Does God change his mind?

[OnceConvinced]

A Christian member of our forum recently pointed out a bible contradiction for all to see:

This verse was presented first:
Numbers 23:19 "God is not human, that he should lie, not a human being, that he should change his mind."

The Christian then attempted to trump it with a contradictory scripture where God DOES change his mind, thus exposing a blatant bible contradiction:

Jeremiah 18:8 "But if that nation about which I spoke turns from its evil way, I'll change my mind about the disaster that I had planned for it."

Here are further verses that show God changing his mind:

Exodus 32:14
So the LORD changed His mind about the harm which He said He would do to His people.

Amos 7:3
The LORD changed His mind about this. "It shall not be," said the LORD.

Jeremiah 18:10
if it does evil in My sight by not obeying My voice, then I will think better of the good with which I had promised to bless it. (wow this is a verse where God says he will break his promise!!)


So questions for debate:

Does Got change his mind?
If he does change his mind, how do we know he hasn't changed his mind about much of what he expected from us in the New Testament?
If he does change his mind, how can we really know what he wants of us today?

[shnarkle]

Yes God does changes His mind when there is good reason.

Jehovah was going to destroy Nineveh but because they changed their ways He changed His mind.

"When the true God saw what they did, how they had turned back from their evil ways, he reconsidered the calamity that he said he would bring on them, and he did not bring it." Jonah 3:10

Did God not know that Nineveh was going to change their ways?

No. God doesn't make decisions for us. If He did then there would be no reason to send people to preach or warn. People would be born with faith.

"However, how will they call on him if they have not put faith in him? How, in turn, will they put faith in him about whom they have not heard? How, in turn, will they hear without someone to preach?" - Ro 10:4

faith is not a possession of all people. - 2 Thessalonians 3:2

It sounds like you're saying that God is not omniscient. If God is omniscient this doesn't negate free will, or one's ability to make decisions for ourselves.

[2timothy316]

Yes God does changes His mind when there is good reason.

Jehovah was going to destroy Nineveh but because they changed their ways He changed His mind.

"When the true God saw what they did, how they had turned back from their evil ways, he reconsidered the calamity that he said he would bring on them, and he did not bring it." Jonah 3:10

Did God not know that Nineveh was going to change their ways?

No. God doesn't make decisions for us. If He did then there would be no reason to send people to preach or warn. People would be born with faith.

"However, how will they call on him if they have not put faith in him? How, in turn, will they put faith in him about whom they have not heard? How, in turn, will they hear without someone to preach?" - Ro 10:4

faith is not a possession of all people. - 2 Thessalonians 3:2

It sounds like you're saying that God is not omniscient. If God is omniscient this doesn't negate free will, or one's ability to make decisions for ourselves.

Omniscient is a word that gets thrown around a lot but does omniscient include all of time? The past, sure but the future? The Bible says, So my word that goes forth from my mouth will prove to be. It will not return to me without results, but it will certainly do that in which I have delighted, and it will have certain success in that for which I have sent it."Isaiah 55:10, 11.

That last part, 'it will have certain success in that for which I have sent it'. This means God does something to make His Word return with the results He wants. But when we read this is it really saying that He knows everything in the future? Does it also really suggest that every future event is 'fixed'? No. Apparently a future event is only 'fixed' if He is actively involved in making it happen. If it was 'fixed' then why send anything?

One person explained it this way. If we want to get from our house to a friends house we have never been to before, we use a GPS system. From this we can a route. But what if a road is closed. No big deal, the GPS system is able to find a new route. The same is with God's plans. He knows all the routes and if the free will of a person changes then another route is ready to go. The difference is that God will get what He wants to come true, done.

So omniscient as far everything that is happening right now, down to the smallest detail, yes. As far as knowing everyone's future no. You'd be right, if everyone's future is fixed then there is no reason for a Bible. We'd be like animals. Living on basic instinct. Following rails that we can never change. It's like watching a movie. Once the movie is made and burned to a DVD, that's it. No matter how many times we watch the movie the ending is always the same.

[Blastcat]

[Replying to post 40 by 2timothy316]



[center]
Some people love to imagine things[/center]

So when your parents expected you to obey and so on or face punishment, they were evil.

______________

FOR THE RECORD:

You do not know my mind, do not know what I have experienced, you do not know me, and you sure don't know what my parents might or might not have done.

You keep pretending to know me better than I know myself.

______________

[shnarkle]

Yes God does changes His mind when there is good reason.

Jehovah was going to destroy Nineveh but because they changed their ways He changed His mind.

"When the true God saw what they did, how they had turned back from their evil ways, he reconsidered the calamity that he said he would bring on them, and he did not bring it." Jonah 3:10

Did God not know that Nineveh was going to change their ways?

No. God doesn't make decisions for us. If He did then there would be no reason to send people to preach or warn. People would be born with faith.

"However, how will they call on him if they have not put faith in him? How, in turn, will they put faith in him about whom they have not heard? How, in turn, will they hear without someone to preach?" - Ro 10:4

faith is not a possession of all people. - 2 Thessalonians 3:2

It sounds like you're saying that God is not omniscient. If God is omniscient this doesn't negate free will, or one's ability to make decisions for ourselves.

Omniscient is a word that gets thrown around a lot but does omniscient include all of time? The past, sure but the future? The Bible says, So my word that goes forth from my mouth will prove to be. It will not return to me without results, but it will certainly do that in which I have delighted, and it will have certain success in that for which I have sent it."Isaiah 55:10, 11.

That last part, 'it will have certain success in that for which I have sent it'. This means God does something to make His Word return with the results He wants. But when we read this is it really saying that He knows everything in the future? Does it also really suggest that every future event is 'fixed'? No. Apparently a future event is only 'fixed' if He is actively involved in making it happen. If it was 'fixed' then why send anything?

One person explained it this way. If we want to get from our house to a friends house we have never been to before, we use a GPS system. From this we can a route. But what if a road is closed. No big deal, the GPS system is able to find a new route. The same is with God's plans. He knows all the routes and if the free will of a person changes then another route is ready to go. The difference is that God will get what He wants to come true, done.

What good is the bare possibility of performance in a world which is essentially uncontrolled by God and random as to the outcome of events? What good are God's pre-ordained general possibilities in a world governed by the hearts and minds of specific individuals-especially individuals who can fall from grace, if they refuse to honor, God's "pre-ordained possibilities" for doing good works? Is God dependent on our autonomous good works in order to make all things work together for good?

How does God guarantee the future existence of the whole without guaranteeing the future existence of the parts?

So omniscient as far everything that is happening right now, down to the smallest detail, yes. As far as knowing everyone's future no. You'd be right, if everyone's future is fixed then there is no reason for a Bible. We'd be like animals. Living on basic instinct. Following rails that we can never change. It's like watching a movie. Once the movie is made and burned to a DVD, that's it. No matter how many times we watch the movie the ending is always the same.

Knowledge doesn't necessarily indicate coercion. However, the father does "draw" those whom he has chosen to Christ. A better translation would be "drag". Either way your choice is irrelevant because you basically can't choose to follow God in the first place. Paul is pretty clear in pointing this out. No one even wants to follow or please God.

[hoghead1]

[Replying to myth-one.com]

In my Post 15, I outlined more than one way in which God changes.

Yes, God continually gets wiser, learns more, as I mentioned before, in Post 15.

Yes, I am anthropomorphizing God. My reason is this: I believe all knowing is analogous knowing; to know, we must generalize from the familiar to the unfamiliar. If there is one thing we are most familiar with, it is our human existence. So, unless there is a genuine analogy or likeness between ourselves and the rest of reality, and this includes God, we don't have an inkling what is going on. Anthropomorphizing and projection aren't the problem, they are the solution.

Beauty, I find, demands uniformity and diversity. So as I and many others seek a beautiful relationship with God, that means we seek a God who is both different from us, yet also alike. A God who is thought of as a male with a beard is just too much alike us to be of any real aesthetic interest, downright boring. A God who is thought of as the complete and total negation of any and all creaturely predicates is too depersonalizing and dehumanizing. So I believe God is like ourselves in that God is sensitive, enjoys genuine emotion, empathizes with us, just as we empathize with ourselves. However, unlike us, God's sensitivity is on a scale we can't even begin to imagine. We directly and immediately interact with little more than our own body cells. In contrast, the universe is God's body, so that god enjoys a direct, immediate empathic response to any and all creaturely feeling. We are total strangers to sensitivity on that grand of scale.

Yes, I think the creation gives God continual feedback. That's what the Bible means when it says God saw it was good. Knowing "plans" or "the plan" is a very imperfect kind of knowledge. You have to see the thing fleshed out to really know it.

[hoghead1]

[Replying to post 42 by 2timothy316]

I am inclined to agree with that. God's omniscience means that yes, God knows everything that has happened or is happening, right down to the smallest detail. It also means God knows the future for what it is: a realm of unrealized possibilities, not something definite, set in cement, or already decided by God. God does not decide for us; we have to make our decisions for ourselves. Hence, the future is undecided until we decide what to do. The future is open-ended, indeterminate, bot for ourselves and also for God.

The only way God could know the future as definite is for God to decide it for us; but then we'd be but puppets and have no freedom, and God would be the author of terrible evils and sufferings.

The Bible presents the future as open-ended for God. Hence, in Jer. 18, God gives a warning and then waits to see what happens, what they actually do, before taking a definite course of action. You also find that in the case of Sodom, where God's knowledge of teh future is "iffy': "If I find such-and-such a number of righteous people" he says.

[Justin108]

[Replying to post 27 by Justin108]

The answer is still no.

So I am to understand that God is not in fact omniscient then?

Omniscient is a word that gets thrown around a lot but does omniscient include all of time? The past, sure but the future?

Isn't the very nature of a prophecy the ability to see the future? And how many prophecies has God made?

[2timothy316]

[Replying to post 42 by 2timothy316]

I am inclined to agree with that. God's omniscience means that yes, God knows everything that has happened or is happening, right down to the smallest detail. It also means God knows the future for what it is: a realm of unrealized possibilities, not something definite, set in cement, or already decided by God. God does not decide for us; we have to make our decisions for ourselves. Hence, the future is undecided until we decide what to do. The future is open-ended, indeterminate, bot for ourselves and also for God.

The only way God could know the future as definite is for God to decide it for us; but then we'd be but puppets and have no freedom, and God would be the author of terrible evils and sufferings.

The Bible presents the future as open-ended for God. Hence, in Jer. 18, God gives a warning and then waits to see what happens, what they actually do, before taking a definite course of action. You also find that in the case of Sodom, where God's knowledge of teh future is "iffy': "If I find such-and-such a number of righteous people" he says.

Hoghead mark this date, because we are in agreement. If we see omniscience as seeing all possible outcomes from every decision that would mean the future is not set or ridged. Only the mind of God could see all the ways something can go. It would also be the only way He could set something in motion to get exactly what He wants to happen when He wants it to happen.

[2timothy316]

[Replying to post 27 by Justin108]

The answer is still no.

So I am to understand that God is not in fact omniscient then?

Omniscient is a word that gets thrown around a lot but does omniscient include all of time? The past, sure but the future?

Isn't the very nature of a prophecy the ability to see the future? And how many prophecies has God made?

Yes, that is the point, how many prophecies has God made. It's not that He is seeing into the future with His prophecies but that He is actively involved in making sure that they come true.

Imagine that we are looking at a solid string hanging down. This is the past. Above one string and attached to that string that are 20 other strings. These are the future. Where they meet is the present. The natural way the next string us chosen is just the the sting that is going up. All others not chosen simply vanish. But God wants something else to happen. So He intervenes and makes things happen so that another string is not added to the past but another one. This in turn opens up a whole new set of 20 strings. God however knows what strings will bring up the next 20 strings and the next and so on for eternity. But He doesn't do this for everything. So being omniscient is not choosing the future but knowing all possible outcomes for every action. What makes God so powerful is that He can intervene and get a precise result from that knowledge.

How does He know what a human might choose? He can see into their heart. We as humans have our own single string of the past and multiple strings (decisions) to choose from. Imagine God could see what what our options are and since He knows our heart He has knowledge of us that we can't fathom. Imagine good choices show up as bright colors and bad one show up as dark colors. God can see our desired choices. He can also see our past choices. If He sees a person's heart that leans to the bright colors that is good and that makes Him happy. But there are also those that are desiring the dark colors. Now He might be able influence a person's choice but He doesn't actively choose for them. He could but He doesn't because then He's have a puppet and we'd lose freedom of choice.

With the above info now imagine the strings of people's hearts God saw prior to the flood. the badness of man was abundant in the earth and every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only bad all the time. (Gen. 6:5)

[Blastcat]

[Replying to post 48 by 2timothy316]



[center]
Theology can be fun.. but watch out.. it also can be quite deadly[/center]

I am inclined to agree with that. God's omniscience means that yes, God knows everything that has happened or is happening, right down to the smallest detail. It also means God knows the future for what it is: a realm of unrealized possibilities, not something definite, set in cement, or already decided by God.

That's just playing around with the idea "knowing the future". Idle speculation.
Doesn't prove anything other than your ability to invent.


You are using the word "knowing" the same way as "not knowing".
And that makes NO sense at all.


God knows every possibility.. but not the actual future at all.
For that, he's like us.. he has to WAIT AND SEE.


What would be the usefulness of knowing INFINITE possibilities if there is only ONE of those possibilities that will actually MATTER and actually HAPPEN? That infinite knowledge would be perfectly USELESS.


Pretending that "a realm of unrealized possibilities" is the SAME as "what is actually going to happen in the future" is silly.


Remember the former things, those of long ago; I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me. I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say: My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please (Isaiah 46:9-10).


He makes known the end from the beginning.. it's all planed. He does whatever he wants to do. We don't have a choice about any of that.

People have a hard time accepting that the Bible is very weird. So, of course, they TRY to make sense out of it. But it's like a teeter-totter.. supporting ONE idea makes the other side fall... Up and down we go. It might be FUN, but after 2000 years of it... it gets a bit repetitive to any outsider who has to slog through all of this "fan talk".

To me, theology is speculation about the infinite meanings of a very strange series of ancient ideas collected in a book called a "Bible".

I should say "endless speculation".

Trying to make sense out of it has been a long drawn out affair.. nobody agrees, and a lot of us stopped caring. It's a bunch of very weird stories that don't make sense.

And of course, there is NO way to ever verify any of these magical stories... Omniscient? Partly omniscient? We don't know what that IS... the only things that theologians do about it is to endlessly SPECULATE.

Story telling about the stories.

How imaginative!

God does not decide for us; we have to make our decisions for ourselves.

That does NOT make sense.

People who need the "free-will" theodicy to work often insist that free-will exists, and that God himself insists on it too. Some people don't really know why they insist on free will, and may be just towing the religious line they've been fed.

Some theologians think that free-will solves the problem of evil.
Outsiders are not so impressed.

For example, I don't consider a decision "Free" if one is being coerced into obeying an all-powerful god. And I also don't think that an all knowing all powerful being couldn't have NOT put us through all of this suffering and what religious people CALL evil.

I'm supposed to be GRATEFUL for the suffering?
No, I'm not grateful for ANY suffering, even though, I can learn from it.

If I want to learn, I'd much rather read a book on the comfy couch, thank you Jesus.

I have NO idea how people can feel free while being threatened with the worst possible torture that never ends. Christians often try to say that NORMAL people will freely CHOOSE to burn in hell for eternity.

Of course, that death threat is within the STORIES.. outsiders do not take them literally. It's amazing to me that grown-ups believe these ghost stories, but here we are. We also have Trump voted as the POTUS.

It's amazing, it's tragic, it might be insane.. but it's real.

People really seem to believe in gods, and in Donald Trump.
Some people in the past believed in Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, and Charles Manson, just to name a very very FEW. History is LITTERED with bodies of people who once were believers.

Some believed in Jim Jones, Carl Drew, Santa Muerte, Valentina de Andrade, Stephen Tari, Jeffrey Lundgren, Brothers Glenn, Sun Myung Moon, the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God and so on.

Lots and lots of people willing to believe in some version of the Bible stories. The so called "satanists" get their ideas from the Bible.. no Bible, no "satan".


Unwarranted, unjustified beliefs CAN be very dangerous.
I'm here to help people get out from under those, if at all possible.

Speculation is fun.. up to a point.
It's not fun anymore when people start to die.

Let's not pretend that people don't die over their religious beliefs, because they have in the past, they are in the present, and god only knows, they will probably keep dying in the future.

I'm here to try to help stop that kind of USELESS death and suffering.

Indoctrination really works, and it can lead to very SERIOUS problems.
I'm in here trying to help people get out from under that.

Hence, the future is undecided until we decide what to do.

And yet, the Bible is peppered with references to "God's plan". Apparently, nobody can change that outcome.

Decide all you will... it's an illusion.
God's gonna get what God wants, and you have nothing to say about it.

Seems like a stupid trick to me...
You are perfectly free to do EXACTLY what he says or else.

Everyone always forgets the "or else" parts of the Bible stories.
If they don't forget to mention it, they pretend it's not really what the Bible meant..

Again, not impressive or convincing to any outsider.
We might be fans of the stories, but apparently, we are FREE to interpret them the way that WE like. And of course, we don't HAVE to pretend to BELIEVE that the stories are in any way REAL.


Outsiders to your faith don't have to ever pretend that it's all "GOOD".

Outsiders can be ( and usually are ) way more objective in our analysis.

The future is open-ended, indeterminate, bot for ourselves and also for God.

You forget or neglect to mention "GODS PLAN".
The future is NOT open-ended... it's fixed.

It can't be fixed and open-ended.
That just doesn't make any sense.


The future is not indeterminate... God knows how it's going to END.


God's PLAN is going to WORK, apparently.


No matter what you do.. no matter what you think.
At least, that what I read in the Bible.

Go ahead.. see what happens to you if you try to THWART God's plan.
I think that Satan, Adam and Eve tried it.

But of course, the fun of the Bible is that it's so vague, so contradictory, that we pretty much can prove anything by it.


That might be fun.. up to a POINT.