let them? Why doesn't he stop them?

We're going to get answers today with my friend, Dr. Greg Boyd. Welcome to the show. You are a renowned theologian, you're a pastor, you're an author.

You're also the founder of the Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. You've also authored several books,

God of the Possible, The Myth of the Christian Nation, and then you also are known, most importantly, for your work on open theism, which

I didn't know what that meant. I still kind of don't know, but that's why you're here because you're an expert on that.

Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Casey, and I appreciate it. I'm so glad for you to be here.

Open theism is one of those things that I honestly had never heard of, but as we discussed with your friend,

Paul, it was one of those things of like, oh, you're talking about open theism. What does God know and not know?

Does God know what we're about to do or are there options? This is going to be like, you might have to hold my hand at some points through this, but at the end of the day, what is going on with free will, what he knows, what he doesn't, what he controls, what he doesn't?

Let's start at the beginning, though. What is open theism? Open theism is just a word that I actually don't care for the term myself.

It was coined in the mid -90s. I'll lead with that. God's open to other influences, to being impacted by things outside of yourself and whatever.

But I would define open theism this way. It's just the belief that part of what

God creates when he creates the world are possibilities. He creates agents who have free will, and if we have free will, it means we can possibly choose this and possibly choose that.

Possibilities are real. Open theists hold that God knows everything. God knows absolutely everything, but the only thing that's distinctive is that we think that part of what

God knows are possibilities because possibilities are real. If God's omniscient, that means he's all -knowing, then his knowledge and reality are co -extensive categories.

If it's real, God knows it, and if God knows it, it's real. So the idea that sometimes critics say that open theists deny omniscience, and that's just not the case.

It's not about the scope of what God knows. It's not about the perfection of what

God knows. He knows everything perfectly. The only difference is that we believe that reality is partly composed of possibilities because God creates us free.

And so insofar as we're free, we can possibly go this way and possibly go that way, there is no fact about what we will do until we choose it.

There's only the fact of what we might do and might not do, and so God knows what we might do and might not do, but he doesn't know what we will do because there is no fact there to know until we resolve it.

So the debate between open theists and traditionalists, it's no different than the debate between, let's say, you and I are in a classroom and I say,

I think God knows that there's 50 chairs in this classroom, and you look around and you say, no, I think that God knows that there's 60 chairs in this classroom because you think there's 60 chairs there, but we both agree that whatever, however number of chairs there are,

God knows those. So it'd be weird for you to say that I'm denying

God's omniscience because I think he only knows that there's 50 chairs, because it's not about the scope of God's knowledge, it's about how many chairs there are in the room.

So also consider this world to be a classroom, and we're debating about what does

God know is in this classroom? And I say, well, I think that there's possibilities in this classroom because agents are free, and you might say, no,

I think that there's only facts, settled facts, there's no possibility, well, we have a disagreement, let's talk about that, but what shouldn't be brought into the debate is whether God's omniscience or not, because it's not about God's omniscience, it's about what's in the classroom, what's in the picture of reality.

Yeah, I mean, okay, so this kind of sounds like, if I go back into my early

Christianhood, like Sunday school mentality of like Marvel, the like multiple universe, whatever that is, there's multiple universes, and many options, that's immediately where my mind went when you said that there's options on what we might choose, like today,

I woke up, and there's many options I could do the minute after I wake up, I could wake up and start brushing my hair,

I could wake up and go for a run, I could wake up and get coffee, you're saying that in that example, God knows that I could get coffee, brush my hair, or whatever my third option was,

ADHD is ADHD today, and you're saying that he knows all the options that I might choose, he just doesn't know if I'm going to brush my hair, or if I'm going to get coffee.

Although we are actually less free than we think, it could very well be that God in knowing you perfectly knows that you are going to brush your hair first, and you are going to brush your hair, whatever, even though you don't know it, because our life is largely carried on by the momentum of previous decisions, and so our character gets largely formed, and to the degree that our character gets formed, we become more predictable.

That's more like a pattern type of situation. God can know much more about our future than we do, but to the degree that we're free, that we're genuinely free,

God sees possibilities. I think the element of we have options, and God knows all those options is the biggest thing that whoa,

I didn't even consider that. I guess I always thought that my life was much more linear, that I wake up, and there is only one action

I'm going to take next, and God knows what that one action is, and I'm going to take it at this exact time. God knows tomorrow at 3 p .m.

what I'll be doing, but I don't know yet what I'm going to be doing tomorrow at 3 p .m., but you're saying he knows all the options

I might take tomorrow at 3 p .m. So in the more traditional view, all the facts about what will happen in world history are there from the start.

They're settled, and traditional theologians will disagree about like how they got settled.

How come all the facts about what KCN and Greg and everybody else are going to do, how they get settled, and some would say, well,

God predestined them, and that's how they got settled. God settled it in his will, and the Armenians would say, well, no, he just somehow mysteriously knows it.

Oh, we're not to that debate yet. Hold on, hold on. Okay, okay, but the open theist view disagrees with both of those and says, no, they're not all settled, and they aren't settled until we make, we settle them because that's what it is to have free will.

We get to, we create facts. We create the facts of what we will choose, and until we create them, there's nothing but possibilities for God to know.

Okay, okay, let's go ahead, actually, and just discuss the Armenian versus the Calvinist debate because I feel like that'll tie nicely into God's omnipotence, his sovereignty.

It all blends in together, yep. Because it feels like a little bit of a dance of like us moving forward in this life and God kind of knowing where we can go and what we might do.

I feel like, and we'll get to this later, but he doesn't know at this one point what we're going to choose before we choose it, and you've already defended that and discussed that.

I think it's worth exploring, and this is a discussion. This is something that you hold it on the card.

You're the smartest person in this room. That's not true. I may know more, but that doesn't mean I'm smarter.

On this topic, yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, so before we get into Armenian and Calvinist, there is this element of, okay, so he knows the options.

We haven't taken that option yet, but what about foreknowledge, that traditional view of all the events in the future are kind of settled and how we get there, but where does his control end?

Where does our free will begin? God knows what we're going to choose, but then he lets people choose the wrong thing.

Well, you see, if you think that God knows exactly what people are going to choose in eternity before they choose it, well, then you have to ask the question, why did

God give them that power? So it's like this. If a parent, like this is a real example

I've heard of. There's a parent who bought their child a shotgun when the kid was 15, and the kid already had suicidal tendencies.

Now, it's one thing to buy your kid a gun to go hunting or whatever, and you know that there's a possibility they might misuse it, but odds are they'll use it.

You have every reason to think that they're going to use it responsibly, although I would never recommend buying a kid a gun at all, but just to go with the analogy, but to know that they're going to misuse it and give it them anyways, well, then that creates another level of the problem of evil, one that an open theist can avoid.

When God gives free will to people, there's an inherent risk there. They could use it for good, and they could use it for evil, but if it's certain they're going to use it for evil, then isn't

God somewhat culpable if he gave them that free will, knowing he made Hitler free, knowing he's going to incinerate six million

Jews? Well, isn't God somewhat responsible for that? In my view, there was a risk of that, but it was not a certainty, and so that absolves

God of the responsibility. So God knows that there's an option that kid might commit suicide.

There's an option that Hitler might incinerate six million Jews, but he also knew that there were options that that wasn't going to happen. Right. So this view does not agree with the traditional view of foreknowledge.

The traditional view of foreknowledge is that God has something like a crystal ball, and I don't mean to be insulting or pejorative or anything, but it's like God can just read the future because it's all there for God to know somehow.

It's all there present for God. But see, if God is a crystal ball and knows the future exclusively as a domain of settled facts, then

I don't know how anyone can have free will. If it's certain that I'll buy the blue Toyota in 2027, then how can

I buy anything other than the blue Toyota in 2027? I'm not free to do otherwise. And so I think the traditional view of foreknowledge, whether you're

Calvin or Arminius, it undermines free will. We're only free to the degree that we are the ones who create the fact of what we will choose.

And if that fact eternally precedes us in the foreknowledge of God or in a crystal ball, it doesn't matter.

It seems to me that undermines free will. So you're saying like okay, so the free will exists for the open theist.

We have the free will to choose the red car or the blue car. And God knows that there's an option for what we both might choose.

Yes. The same way the bad things might be an option that we might choose. And in reality, at any given moment, there's a thousand things we might choose.

Right. And God knows all those possibilities. And I would think would have even a probability assigned to those.

It's most likely that Greg will do this, but he could do this. Sometimes people surprise you. And that's why you find examples in the

Bible where God is surprised. You know, in Jeremiah three, he says to the Israelites, he'd been unfaithful to me.

I thought after I showered you with loving kindness, I thought that after I delivered you out of Egypt, that you turned to me, but you didn't.

Well, here's God confessing that I thought you were going to do this, but instead you do this. Yeah. Or a mission being can be surprised.

Okay. That also ties into like Exodus when he came out, he's like, what are we doing? Like, why did he lead them all the way out of Egypt?

Just for them to worship a golden calf, just for them to do all those sinful things. It's almost like, why did he put in all that effort for the

Exodus? If all they were going to do was mess up so many times after that. And so in fact, in Exodus 13, 14, this verse just popped in my mind.

But it says there that the Lord didn't lead them along the straight path to the land of Canaan, which would have brought them in the land of the

Philistines. But it says he didn't lead them in the straight path, but he led them a long way around because he thought if they face war, they might want to return back to Egypt.

So here's God thinking, if they confront the Philistines, they might want to return. And so he alters his plan on that basis, but it gives us a little peekaboo into how

God's think. God thinks in part in terms of contingencies, ifs, maybes, possibilities.

He improvises. Yeah. The king of like forward thinking and long -term planning.

Yes, exactly. Taking into account everything he knows about every single person within population.

So consider this. This is, I think, just mind -blowing.

But if God is all intelligent, right? He's got no limit to God's intelligence, right?

God has infinite intelligence. Well, if you have infinite, unlimited intelligence, you don't have to spread them thin to cover possibilities.

Like you and I, if we're playing chess, the reason it's challenging is because the more possibilities we have to contemplate, the less attentive we can be to any one of the possibilities.

So like if you're playing a world -class chess champion, you're probably going to lose unless you are also a world chess champion because a world chess champion,

I've been told, can think effectively about 30 moves, three across, 10 deep, or 10 across, three deep, or any other combination.

Whereas a novice chess player has trouble thinking beyond three moves. If I do this, well, he might do this, but then

I'll do this. But the more possibilities there are, the thinner you have to spread your attention.

Well, if God's infinitely intelligent, then he doesn't have to spread his attention at all. So God can look at every possibility as though it was the only possibility, and he can have a plan prepared for it in case that possibility comes to pass.

And it will be just as effective as if that was the only possibility he had to think about because he doesn't have to spread his intelligence thin.

So in the open view, whatever comes to pass, whatever happens to me, I can say that God has been preparing a plan on how to respond to this very event.

I got my legs cut off, for example. Well, God's been preparing a plan on how he's going to use me with my legs cut off from the foundation of the world.

It's as though he had a crystal ball. It's just that he's so smart. He's so smart. I'd be saying the exact same thing regardless of what happened to me because he's got every possibility covered.

And so for the foundation of the world, there must be a trillion, trillion to the trillion, trillionth power possibilities of how the world could go.

Every decision bends the world in a new direction. And God has every one of those trillion, trillion to the trillion, trillionth possibilities covered as effectively as if he had a crystal ball for each one.

So in the open view, God doesn't know less. God knows infinitely more than in the traditional view.

Okay. Okay. A lot of this kind of sounds like God might be on like the responsive end of like, okay,

I know the options. I've got plans. You let me know which one you choose and we'll go from there kind of thing. Kind of like how we started this podcast.

You're like, you ask the questions and we'll go from there. The question is, when does God interfere and like, be like, we're not,

I guess I know you wanted to brush your hair, but you're gonna brush your teeth first. You know, like when does God say like, nope, like I'm going to manually move your decision into more accordance with my will?

Sure. Well, you know, so when God sets up the game, because he's not only the master chess champion, he, he, he, he designs the rules.

And so he knows how much freedom he wants to give to you or to whatever other agent.

And it's always restricted. Our freedom is actually very myopic.

When you consider all the things that are given about us, all the things I didn't choose, you know, I didn't choose to be a male.

I didn't choose to be born in America. I didn't choose to be born in 1957. I did all the givens about me.

I didn't choose. It was given to me. Um, and in any given moment, the amount of free will that we have, uh, uh, is, is, is, is very restricted, but we have a little bit.

And if you take a little bit of free will each moment and expand out over a lifetime, it makes a big difference.

It makes a big difference, but God sets the parameters on that. So it's not like, I don't think anyone's free to blow up the world before God thinks the world should be blown up.

You know, I think that there's parameters around it. And, um, and then God would know that in case this, in case agent

B does this, that, and the other thing, if that happens, then I'll simply intervene and I'll steer it this way.

And so God has all the contingency plans, but once he sets up the thing, now he's waiting for us to move. And then he counter moves and then he moves again and counter moves, but he's always had a goal as to what he's steering it towards.

And that is for Christ to have a bride, to have a people and a that's invited into the triune fellowship.

And so he's steering it towards that goal, but there's a thousand ways, a million ways you can get there. And so he's improvising along the way.

Yeah. It just, the way you said that really reminds me how, how much I need to humble myself, like truly how arrogant

I am for thinking that like, well, how could God possibly like divert my decisions? It's like the way you just simply put it up.

Like we really don't have that much control. And that's honestly something I've been saying outside of this conversation, just to my peers of like, you know, like you think that you have all this control and then you're put in a position like me having a job and like working full time and then losing that job and now podcasting full time.

I'm like, okay, like I'm choosing these things. I'm choosing that I wanted to podcast full time. But then you look back and you're like,

I never controlled if I had that job. I never controlled if I lost or kept that job. I never even controlled if this podcast did well, like my, the delusion that I've told myself of what

I actually have control over is literally just myself. It's just my own actions that I wake up and choose what to do with myself.

I can't control the weather. I can't control if this podcast does well or fails tomorrow. I can't control if that job works out or doesn't, or that person shows up.

Like just, I'm hearing my arrogance and even asking the question of like, well, God's on the offense.

It's like, God has literally, you're right. Like he has set up everything and the free will that we choose to exhibit is so like, it's within a tiny box of just me.

It's just me. You're right. You're right. And that, I think, so I think humility is very important. And it's also wisdom requires us to know what we can control, what we can't control, you know?

And that's that whole serenity prayer. God, you know, grant me to, to take control of everything

I can control and to let go of what I can't control and give me the wisdom and know the difference.

That's just wisdom. And even a lot of things that are within our choice, when we make the choice, even that maybe wasn't in our control because given previous choices we made, that could have been something that was already determined.

We had determined it, you know, just by the course that we had gone down. But so it's important to,

I think, own up to, we all have some say -so and we all get to vote on how reality goes.

And that's our domain of responsibility. And our job as Jesus followers is to align our will with God's will so that we're always bending the world and bending our lives in a

Jesus kind of direction. But that's the domain of our responsibility. It's important that we own that. Yeah.

At the same time, it's important that we humble ourselves and realize that that's, that outside of that domain, we don't control anything.

Yeah. It really makes me think of like times where I felt like, quote unquote, far from God because I was making a lot of selfish decisions or I wasn't going to church.

I wasn't dedicating time to God. It's based off this conversation, those decisions that I was making, those were still operating within the realm of possibilities that God knew of and could control.

But my life looked so bad. It felt bad. It felt distant than when

I pivoted and read my Bible every day and spent time with the Lord. So it feels like in my

Christian, like early Sunday school mentality of like, well, these bad decisions led me away from God.

So now I'm like no longer within the reach of God. I'm kind of out on my own. I'm in my own desert. I'm kind of like victim to sin.

But then I make decisions that are in alignment with God. And it's like, everything's working out. I'm being guided.

It almost feels like, um, kind of left out in the cold versus in the house with God. Is that just like a feeling

I've made up? No, I think we can grow away from God.

It's a relationship. It's like a marriage. And you maybe don't know this yet, but you'll find out if you ever get married that it has to be maintained and you can backslide.

You can grow distant from one another. Or you have times where you have a kind of revival.

In fact, you need to plan times where you can kind of reignite things and keep it going. It's the same thing with our relation with God.

We have a responsibility to be seeking God, to be pursuing God. Now the Holy Spirit is always at work in us to woo us back.

And even when we turn towards God, that is a response to his grace who's already been calling us there.

But the apostle Paul in Acts 17 says that God with the rising and the falls of different civilizations,

God has from the start been working to get people to seek for him and grow up for him possibly find him even though he's not far from any of us.

For in him we live and move and have our own being as some of your own poets have said. He's talking to a bunch of philosophers on Mount Eragopagus.

And so God is at work at all times in all places with all people to get them to seek him and search for him insofar as it's possible in their culture.

And so when we respond to God, we're responding to God's grace who's always been wooing us, but we could resist it.

I don't think God's grace is irresistible. The Bible talks a lot about don't grieve the Holy Spirit.

We could grieve the Holy Spirit by saying no, choosing self -centeredness over submitting to Christ and all the rest.

So I don't think this is subjective feeling. I think that was a spiritual, fortunately you're spiritually sensitive to know enough that you're not where you're supposed to be and you can make decisions to come back to home, to start abiding in Christ.

Literally means to make our home in Christ. I just preached on that this last week. Okay. So there is this element of we're like inching our way towards like evil and suffering, but the view that you briefly mentioned of like Calvinist versus Armenian, are

God's people chosen? Did God know that I would become a Christian? And does

God know that my friend won't become a Christian? So like, does he know these things when

I was born that Cassie will become a Christian, so -and -so will not?

Or is it I chose and they chose and we chose our salvation because it comes into this place of like, why would any, why would

God let anybody not be a Christian? Yeah. Well, okay. So there are,

I know very well the biblical case that can be made for thinking that God knows, at least knows whether we'll be saved or not.

But even for the case for saying that God chooses who will be saved or not, that's Calvinism. And I, for a period of time, for two years of my life,

I was a Calvinist. And I was a Calvinist simply for exegetical reasons.

I could not interpret Romans 9 in a avoided it. I couldn't interpret the gospel of John 6.

There's passages where it seems to indicate that God chooses who's going to come to him.

He didn't choose me, but I chose you. Right. So I get the exegetical case that can be made for that.

What I've never understood, and this is me being honest, but even when I was a Calvinist, I didn't like it. It's like,

I have to believe this, but it struck me as an ugly view of God, who's choosing who will be saved and who will be damned.

And most Calvinists traditionally believe that damnation means eternal separation from God, eternal misery, unending eternal misery.

Like how could you love a God that, dang, God chose me to be in hell. Or chose my baby or my loved one.

It puts us in an awkward position where we out love God. We wish people were in heaven.

He doesn't want in heaven. And maybe it was because, I mean, I had one Calvinist friend tell me that I was predestined not to be a

Calvinist because I could never see how anyone enjoys it. You have these people who say, oh, the glory of God, he chose me to be one of his elect and he didn't have to.

But I'm thinking, yeah, but what about all the poor suckers who aren't the elect, the reprobate? And it's kind of like, okay,

God, I'll say that you're all loving and I'll serve you. Just don't take me. You can even take my daughter, she might be reprobate, but I'll still love you.

I just don't want to be one of the damned. And I feel like if I die and I ended up facing

God and I turned out the Calvinists are right, and that he was just choosing who would be in and who would be out.

And now I got to go suffer with all the ones who weren't chosen. I feel like a moral obligation to join them.

It's like an obligation not to bow down and worship a deity who could be so arbitrarily vindictive.

I really understand the rebellion of atheists who reject a

God who would ordain that there's this kind of suffering in the world. These children suffer these terrible things, pinworms, whatever.

And that suffering goes on for eternity. I would have to join the atheists and say, I have a moral obligation not to bow and worship you.

And I think the true God would say, okay, you passed the test, you're in. I think he honors the morally upright atheists more than a believer who is just trying to save their own neck by saying something's beautiful and good when it's not beautiful and good and they know it.

So that's what got me back to say, okay, there's got to be a different way of interpreting these passages. And I've gone back and it turns out that I think there are really good alternative explanations for those passages.

But at the very least, I would say that if God knows who's going to choose him and who's not, and certainly if God chooses who's going to choose him and who's not, then we can't have free will.

There's no free will in that. Free will, I would say, the bare definition of it is that I have the possibility of choosing otherwise.

I chose this, but I could have chosen that. I genuinely had the other possibility. But if all the facts are known, let alone predetermined before I even exist, then

I can never choose otherwise. Therefore, I can never have free will. Because the Calvinist view, again, just to spell it out, the

Calvinist view is when I'm born, God knows whether or not I'm going to be, he's chosen me to go home to him, or he's chosen that I will not go home.

But you're saying the Armenian view is, I have come into this world and I have many options on what

I want to believe. And I have chosen to become a Christian. And so therefore God goes, thanks for opting in voluntarily, like I'll see you in heaven when you're gone.

That's the open view. The Armenian view agrees with the Calvinist that the future is totally foreknown.

They just hold that people have free will nonetheless. So yeah, they hold that people have free will.

And that to us, there's possibilities. I can genuinely choose this way or I can go genuinely chose this, but God always knows which way

I'm going to choose. But I think that also undermines free will. Because I mean,

I can't choose other than the way God knows I'm going to choose. So the fact eternally precedes my decision in both

Calvinism and in Armenianism, and that undermines free will. In the open view, there is no fact that precedes your decision.

Oh, okay. Got it. So you don't agree with Armenian or Calvinism? No, the open view,

I mean, there's different ways you can categorize things, but you can see the open view as a sort of subset of Armenianism.

All open theists are Armenian, they hold to free will, but not all Armenians are open theists.

Got it. So we're a subcategory of that. But we agree with the Armenians over and against the

Calvinists that God doesn't predestine people to be saved or not saved.

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So yeah, kind of like going back to the parameters and like the free will and the control and like his omnipotence is how come like the babies in the slums of India who like are experiencing,

I think it's Hinduism, can't God expose himself to them?

Or does God have grace for people like that who never really got the chance to choose God or not?

All they knew was one thing. Yeah, I know that's a different category, but like we're going into salvation issues here.

But if you're asking me, it all comes down to, Cassie, what's your control belief?

What's the belief that's at the center of everything you believe? And at the center of everything I believe is that God looks like Jesus, that the cross reveals the true character of God.

God is other -oriented love. And so I think that's the center of the center of Scripture.

And Jesus says, all Scripture points to me and all Scripture bears witness of me. And it's this all -important truth that he is the definitive revelation of God.

Hebrews 1 -3. He's the exact representation of God's very essence. And so if God is like this,

God is cross -like love, other -oriented love, the kind of God who would leave heaven and become a human being and die a hellish death for human beings who couldn't deserve it less.

That's the character of God. Well, it's inconceivable to me that a God who is that kind of love would have someone be damned, or even miss eternal life simply because of where they were born, or the parents they were raised in, or the religion they were raised in, or the million other things that are outside of control.

You can't be lost on a contingency if God is a God of love. And so now

I have to deal with all the verses that say, well, if you believe, you shall be saved. But if you don't believe, you'll be lost.

And you have to wrestle with those kind of passages. And there's ways of doing that. I don't know if you want to do them right here. I would kind of go down a different rabbit trail.

But yeah, given my control belief that God was revealed on the cross in the preeminent way,

I work at all theological questions in that light. And so I think we live in a longer story than just this short life here, and then it's either heaven or hell.

I think that's a very attenuated narrative. No, I think that's really well spelled out. I had a similar scholar say something very similar of like,

I think that God meets us where we're at. I don't think he's like a black and white type of God. And I think that if we do have an everlasting

God, he's not going to punish us like based on what we know about him is what he'll judge in us.

And based off how he knows our heart is how he'll judge us. And that's what Paul says, right? That when

Gentiles don't have the law, God judges them on the basis of their conscience. Their conscience is the law unto the self.

And so you judge on the basis of the light that you know. And I like C .S. Lewis's kind of analogy.

It's his last of his trilogy, I think, where there's a soldier that's working on the side against Aslan.

And he's working for the evil deity. He gets killed, but then he ends up with Aslan. And he's like, well,

I was fighting against you. And Aslan says, well, you thought you were, but actually I know your heart and you're actually on my side, even though you thought you were fighting against me.

I think that there'll be a lot of kind of things like that where it's, I didn't know you consciously, but Jesus says to the people, you visited me in prison,

Matthew 25. When I was hungry, you gave me something to eat. When I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink. When I was homeless, you took me in.

When I was in prison, you visited me. And they go, when did we do that? And he goes, well, insofar as you did it to the least of these, you were doing it to me.

So they didn't know they were doing it to him, but they in fact were. Wow.

I've never even thought about that verse in that way of like, when I was not doing it for Jesus, I wasn't even doing it to Jesus.

But when I showed compassion to somebody else, it was as if I was doing it to Jesus. Cause God saw my heart of somebody that was willing to do that.

Exactly. Yep. Whoa. So like even people that aren't serving

God directly, blatantly, out loud, publicly, it's still kind of serving God. And there's people who convince themselves they're serving

God. But to those folks, Jesus says, depart from me. I never knew you. I hate that verse.

There's a great reversal there. It was a great reversal there. In fact, a lot of Jesus' parables are about great reversals.

The insiders find themselves on the outside and the outsiders, people that they're always far from God, they end up on the inside.

There's another reason why we should all be very, very humble and should be prodding ourselves like we're the same group and they're not.

Gotta leave all that stuff to God. Wow. It really does like, cause I feel like a lot of atheists are great people.

I think they're nice people. Do you think that they unknowingly have a heart of God?

They unknowingly have a heart for God, I want to say. Well, I can't speak as a general category, but the atheists

I've known, I'll put it like this. I have yet to meet an atheist who, if I agreed with their picture of God, I wouldn't join them.

In other words, I have yet to meet the atheist who's rejecting the God that I believe in. And the

God that they reject is a God I would reject. It's almost always a monster God, a deity who's involved in all the evil of the world, all the rest.

And they reject him out of a moral obligation. I can't worship a deity who would do this to kids and all the rest.

And sometimes the gospel that they're faced with is an unintelligible gospel. And they ask honest questions like, how does that work?

And that if you just pray the sinner's prayer when you're four years old, then no matter what you do the rest of your life, somehow you're saved.

Whereas the other person who was a saint all their life in the wrong religion, they go to hell. Stuff like that makes thinking people go, what?

Yeah. So I hold out hope for atheists.

Whoa. Oh, that is so gracious and renewing. Because you're right. We are such legalistic creatures of what you just said.

You were a saint in the wrong religion. How could that person be damned? Because I think that we get caught up in like, well, yes or no on the

Christ. Say yes or no. And it's like, if they say no, then it's like, sorry, that was it. That was your one chance.

Eternal fire for you. Cut him out. But you're saying that's not it. That's not it.

No. I really don't believe that. And if you really trust that God, when

Jesus says, if you see me, you see the Father, this is what God looks like. If God really looks like Jesus Christ dying on the cross, then we would expect that kind of grace towards everyone.

It can't be.

We like things so simple and black and white. Yes or no. In or out. Clear -cut lines. But here again, we have to be humble and acknowledge all that we don't know.

There's so much we don't know. And nowhere in the Bible does anyone claim to know that someone's in hell other than Jesus.

And he speaks about Lazarus, and that's a parable. So if no one else claimed to know that someone else is in hell, how do we reserve the right to think we know who's in hell?

God's grace, his anger endures for a moment, but his mercy endures forever.

And so I think we have good reason to be hopeful. Keep on. He's a good shepherd who goes out and searches for that one lost sheep until he finds them.

Yeah. It just makes me think of the power that I think Christians hold when it comes to judgment of like, well, you're doing this sin, so you're going to hell unless you change that one sin.

And it's like, I just think of all the pride parades and the pride protests and the abortion clinic protests.

I understand loving. I understand accountability. I understand encouragement. But it almost is like,

I've seen this, and it's what gives us a bad rap of like, because you're doing that thing that I'm not doing,

I'm better than you. And I get to therefore say where you're going next, unless you do what I say. And you know what's crazy,

Cassie, is that the sins that Christians tend to wink at, the minor sins, are the ones that are more frequently mentioned in the

Bible, like gossip and slander, railing against people, judging people.

Those are biggies. And yet Christians are guilty of that all the time, especially in prayer meetings.

Oh, pray for so -and -so, because we know what they're doing and whatnot. Gossip and slander, whatever. But you've got, you know, and this could open a can of worms, but you've got three verses that possibly mention homosexuality.

And we're going to pass laws against that, because that's one that we can be sure that we're not guilty of.

These pastors can assume that most in the congregation aren't going to be guilty, because the gays have all left. But you want to pass laws against that.

But no one's out there passing laws against slander or greed or idolatry or all the other things that we're guilty of.

And what really, and now we're getting kind of off topic, but it's a good topic. But you know,

Jesus says, do the opposite. He says, instead of minimizing your own sin and maximizing the sin of others, which is what self -righteousness is.

I may not be perfect, but at least we're not like those people. Well, Jesus says, do the opposite. If you think you see a speck, this is

Matthew 7, 1 through 3, part of the Sermon on the Mount. If you think you see a speck in your neighbor's eye, why are you searching for that speck of dust particle in your neighbor's eye when you've got a tree trunk sticking out of your own eye?

Yeah. First take out the tree trunk, and then maybe you can see the speck. And what he's doing is he's not saying that his disciples were a million times worse sinners than others, because there's got to be a million specks in a log, right?

But what he's giving us is an attitude. Whatever faults you think you see in your neighbor, consider your own faults to be a million times worse than that.

And if we all did that, we'd be confessing that we're the worst of sinners, which is what

Paul says we should be confessing in 1 Timothy 1 .15. He says, here's a saying that's worthy of all to confess that Jesus Christ came into this world to save sinners of whom

I am the worst. That's part of the saying. So we should be known as the humblest people on the planet, not the most judgmental people on the planet.

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Every year, these polls on what are attitudes towards Christians, and sadly, Jesus still rates pretty high in the average people's, person's, you know, register, but Christians are down towards the bottom.

They're dismissed as intolerant, judgmental, misogynist, anti -gay, and all the rest.

Where, you know, Jesus was known, he was scandalous because of the sinners that he attracted. The prostitutes and tax collectors came to him.

They wanted to hang out with him. They knew that he wouldn't agree with their lifestyle, but his love trumped whatever judgment they thought he'd have on them, and so they wanted to hang out with him.

He brought life. If we were manifesting the same love, I think we'd be having the same phenomenon happen to us, but instead, the sinners want to stay away from us because Christians think that they're not one of them.

Do you think that is like a genuine sense of judgment there, or do you think it's like, I don't want to be dragged down into that sin?

Because I know that if I, like, this is like the one example that came. It's like, if I started hanging out with OnlyFans girls because I wanted to love them, maybe

I'm not right now hanging out with girls that do OnlyFans because what if they, what if like my sinful nature gets attracted to what they're doing, and then

I get pulled to like, quote, unquote, the other side? Like it's a sense of protection by like disassociating with them.

I see. Yeah. I didn't know what you meant by, that's that sex thing where you sign up - Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

The sex chart. Yeah. That's, I'm 68, and there's some phenomena in this world that I do not understand.

I missed the learning curve on that one. I don't get it. That just strikes me so, but anyways, but okay,

I get the analogy. Yes, the like cam girls that like do it for money. Yeah. There is a realism that we have to,

I could never, I have known people who have gone into the porn industry and evangelized in the porn industry.

I could never do that because that would be too much of a temptation. I don't have enough strength.

You got to know your limitations. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. If you're an alcoholic, you might not want to be thinking that you're called to go minister in bars.

You have to know, so there is that, but that aside, we should be attracting all different kinds of folks to us.

Okay. Yeah. I think I'm just trying to like give Christians an out of like, well, maybe they're not bringing those sinners to the table because that sin's too tempting and they're just trying to protect themselves, but I agree with you.

I think that, but even, yeah, I'm trying to put it like, let's say I'm not tempted at all to become an OnlyFans girl. And it's like, even if I did start evangelizing with like only those women,

I'm just like, I'm just like loving them. Like for me, evangelizing makes it seem like there's a script, but like just loving them, just hanging out with them.

I do feel like I would catch some flack. And that's where you kind of get a chance to rub off on them and that's where you begin to influence.

But I feel like even if I did that, I would get a bad rap. Like this channel would not go well. Oh, there you go.

There would be, I don't want to call your audience Pharisees, but if they knew that you were hanging out for love and still rejected you, that would be very pharisaical.

And that's what the Pharisees did with Jesus. Birds of a feather flock together. Look, he's hanging out with those sinners.

He must be one of them. And so in some ways, if you're being judged by Pharisees, having two scandals of love, you're in the exact right spot because that's where Jesus was at.

Yeah. I'm not saying that I'm going to do that. I'm not saying that like my audience is a Pharisee, but I think it's more of like an internet thing.

Like the people that I think are seeking God or listening to this podcast, I think the people that catch 30 second clips take a lot of things out of context because it is out of context.

They miss like a whole 60 minute conversation. So of course they're only judging based off what they're given. Okay. Yeah.

I mean, that was a good tangent. Jeez. Okay. So let's talk about evil and suffering. I just want to draw attention because I think this is charming.

This is what happens when you get two ADD people together. The conversation, especially when one doesn't have the meds.

We started with open theism and now we're down talking about Jesus and the prosecutors. I love it.

I love it. Okay. That's why we have show notes, literally for this reason, because who knows where we're going to go next.

Okay. Oh, show notes are overrated. The things that we were supposed to talk to was evil and suffering.

And correct me if you feel like we've already discussed this, but it's like, if God knows evil's coming, why doesn't he divinely intervene?

If he knows that I'm going to marry a guy who I've been praying for my whole life and that guy ends up cheating on me, divorcing me, leaving me with four kids without any income, couldn't

God stepped in at some point to stop all that from happening? Yeah. Yeah. So in the case of your marriage, that would be an absolutely great...

I know a lady who gave up on her faith on God for this very reason. She approached me,

I was guest speaking at this church and she approached me after the service. And there was the first time back in church in seven years.

And the reason that she had quit church altogether was because she said that from the age of 13 on, she had one prayer and that was, she had a burden to be a missionary in Tanzania.

I think it was Taiwan, something like that. And her one prayer was that she'd meet a man who also had a burden for Tanzania and they become missionaries together.

That was her life dream. Well, she went to Bethel College where I taught and meets the guy of her dreams.

And it goes just for four years, they do everything right. They submit to the elders, they get input from friends.

Is this a union that's of God or not? They check off all the boxes. Comes to the year, they get married and then they go to missionary school.

And as the first year missionary school, he gets caught cheating on her. He repents and they get restored.

But about, I guess it was a couple months later, he's back having affair with her.

Finally, the third time she finds this out, he says he's leaving her. He's going to marry this gal.

And she had just found out she was pregnant. Okay. So her whole thing was, what a great joke,

God. I pray my whole life to find, I ask one thing and that's give me a husband. I want to serve your will and give me a husband who wants to serve you like I serve you.

And so we can go to Taiwan, the happy ever after. And this is what he gives me, a guy who's a constant cheat.

And now he's not, you know, no interest in missions. My missionary career is blown sky high and all the rest. And so she's raging against God.

And what I was able to say to her was this, I go, what if when God said, let's grant that you did everything right and you got the green light to do this.

And I have no reason to doubt that. And maybe at the time that was a good bet. Because though God would of course know that your husband has some wayward tendencies.

He also saw that his love for you could have put an end to that. And his life could have been going on that track.

Unfortunately, when it came to this time to make a decision on whether or not to start flirting with this girl who was flirting with him or not, he said yes to it.

And one flirt led to another and he went down that path and ruined it. It still could have been repaired if only he would have repented and stayed clear as true, but he didn't.

Two other, two more times. And what if God is grieving over this as much as you are?

Maybe even more so because God loves you more than you love yourself and loves your child more than you could love your child and your husband more than anyone could love your husband.

What if God's grieving of this? Because it was always a risk.

There's always a risk in love. And this is a risk that's gone wrong. But I said to her, on the other hand, you got to know that while God wishes it would have gone differently and it could have gone differently, you're here now and God has been anticipating this possibility from the foundation of the world.

So God has a plan on how to turn this to his advantage and to your advantage. If now you'll recommit to him and start walking in his ways.

It maybe isn't Tanzania or Taiwan or wherever it was, but it's a new kind of ministry and it'll be just as fulfilling, maybe even more so because God is a

God who in all things is working to bring good out of evil. And that got her, that open view created enough space in her brain to reconsider becoming a follower of Jesus again.

And she finally did. That's one case where the open view, I think has got an answer that no other view can give.

Yeah, it definitely was the parallel of like the traditional view of like, there was one shot at this life.

And I took that option and it's still at work. So I guess the whole thing's blown versus like, maybe this was part of a plan.

Maybe you had to go through all that to get to this moment because it's playing a moment in a larger moment that's yet to come.

See, that's what a Calvinist would say. Oh. Calvinist would say, you had to go through this in order to get to this point.

Oh my gosh. An open theist would simply say, he didn't have to go through this, but you did. You went through it. And now that you went through it,

God can use it for good. The Calvinist would say God predestined it for the good. The open theist would say, no,

God didn't predestine it. It just happens. But when it happened, now that it's happened, he'll use it for the good.

And the trouble with the Calvinist view is that, well, you can say, you had to go through a bad marriage in order to learn this thing.

What do you do with the Holocaust? What was the grand purpose for the Holocaust? And the

Calvinist view, every child that was incinerated, a million of the victims of the

Holocaust were under the age of five. And I just have a special heart for kids under the age of five.

Calvinist would have to say every one of those kids were predestined to be incinerated. For what greater purpose?

And the only answer they have is the glory of God, which is to me the worst answer you could give.

Yeah. Okay. So this concept of a plan that it's playing a role in is not

Calvinist, is open. Yeah. If you mean by a plan, something that's predestined, that's

Calvinist. Got it. Everything's part of a plan. Everything fits God's plan.

And that creates the problem of evil because so much of what seems to be planned is evil. And if God's all good, how can that evil be part of his plan?

The open view doesn't... God has an overall plan for the whole creation. God has a plan for your life.

God has a plan for this moment, but it changes. It depends on what you choose. Plans can change in circumstances.

And so it's like in Jeremiah 18, this is a great analogy of this.

And I especially like this analogy because it deals with the potter clay, which Paul talks about in Romans 9.

Paul says, God has the right to make any kind of vessel he wants out of one lump of clay. So if he makes one vessel for honor, another one for common use, that's his prerogative.

And if he wants to punish the vessels of dishonor for being the way he made them, that's his right.

In order to say to the vessels that he made for honorable purposes, you know, aren't you glad I showed mercy on you?

If you have a five -year -old son playing with clay and you see him doing this with clay figurines, smashing one group for being the way that he made them, and then turning to the other group saying, aren't you glad I didn't do that to you?

You probably want to get him to see a therapist pretty quick. But that's how they interpret that passage.

But in Jeremiah 18, it's the only place where the potter clay analogy is fleshed out.

And Jeremiah fleshes it out, or I should say the Yahweh fleshes it out in a way that has the opposite meaning of what the

Calvinists give it in Romans 9. There, the Lord had prophesied against Israel that they're going to come under judgment because of their disobedience.

And some of the Israelites were saying, we're doomed. It's no use. It's no use. So then the

Lord takes Jeremiah to the potter's house and he sees this potter making this vessel, but the clay wasn't cooperating with him.

And so he decided to change his plans and make a different kind of vessel that was appropriate to the kind of clay he was working with.

And then the Lord says to Jeremiah, now you go back and tell Israel, I'm the potter and you're the clay.

And if I decree I'm fashioning judgment against you, if you will change your mind and repent,

I will change my mind. And instead of bringing judgment, I'll bring blessing. But if at any time

I am fashioning blessing for a nation because of its righteousness, if it turns wicked, if they change their mind and turn wicked,

I'll change my mind and I'll bring judgment rather than blessing. So the whole point of the potter clay analogy is

God's flexibility. His flexibility in working with the, and whatever he produces, it's wise because it's the only thing he could produce given the lump of clay.

But we as free agents have a choice about what kind of clay we're going to be. Are we going to be moldable for him to fashion blessing in us?

Or are we going to be hardhearted? And in which case he has to fashion judgment. So to go back to your friend who basically went through this tragedy with her marriage, you know, and the

Calvinist view would say, well, that's part of the plan. You had to go through this to get to the next level. But the open theist view is more saying okay, we went through that and now we've made the decision to leave him.

Now something else is going to happen. Now a different direction. That maybe was part of Satan's plan because there's an enemy out there working against maybe he threw in some, you know, things.

And it became the ex -husband's plan and the gal's plan they was flirting with, but it was not

God's plan. God's plan is not for you to sin. He always intends righteousness, goodness, godliness for his people.

I always like to think about, and this will get into kind of the next follow -up question is like the mysteries of God and like what we can and can't know, but like the book of Job and everyone always wonders like, well, why does something bad happen to Job?

And he was clearly faultless and his friends have these conversations with him trying to justify like, well, obviously he did something wrong.

And then he finally meets God and God's like, well, who are you? You know, to kind of know what

I'm doing here. Were you there when I marked off the dimensions of the earth? Were you there when I laid the foundations of the soil? I guess a

Calvinist view for Job would be like, Job needed to go through all that suffering to like, that was all part of the plan in order for him to then, you know, reap double by the end of the story.

But an open theist view is like, well, Job decided to seek God after all of that. He was seeking

God. And then the enemy came into play, took it all away. And then he still sought God and God responded with more grace and blessing.

Well, what's amazing about the book of Job. I mean, there's a lot of things that are amazing about that book.

It's so insightful, I think. I also think it's so very often misinterpreted. If this was all part of God's plan, then it must've been

God's plan for Satan to come into the courtroom at the beginning and to accuse God of being this Machiavellian leader who only, you know, cause that's the accusation.

The Satan shows up, the accuser. And we have to realize that we're dealing here with epic poetry.

The genre of Job, this isn't like a video recording of what we would have seen with a video recorder, but it's an epic poem.

And the prologue of an epic poem in ancient world is usually to set up the characters of the play and to let the audience in on a secret that the characters don't know.

And so we are part of the members of God's court and we see the Satan get introduced into this court.

He's not one of the sons of God. He just shows up at their party and he starts accusing God of things. You know,

God's proud of Job. And so Satan goes, you think that Job's, you know, worshiping you for free?

No, he's doing it for the benefits, which is to say, you're manipulating people into worshiping you. So of course, you're going to worship you, take away the manipulation and then see what happens.

And in the context of this epic poem, the only way that can be answered is by Job being put to the test.

If Yahweh were to just, you know, ignore Satan, well, that would, the charge would be left standing.

If Yahweh were to incinerate Satan, the charge would be left standing. That'd be the ultimate Machiavellian thing to do.

The only way it can be answered is by being put to the test. And so Job becomes the unwitting test partner here and everything gets wiped away and Satan gets unleashed on him.

And you know, this malevolent being just takes away, you know, God put some parameters around it, but otherwise he just has his way.

Then throughout the drama, none of the characters know about this. They don't know about this wager, which is already telling us something important.

And that's that things go on in the heavenly realms that affect us here on earth, but we never know about them. In fact,

I think that's the whole point of the book of Job. There's things going on in the heavenly realm, this spiritual warfare, which is what it was, it was verbal warfare.

Job gets caught in the middle of it. And Job, so Job's friends blame Job for what's happening because they have this idea that if you're righteous,

God will give you good things. So if you're not getting good things, you must have your righteous. And the book of Job is meant to refute that theology.

But Job, he also thinks that God's doing all this to him because he doesn't know what the

Satan figure. And so he blames God. At first he sounds righteous. The Lord gives, the Lord takes away. But follow his train of thought throughout the book, and he gets nastier and nastier and nastier.

By chapter 30, he's calling him Satan. He says, you're my adversary. You toy with me like a lion does its cub.

Why are the righteous thrown out on the street? How come the innocent don't hear their prayers? Who's turning the hearts of the judges against righteousness?

It's you. He blames God for everything. And then at the end of the book, when

God shows up in the whirlwind, he does put Job in his place. He says, Job, what do you know?

Were you there? Did I consult you when I set the foundations of the earth? Let's start easy.

Do you know where dew goes? What does the dew in the morning go? All those wild animals. What's God, why is he talking about all these wild animals and the constellations and all the rest?

Well, he's exposing Job's ignorance. But he's not saying I can do whatever I want and you can't question me.

He's just saying, Job, until you know what's going on here, maybe you want to be a little less quick on the trigger on blaming me.

And then in chapters 39 through 41, he turns his attention to Leviathan and to Behemoth, these ancient ways of representing evil.

Leviathan, the many -headed dragon, and he describes them as having these, breathing smoke out of its nostrils and fire out of its...

It's an ancient Near Eastern mythical way of representing evil. And he chides

Job by saying, hey, Job, you want to go take on Leviathan? Go tame him with your spear.

Oh, that's right. He eats iron. And so he puts Job in his place by how little he knows and basically saying, unless you think you can do a better job than me contending with Leviathan, maybe you want to be a little less quick.

And Job, you don't know what's going on here. So then Job repents. It says in chapter 42 in verse six, he repented.

He says, I spoke in ignorance. And he runs his clock. Then Job says, or God says to one of Job's friends, no, he says to Job, Job, I'm angry with your friends because they did not speak about me what was true as you did.

Now, here's the thing. So Job's friends spoke out of their fear. And that's why they were indicting

Job. They just wanted the assurance that what happened to Job wouldn't happen to them. So they have a formula. If you're a good boy, nothing bad will happen to you, which is burying your head in the sand.

He's mad at them because they were speaking out of self -serving reasons where Job spoke truth. Now the word truth in Greek is kun.

And it means to align with, like a plumb line. And a word can align with truth in one of two ways.

One way is it can be accurate. It can align with what is true objectively. But that can't be what's applying to Job because he just repented of everything he just spoke.

And God chastised him for what he spoke. He spoke in ignorance. The other way that truth can align is with your heart, your heart intention.

You speak honestly. And that's what God's commending with Job, that Job, even in the midst of all of the crap that you went through, and he never does find out why, you stayed honest with me.

And that counts as succeeding the test that Satan had put out there.

It's a form of worship, and we're just honest with God. Even when what we're saying about God is bad, it's coming out of our gut.

God loves an honest conversation. God loves it when even when we say, I don't want to believe in you, and I can't follow it because I'm struggling with this.

God goes, I love that you're being honest because I can work with that. Versus like, yeah, I don't know why

God does what he does, but I'm supposed to follow him, so I will. Yep. I think God loves honesty above all else.

The genuineness of a relationship is only as real as the depth of your conversation, the honesty of your conversation.

You're only related to a person insofar as they're honest with you. And so what God wants first and foremost is honesty.

Girl, that's like my whole channel. It's like, I don't get it. I don't get it. If everyone loves you, why? Because I don't get it.

But okay. I feel like God loves a lot of atheists then. Oh yeah. He loves everybody. Well, obviously.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think people get caught up in like, depart from me. I never knew you. And the whole, you got to buy into the bit of the resurrection.

And so even the atheists that aren't worshiping him, that aren't buying into the whole resurrection, they're still being honest of like, well, that's because he doesn't make sense to me.

That's because I don't get on board with this. That's because it doesn't make sense to me. God's like, I love that you're not pretending.

I think God would rather have an honest atheist than a disingenuous believer who's not really being honest with themselves or with God.

And they just suppress all their questions, suppress their objections, suppress everything. And that's not very healthy.

Yeah. So you kind of mentioned like, you don't know what's going on in the heavenly realm.

Do you think there are aspects to our relationship with God where we say like, why did this happen? And it's like, you don't get to know that part.

Like, are there limits to like where our understanding of God ends and like where his sovereignty begins that we just don't get access to or don't get access to it yet?

Well, you know, it depends on what kind of question you're asking. If you're asking a question about like, why did some evil happen to me?

Let's say, you know, I'm walking down the street and I get shot in the head and I'm brain damaged the rest of my life.

It was a random drive -by shooting. Why did that happen to me? I don't think that's the kind of question where God would say, shh, you don't get to know why that happened to you.

Because that was evil. And whatever, God is not ever the author of evil.

So, in my view, because my control belief is that God looks like Jesus Christ dying on the cross.

God is other oriented love. I can't know why I got shot in the head on this date, at this time, by this person, whatever.

But the reason I can't know is not because God is so mysterious. God's character,

I think, is absolutely clear. God's a good communicator and he communicates really loudly on the cross.

This is who I am. The reason I can't know is because there's so many variables involved in that answer.

Like, why was that guy shooting at whoever he's shooting at, at this particular time? Why was he the kind of guy that would want to shoot at anybody?

Well, maybe it has something to do with the fact that he was born in this situation and had this kind of a sick mother. Why was she sick?

Well, that has to do with her father's abuse. You find out that, ask any question about why anything happens.

Why is there a five second interval between two cars on a highway any day? Well, you'd have to know the entire history of the universe to answer that question.

Because everything is so dynamically interrelated that it could be the case that if a butterfly hadn't flapped its wing in a particular way 17 years earlier,

I would have been shot there and something else would have happened. So, there's infinite complexity in the goings on because everything's interdependent in reality.

And so, we can never know why things happen the way they do. But what we've got to know,

I think, is that in a world where we can never know why things ultimately happen the way they do, every answer we give to a question about why is only the tip of the iceberg.

You could trace it all the way back to the beginning of history. But in the midst of that sea of complexity and ignorance, what we've got to know, because everything depends on it, is the character of God.

The character of God is light and in Him there is no darkness, 1 John 1 .5.

There's not a hint of evil, of malice, of revenge in Him.

God is love and in Him there is no darkness. So, it's not like a restrictive amount of knowledge of like, let me know,

God. And He's like, no. It's more of like, you couldn't possibly fathom what it took to answer that question.

Well, it just has to do with our finitude, that we have finite brains, but a virtually infinite creation.

And so, that's why we can't know why things happen the way they do. But what

I need to know, I think everything depends on this, is if it's evil, Cassie, it did not originate in God.

If it's evil, it had to originate in wills other than God, whether it's human or angelic.

And I don't even need to know whose will did what. I can't trace this back to God.

So, never should I blame God for it. Okay.

So, how do you recommend, I mean, just kind of like wrapping up, how do you recommend to believers navigating and embracing a

God with so much unknown, with that faith and with trust in Him, despite not knowing or understanding fully?

Yeah. So, I think a lot of people, when they find out that there's the fact of what

I'm going to choose and what others are going to choose, that it's still indeterminate, still up in the open, it makes them fearful.

They like things closed for certain groups of people. They like it nailed shut, nice and tidy with a bow on top.

And so, it makes them feel insecure that there's any kind of, you know, things really hang upon what I choose. Yep, they do.

And everyone lives like this. You know, what I'd say, Cassie, is whatever people believe, they're going to live like they're open theists.

You can pray for protection when you go to bed at night, but you're still going to lock your door. You know that things hang in the balance on what you choose?

It's how we live. We couldn't make decisions any other way. So, the open view is just basically saying the way that you experience the world is accurate.

Things really are up to you. But you don't need to be fearful if you'll trust the character and the intelligence of God.

The character is always good, always loving, and the intelligence is always anticipating.

Whatever assurance you used to get from believing that God knew the facts of what you will choose, I offer you the same assurance just with a smarter

God. A God who anticipates every possible thing you could do as though you had to do it because he's that smart.

So, trust the character of God and trust the wisdom of God, and you got it all covered. So many topics in this episode.

Like, it's brain food. I mean, I'm so excited to kind of debrief with your friend Paul Eddie next week.

And this is just something that it's so well -guided and well -informed. I really appreciate you coming on the show and really outlining and mapping this diverse set of ways that we can approach

God. How can people get involved with you if they want to continue learning from you, Greg? Well, I've got a number of books out there.

I've got a Woodland Hills podcast I preach two out of every three weeks.

And so, I'm always giving my stuff there. This last week's message, I don't know when you're going to air this, but the message for the 14th was on staying present, practicing the presence of God, which is such a...

So, yeah, you can give all my sermons that way. And I also have a website called Renew.

Rethink everything. It's R -E -K -N -E -W because rethink everything you thought you knew. And I have a lot of writings and blogs on there.

And we have a Q &A podcast that we do on there. So, yeah, you can touch me that way.

Okay. I'll put all that in the show notes if anybody wants to get involved with buying your books or going to your website and learning. But this is a scary topic and you handled it well.

I think that a lot of people get so tripped up in the way that things can work and not work. But I think at the end of the day, the message is who is

God showing up on the cross for us? That's a God of love. There you go. I think that's it. Thank you so much for coming on the show,

Greg. I really appreciate it. Hey, thanks for having me on. It's really been enjoyable having our little ADD rant and going this way and that way. I loved it.

Absolutely. Well, you're welcome back anytime. Let's find an excuse to bring you back on. Let's do it. Thank you. God bless you.