Hello,
I have taken some time to consider Zhuang Mao's question to my previous question, which considers why we pray if God has known and pre-destined everything.
Indeed, God created the world at its beginning. But perhaps we fail to see that God has also created the end. In fact, the whole of existence can be considered to have existed all the while. In this sense, God has pre-destined everything, since there is nothing that can change what God has already known. It is worth thinking about this - Did God cause everything to happen?
The answer is probably 'No'. As Zhuang Mao has noted, God has allowed us to have free will, to choose as we will and as we please. He did not want us to sin, but Adam and Eve did; He did not want the Israelites to fade from the splendor of David's reign, but they gradually disintegrated. But God, being all-knowing, has already forseen this, and through His Old Testament prophets He had already predicted the salvation that is to come from our Lord Jesus Christ. He knows exactly how we are going to make the next decision, because He is all-knowing.
So why do we pray? We pray because we need to communicate our petitions and intercessions for others to God. He knows our hearts, but He wants us to communicate with Him, for our own good, not His (how can we possibly benefit God in any way? He is omnipotent!). In prayer, we come into the realisation that we have a God who answers our prayers, and it strengthens our faith. This in turn assures our salvation, lest we fall from grace. Does He benefit from all these? Far from it! Why does He need to grieve His heart for the sake of Man? Why, because God is love, and He loves His creation! He stands to gain nothing from our salvation and our comfort, because He owns everything.
Does God pre-destine our prayers? This is a contentious point, but I believe that prayer is as much a personal decision as any other,
i.e. He does not pre-destine it. But even before we pray, He knows if we will pray, and what we will pray. In fact, the whole of history and the future is laid out before Him as a map is laid out on the table, plain for Him to see. Remembering that God exists outside of time, it is therefore possible to accept that God does not follow our pattern of making plans and decisions. To Him, everything laid out in terms of the four dimensions (3 spatial dimensions and 1 temporal dimension) - in much the same way that we can give the exact coordinates of Mount Everest, so too can He indicate with precision every decision that every living thing makes at every point in time.
As part of Creation we can never quite understand how to predict decisions. This fact is most clearly brought out if one plays chess. In the game of chess, the objective is to be able to predict each decision that the opponent will make after each of your pre-planned move. It takes a very good player to pre-empt the opponent by 8-10 moves; it is impossible to predict a whole game before the other person has made a single move. But God being the Creator is able to see all our decisions. Think of God as the BEST chess player in the whole world, and so much more. Not only is He able to forsee your chess moves, He can predict everything you will do, without needing any limitations on your decision-making freedom (in chess, the decisions are limited by the moves that each piece can perform, as well as the turn-by-turn nature of decision-making). This means that He has not compelled you to act in any manner, which is of course in line with our point that God does not
cause everything to happen (although He can).
God does not need to wait for us to make a decision before He makes His move, because He knows all our moves. He does not need to wait till we decide whether or not we will pray before He can respond (by answering our prayers if we do pray, and by not answering if we don't). But let us never fall short of His commands, and do not wonder for one second if we should pray!
The conclusion of the matter is this - that God knows everything, but does not pre-destined everything, despite frequent confusion to the contrary. Some people lump God's omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence and propose that God must therefore have pre-destined everything, that free-will is nothing but an illusion. This can be no further from the truth, for does God delight in grieving for a sinful world? That is a strange proposition indeed. God's good plan includes our prayers and petitions, so let us not tarry further. Living in God's will requires that we communicate with Him, for how can one man please another except if he knows the desires of the one he is trying to please? Therefore, I urge you to pray, and pray often. For our God is a prayer-answering God!
Cyrus
You were blessed by Cyrus
