The Interwovenness of Human Lives & Their Inevitable Mutual Effects on Each Other - aka, The Ripple Effect
see also Punishing the Children for the Father's Sin
Verse Observations: Prv 22:14
Verse Observations: Gn 22:1,12, Ex 15:22-27, 16:4, Dt 8:2, 13:3, Jdgs 2:22, I Chr 29:17, II Chr 32:31, Ps 7:9, 11:4-5, 17:3, Jer 6:27, 12:3, 17:10, Jn 6:5-6; Ps 139:1-4
This page has strong ties to God Using Evil for Good, since we'll often be looking at the title theme of this page from the perspective of the contrast between good and evil.
How is the ripple effect distinct from the butterfly effect?
God wanted to punish Israel, so he got David to take a census, and then decided to punish Israel for David’s sin. This doesn’t make sense. Why punish Israel for something that wasn’t their fault? If they were guilty, why not just punish Israel out right? (II Sm 24:1-17, I Chr 21:1-17)
This is related to the concept of what I call the background vs the catalyst, a discussion of which more probably belongs on the Cause & Effect page, but since this is the first place I'm mentioning it (other than in the UQ T-chart) I'll explain what I'm talking about.
Think about history. Historians always want to know the causes of events and trends. If you think about it, every event has 2 types of causes: the background factors, the things that have been boiling and seething beneath the surface, and then the catalyst, which is a single event that sets in all off. Kind of like the bomb was there, it just had to be set off. Think about the Arab Spring. All this crap was going on the whole time, but it took a disgruntled Tunisian fruit and vegetable vendor who just couldn't take it anymore to immolate himself and set the Arab world on fire. Or WWI. It's really hard to believe that the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand could set off one of the biggest wars in history if there weren't other circumstantial reasons for the flare up, reasons that are so complicated that to this day historians can't agree on why there was even a war in the first place.
Likewise with the story of David's census. If you look at the verse references I cite above, the initial causes of the pestilence are given right at the beginning, in the first verses of both passages. II Sm says that "Again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel ..." (24:1), while the I Chr passage starts with, "Then Satan stood against Israel and incited David to number Israel." (21:1) Are these contradictory? One says God was angry at Israel, the other that it was Satan's fault. They're both right. Apparently, Israel's level of morality had dipped below God's acceptability level, so he sent Satan to tempt David, so that he could punish Israel. But where did I get that from, about God sending Satan to tempt David? It's not in this story. But if you look at the story of Micaiah at the court of Ahab (I Kgs 22:1-28), particularly vv 20-23, we see the demons at God's court volunteering to bring about King Ahab's doom, at God's solicitation. We see a very similar scenario at the beginning of Job. So it's not hard to make the connection here and conclude that the same mechanism drives not only this story of David's census, but holds as a general rule for all humans and human temptation.
So why didn't God just punish Israel outright (as I suggested in the original question), rather than get David involved? I suppose he could have, but I suspect that it's because God works at all levels of the social hierarchy to bring about his will. Not just the society, or the leaders of society, but with society and its leaders. (See, for example, Is 3:1-15). So that's where I get the term "the ripple effect". It made me think of wave interference (hence, the page image I selected above). You throw 2 pebbles into a pond, each forming its own set of waves, but they come together and then that forms its own set of waves, either amplifying or cancelling out the effects of the 2 original sets of waves. That's how I see cause and effect. Every effect has 2 types of causes, background and catalyst. So the 2 pebbles are the 2 causes, background and catalyst, and that sets off a whole chain of events, each of those events interacting, interfering and setting off its own chain of events, in a whole web of cause and effect, which we could think of as multidimensional in its complexity.
Surely, God must have meant to punish Hezekiah by causing the Babylonians to come and take everything of Hezekiah's that he had shown the envoys (because his heart had become proud. Therefore, he tested him, to manifest his sin, and for this he was punished, along with all his subjects. But now the question is, why not just punish his inner sin? Why must it be manifested before God pronounces his judgment?) (II Kgs 20:13-19, II Chr 32:25-26, 31)
Why did the Benjaminites get Jericho if it could never be rebuilt again? (Jos 18:21) (similar to: Why did God provide a king for Israel and make provisions for one if he did not want them to have a king? = Why did God give the Benjaminites Jericho if he didn't want them to have it?)
Well, I'm not sure if we can say that God didn't want them to have these things, since in the end he gave them to them.
How come God told Jehu to kill the house of Ahab (II Kgs 9:7), but then in Hs 1:4 he says it was a sin for him to do that?
Why did God make Balaam try twice to go with the princes of Moab, since it was God’s intention from the beginning that he use this as an opportunity to bless Israel? (Nm 22:13, 15, 20)
Could this be an example of God's reacting to events in human time as a human would (ie, as if there were no divine plan?)
Nebuchadnezzar would not have known that he was doing the Lord’s will in destroying Tyre, so to him it was sin. How then could God repay (that is, reward him) for his sin? (Ezk 29:18-20)
Now the story of the trickery of the Gibeonites is very interesting, because it was by the grace of God that they were saved, and yet it was also God that told the Israelites to wipe out the inhabitants of Canaan. Was it not God who moved the Gibeonites to act as they did, and God who moved Joshua to accept the treaty of peace and disobey God? (Jos 9)
Reuben’s descendants were cursed, Judah’s blessed, though they had not even been born and had done nothing neither good nor bad, but their fates were decided by their ancestors. (Gn 49:3-4, 8-12)
So we see that God can work along 2 or many lines of influence, in this case, the influence of ancestry, and secondly, through the lives of each individual descendant.
To give an example, imagine 2 scenarios -- you're stuck on a desert island with one other person of the opposite sex, and the second, your regular real-life situation. If there's only one person you can choose to be your life partner, the only other option is to be single, which I think most people would rather not choose. But if you do choose that one other person that you happen to be stuck with, you would still have freely chosen to get with them. After all, you could have just stayed friends. Now compare this with your regular real-life situation. Some people, especially if you're online dating in a big city, will have tons of people to choose from. Others in small towns, perhaps they already know everyone that they could realistically choose from. In a sense you could say that the person living in a big city is "freer" than the person living in a small town, and that person in turn is freer than the person stuck on a desert island with one other person. But would this be an accurate way to measure free will -- that the degree of freedom depends on the number of choices? No, rather, what matters is whether a person freely made even one choice between 2 options.
To elaborate on the second scenario (ie, your own regular situation), in a sense you already live on a metaphorical desert island. However, in this case, your "island" was created largely due to your own choices, or shall we say preferences? And if we say preferences, can those truly be considered choices, since we generally don't think of preferences as something we choose. You may not be able to help it that you're into blondes but not brunettes. Would this be deal breaker, though, if you met a brunette that was otherwise perfectly acceptable? Probably not. I hope you're not that shallow. But even if you are, you'd probably become a lot less shallow if you were on a desert island with a brunette. So we see that relativity also comes into play with free will decisions. If you were online dating in a big city, something as superficial as hair color might very well enter into your romantic decision-making quite frequently.
In any case, I don't want to get too far off track here. As I was saying, we all create our own "islands", that is, we narrow down our scope of possibilities according to our own liking, or perhaps, due to outside impediments and limitations that we have no control over, but that we do our best to overcome (people always go for the best that they can get, so while you may want a 10, you may also realize that this just isn't possible given that you yourself are not a 10 [or have some other quality that will make up for not being a 10], so you might try for a 6, and may settle for a 5, and may even begrudgingly settle for a 4.) You might decide that you're only into introverts. So you basically kicked all the extroverts off your island. You might then decide that your partner needs to make x amount of money, so you kick everyone off your island that's poorer than that. You may have a preference for a particular ethnicity, so there goes everyone else, and so forth. Finally, in the last cut, you get kicked off other people's islands. So that again leaves you with only a few people that you're mutually acceptable to, not to mention, all the billions of people on the planet that got kicked off just because they don't live in your geographical region or that don't even speak the same language as you. In fact, the vast majority of people go into that first bucket (ie, the people you never even meet, or that you only superficially meet [ie, they happened to walk on the same street as you on a certain day]). Pretty soon, you may find that there's literally only one person left on your "island", even though in fact, you don't live on a desert island, but in NYC.
So this thought experiment shows how fate and free will come together, closer and closer, until they become superimposed on each other to the point that you can't tell which is which. It kind of reminds me of the ship of Theseus. If you keep taking away one board and replace it with another, until the last board has been replaced, is it still the same ship? If you take away one more choice, until you're left with only one choice (a simple yes or no) does that mean that we can no longer call your situation free?
So we come back to the original question -- the question of ancestry. Too bad if you were born a Reubenite rather than a Judahite -- does that mean that you were born screwed over? Too bad if you're born poor rather than rich, right? Or if you were born in a poor country like India instead of a rich country like the US. Because if you were born in a poor country, statistically speaking, you're probably poor, and if you're born in the US, even if you're poor by US standards, you're still way better off than if you were born in most other countries. Do Indians deserve to be born in India? No, of course they couldn't help it. But does that then mean that it's unfair that they were born in India? I don't think you can say that. After all, India is what it is, became what it is, through the choices of all the individual Indians in it. Apparently, compared to the rest of the world, they haven't made very good decisions, and no doubt this is largely due to the culture they chose and created for themselves. So again you have 2 influences (the society and culture you were born into, which you couldn't help [unless you're Hindu and you believe that you could help it!]), and your own reaction, your degree of acceptance or rejection of that culture. And I'm saying here that God works on both levels, all levels, of the tension between fate and free will, whether it's your birth situation, or the situations you find yourself in throughout your life (like getting stuck on a desert island).
Isn’t what Jeremiah said in Jeremiah 32:18-19 contradictory? (You show steadfast love to thousands, but you repay the guilt of fathers to their children after them, O great and mighty God, whose name is the Lord of hosts, 19 great in counsel and mighty in deed, whose eyes are open to all the ways of the children of man, rewarding each one according to his ways and according to the fruit of his deeds.)
Can there be any better example or proof of God's mysterious ways?
How could God allow a lying spirit to be sent to cause the prophets to lie? (I Kgs 22:16-22) Why did God send the lying spirit in the first place if Micaiah was going to tell the truth anyway and more than this, Ahab believed it enough to do something about it (disguise himself as a regular soldier)? (I Kgs 22:1-38) What’s more, God told the lying spirit that it would succeed, but it didn’t. The truth all came out and Ahab was made to die in battle not by direct fighting, but through an accident. So you see, he tried to run from fate, but it got him anyway. (I Kgs 22:20-23, 30-35)
Well it definitely goes to show that you can't escape the divine plan.
How can the Lord deceive these prophets and then be right to punish them? (Ezk 14:9)
Though I list only one verse reference here, as if this were the only incident of its type, I hope that by the point you've reached this point of the page that you can see that this actually applies to everyone and every temptation. It's how God does things. So I guess depending on your perspective, this can either make the "problem" better or worse.
Why did the old prophet lie to the prophet from Judah? How could he possibly condemn him if he was the one who had tempted him? (I Kgs 13:1-32)
This to me is more difficult to answer than the preceding questions (not that I've answered the preceding questions), because whereas in previous examples it seems somehow OK for God to use spiritual beings (ie, demons) to serve his own purposes, the same standards don't seem to work for a fellow human. After all, if a demon tempts someone, and if that person falls, it's that own person's fault, and we can blame the demon too as being wholly evil (hope that doesn't sound like a pun). Anyway, in this situation, things are more ambiguous. While the prophet from Judah can be blamed for not obeying his instructions from God, what are we to think of the old prophet? Was he good or evil? I think that's the crux of this question. It's kind of hard to continue if I can't even make up my mind about that.
How is that God can give permission to do evil? I don't see how this is much different from doing evil himself. (Jb 1:12)
I can really only think of one example where God permitting evil, or to be more exact, actually planning for it -- the crucifixion, led to a good outcome. In such a case, I can see how using humanity's evil is justified, while God comes out clean and beyond reproach in the end. Unless we place all temptations and evil in this category (which I don't see why we couldn't), I think the question still stands. However, does this mean that an answer depends on the final outcome of evil, which we know is the glory of God? Perhaps. As Paul said, "We know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose." (Rom 8:28)
If God had given Balaam permission to go with the princes of Moab, why did he get mad at him? (Nm 22:20, 22) How could Balaam trust the angel of the LORD telling him to go if previously he had told him to go and then got mad at him? (Nm 22:35)
In the law God said that the people could have a king, so why when they wanted one did he say that they were sinning? (Dt 17:14-15, I Sm 8:7) He even picked a king for them that turned out to be no good. (I Sm 8:7) (This implies extreme support for their "wrongdoing", since God himself decided to get involved in the decision. Even worse is that God ended up disapproving of and rejecting this king. As ironic is that is, I think it's actually a clue into what God had in mind.)
I can only think of one other scenario in the bible that's similar to this one (ie, God letting someone get away with sinning), and that's when David took Bathsheba as his wife after he killed her husband. To me, that's pretty messed up. Technically, he did nothing wrong by doing this, since she was a widow, and free to marry, but it's messed up because he's the one who made her a widow. You would think that God would have said something against this, since I think the only way David could have shown that he was truly repentant was if he had given up Bathsheba and totally forgotten about her (he was having his cake and eating it too, which is exactly what we can't allow, ie, getting away with sin). What would Uriah have thought if he could see them together? Wouldn't he have thought that was just really messed up?
But was it really a sin to have a king? I don't think so. I think what was sinful was their motivation, although even here I fail to see what's so wrong with their intention. The text implies that they were rejecting God in wanting a king. How this is true I don't know, since the text doesn't explicitly say, but we're just going to have to go along with it since we have no other details.
So perhaps they were sinning, but then why would God get involved, that is, getting involved as an accomplice? There are two possible ways of explaining this, and I think they're both equally true: 1) that God wasn't getting involved in their sin, but remained sin-free by merely getting involved in the sin-neutral acquisition of a king, as I said above that wanting a king, or having a king, in itself is no sin, and this is the part that God got involved in. 2) It could be said that if God allows or even gets involved in people rejecting him, that is no sin on God's part. This particular case is like a divorce. God often describes himself as a faithful and good husband in the bible, and Israel as a treacherous, unfaithful wife, which is pretty much what's going on here. We've seen it so many times in the Old Testament. It's pretty much the story of the Old Testament. So if this treacherous, unfaithful wife leaves him, decides to divorce him, then he just lets her, since he can't keep her against her will. And if he pays alimony and child support for her and their children, as the law would require, that's too bad for him since it wasn't his fault that his wife is messed up, and although you could say he was aiding and abetting her in leaving him (since without his financial support she wouldn't be able to carry out her antics), it wouldn't be fair to say that.
We see this again when Judas betrays Jesus. When Jesus points out who his betrayer is (at the Last Supper), he tells Judas, "Go, do what you are about to do quickly." This could be seen as Jesus encouraging or even supporting Judas in his betrayal, or you could see it as Jesus merely saying something to the effect of, "Let's get this over with; we both know you've already made your decision."
So the same thing is going on here in God picking a king for the Israelites. God doesn't like that they're rejecting him, but just because he picks a king for them doesn't mean that he is in any way aiding or abetting them in their sinfulness.
But that's not all -- what about God picking a bad king for them, one that he ultimately rejected? Even that makes sense, based off of everything we've talked about so far. In God giving Israel a bad king, he was punishing them for their bad intentions, as we know is one way God uses to punish a people from Is 3:1-15 (Punishment of the Leaders - Since Your Leaders are Evil, I Will Give You Bad Leaders). And Saul, also was punished, although he actually punished himself (in committing suicide). But in the end God had his way, because the next king he chose, not of the line of Saul, David, was a man "after his own heart". And David's lineage he did set up as an everlasting dynasty, to be culminated in the King of Kings. So we see that if salvation has or ever will come to the Jews, it was not through their own efforts or planning, "that no one may boast". (Eph 2:9)
So did I categorize this question under the right page? Yes, I did, although at that time it was only a hunch. But now we can see the interwovenness of human lives and what I call "the ripple effect" in action. There are several "layers" going on here. One, the Israelites have one objective (to have a king), and not for a good reason. Their objective goes against the Lord's. But the Lord has another objective, and his objective has both a short-term and long-term range. The short-term objective is to punish the people for their sin. But the long-term objective is to save his people from their sins, not just the first chosen people (the Jews), but the fullness of his chosen people (the elect from all the nations). So the Israelites send out one ripple, which bounces against God to get 2 ripples. One bounces off of Israel to their destruction, the other for their salvation. The destructive ripple reaches its end when Saul self-destroys and the armies of Israel are left to be scattered on Mt Gilboa. They wanted a king to lead them and lead them into battle against their enemies, but we see that that completely and totally backfired, because not only did they lose their king, but their king was the one who took his own life, and left them defenseless against their arch-enemies, the Philistines. The other ripple, the ripple of salvation, spreads from the line of David, to Israel, and to the whole world. So we see how God can take human action and turn it toward the fulfillment of his own will. In so doing, the human ripple becomes a divine ripple, and this is one reason why I say "the interwovenness" of human lives. Each human action (or ripple) interacts and intertwines with all other human actions/ripples, and all these are subsumed under God's mighty wave (the divine plan).
Why would God even mention Job to Satan? Now I know that of course he has his purposes, so my real question is -- doesn't Satan know that God has his purposes? Doesn't he know that even he fulfills the will of God?
So what's the alternative? That he refrain from getting involved in the divine plan at all, knowing that his involvement will all be to the glory of God? Why does he not choose this avenue? Why does he feel that he gets more out of "cooperating" with God?
God obviously knows what a person's breaking point is -- why doesn't Satan? Doesn't this mean that Satan, just like us, is affected by chance and ignorance, doesn't always, can't always know, if he's making a good investment of his efforts? (Jb 1:11, 20-22) That he tries his best but can screw up just like anyone? So then God is the one who really has all the cards in his hand. And yet Satan still insists on playing.
Why would Satan enter into Judas? Did he not know he was becoming a part of the fulfillment of God’s plan and his own ruin? Did he not hear or know when Jesus said to Peter “Get behind me Satan!”? (Lk 22:3, Mt 16:23) Because that really would have been a dead giveaway that by putting in motion the crucifixion of Jesus, he was actually acting in concert with God's will, albeit, in a twisted way.
Verse Observations: Prv 22:14
Verse Observations: Gn 22:1,12, Ex 15:22-27, 16:4, Dt 8:2, 13:3, Jdgs 2:22, I Chr 29:17, II Chr 32:31, Ps 7:9, 11:4-5, 17:3, Jer 6:27, 12:3, 17:10, Jn 6:5-6; Ps 139:1-4
This page has strong ties to God Using Evil for Good, since we'll often be looking at the title theme of this page from the perspective of the contrast between good and evil.
How is the ripple effect distinct from the butterfly effect?
God wanted to punish Israel, so he got David to take a census, and then decided to punish Israel for David’s sin. This doesn’t make sense. Why punish Israel for something that wasn’t their fault? If they were guilty, why not just punish Israel out right? (II Sm 24:1-17, I Chr 21:1-17)
This is related to the concept of what I call the background vs the catalyst, a discussion of which more probably belongs on the Cause & Effect page, but since this is the first place I'm mentioning it (other than in the UQ T-chart) I'll explain what I'm talking about.
Think about history. Historians always want to know the causes of events and trends. If you think about it, every event has 2 types of causes: the background factors, the things that have been boiling and seething beneath the surface, and then the catalyst, which is a single event that sets in all off. Kind of like the bomb was there, it just had to be set off. Think about the Arab Spring. All this crap was going on the whole time, but it took a disgruntled Tunisian fruit and vegetable vendor who just couldn't take it anymore to immolate himself and set the Arab world on fire. Or WWI. It's really hard to believe that the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand could set off one of the biggest wars in history if there weren't other circumstantial reasons for the flare up, reasons that are so complicated that to this day historians can't agree on why there was even a war in the first place.
Likewise with the story of David's census. If you look at the verse references I cite above, the initial causes of the pestilence are given right at the beginning, in the first verses of both passages. II Sm says that "Again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel ..." (24:1), while the I Chr passage starts with, "Then Satan stood against Israel and incited David to number Israel." (21:1) Are these contradictory? One says God was angry at Israel, the other that it was Satan's fault. They're both right. Apparently, Israel's level of morality had dipped below God's acceptability level, so he sent Satan to tempt David, so that he could punish Israel. But where did I get that from, about God sending Satan to tempt David? It's not in this story. But if you look at the story of Micaiah at the court of Ahab (I Kgs 22:1-28), particularly vv 20-23, we see the demons at God's court volunteering to bring about King Ahab's doom, at God's solicitation. We see a very similar scenario at the beginning of Job. So it's not hard to make the connection here and conclude that the same mechanism drives not only this story of David's census, but holds as a general rule for all humans and human temptation.
So why didn't God just punish Israel outright (as I suggested in the original question), rather than get David involved? I suppose he could have, but I suspect that it's because God works at all levels of the social hierarchy to bring about his will. Not just the society, or the leaders of society, but with society and its leaders. (See, for example, Is 3:1-15). So that's where I get the term "the ripple effect". It made me think of wave interference (hence, the page image I selected above). You throw 2 pebbles into a pond, each forming its own set of waves, but they come together and then that forms its own set of waves, either amplifying or cancelling out the effects of the 2 original sets of waves. That's how I see cause and effect. Every effect has 2 types of causes, background and catalyst. So the 2 pebbles are the 2 causes, background and catalyst, and that sets off a whole chain of events, each of those events interacting, interfering and setting off its own chain of events, in a whole web of cause and effect, which we could think of as multidimensional in its complexity.
Surely, God must have meant to punish Hezekiah by causing the Babylonians to come and take everything of Hezekiah's that he had shown the envoys (because his heart had become proud. Therefore, he tested him, to manifest his sin, and for this he was punished, along with all his subjects. But now the question is, why not just punish his inner sin? Why must it be manifested before God pronounces his judgment?) (II Kgs 20:13-19, II Chr 32:25-26, 31)
Why did the Benjaminites get Jericho if it could never be rebuilt again? (Jos 18:21) (similar to: Why did God provide a king for Israel and make provisions for one if he did not want them to have a king? = Why did God give the Benjaminites Jericho if he didn't want them to have it?)
Well, I'm not sure if we can say that God didn't want them to have these things, since in the end he gave them to them.
How come God told Jehu to kill the house of Ahab (II Kgs 9:7), but then in Hs 1:4 he says it was a sin for him to do that?
Why did God make Balaam try twice to go with the princes of Moab, since it was God’s intention from the beginning that he use this as an opportunity to bless Israel? (Nm 22:13, 15, 20)
Could this be an example of God's reacting to events in human time as a human would (ie, as if there were no divine plan?)
Nebuchadnezzar would not have known that he was doing the Lord’s will in destroying Tyre, so to him it was sin. How then could God repay (that is, reward him) for his sin? (Ezk 29:18-20)
Now the story of the trickery of the Gibeonites is very interesting, because it was by the grace of God that they were saved, and yet it was also God that told the Israelites to wipe out the inhabitants of Canaan. Was it not God who moved the Gibeonites to act as they did, and God who moved Joshua to accept the treaty of peace and disobey God? (Jos 9)
Reuben’s descendants were cursed, Judah’s blessed, though they had not even been born and had done nothing neither good nor bad, but their fates were decided by their ancestors. (Gn 49:3-4, 8-12)
So we see that God can work along 2 or many lines of influence, in this case, the influence of ancestry, and secondly, through the lives of each individual descendant.
To give an example, imagine 2 scenarios -- you're stuck on a desert island with one other person of the opposite sex, and the second, your regular real-life situation. If there's only one person you can choose to be your life partner, the only other option is to be single, which I think most people would rather not choose. But if you do choose that one other person that you happen to be stuck with, you would still have freely chosen to get with them. After all, you could have just stayed friends. Now compare this with your regular real-life situation. Some people, especially if you're online dating in a big city, will have tons of people to choose from. Others in small towns, perhaps they already know everyone that they could realistically choose from. In a sense you could say that the person living in a big city is "freer" than the person living in a small town, and that person in turn is freer than the person stuck on a desert island with one other person. But would this be an accurate way to measure free will -- that the degree of freedom depends on the number of choices? No, rather, what matters is whether a person freely made even one choice between 2 options.
To elaborate on the second scenario (ie, your own regular situation), in a sense you already live on a metaphorical desert island. However, in this case, your "island" was created largely due to your own choices, or shall we say preferences? And if we say preferences, can those truly be considered choices, since we generally don't think of preferences as something we choose. You may not be able to help it that you're into blondes but not brunettes. Would this be deal breaker, though, if you met a brunette that was otherwise perfectly acceptable? Probably not. I hope you're not that shallow. But even if you are, you'd probably become a lot less shallow if you were on a desert island with a brunette. So we see that relativity also comes into play with free will decisions. If you were online dating in a big city, something as superficial as hair color might very well enter into your romantic decision-making quite frequently.
In any case, I don't want to get too far off track here. As I was saying, we all create our own "islands", that is, we narrow down our scope of possibilities according to our own liking, or perhaps, due to outside impediments and limitations that we have no control over, but that we do our best to overcome (people always go for the best that they can get, so while you may want a 10, you may also realize that this just isn't possible given that you yourself are not a 10 [or have some other quality that will make up for not being a 10], so you might try for a 6, and may settle for a 5, and may even begrudgingly settle for a 4.) You might decide that you're only into introverts. So you basically kicked all the extroverts off your island. You might then decide that your partner needs to make x amount of money, so you kick everyone off your island that's poorer than that. You may have a preference for a particular ethnicity, so there goes everyone else, and so forth. Finally, in the last cut, you get kicked off other people's islands. So that again leaves you with only a few people that you're mutually acceptable to, not to mention, all the billions of people on the planet that got kicked off just because they don't live in your geographical region or that don't even speak the same language as you. In fact, the vast majority of people go into that first bucket (ie, the people you never even meet, or that you only superficially meet [ie, they happened to walk on the same street as you on a certain day]). Pretty soon, you may find that there's literally only one person left on your "island", even though in fact, you don't live on a desert island, but in NYC.
So this thought experiment shows how fate and free will come together, closer and closer, until they become superimposed on each other to the point that you can't tell which is which. It kind of reminds me of the ship of Theseus. If you keep taking away one board and replace it with another, until the last board has been replaced, is it still the same ship? If you take away one more choice, until you're left with only one choice (a simple yes or no) does that mean that we can no longer call your situation free?
So we come back to the original question -- the question of ancestry. Too bad if you were born a Reubenite rather than a Judahite -- does that mean that you were born screwed over? Too bad if you're born poor rather than rich, right? Or if you were born in a poor country like India instead of a rich country like the US. Because if you were born in a poor country, statistically speaking, you're probably poor, and if you're born in the US, even if you're poor by US standards, you're still way better off than if you were born in most other countries. Do Indians deserve to be born in India? No, of course they couldn't help it. But does that then mean that it's unfair that they were born in India? I don't think you can say that. After all, India is what it is, became what it is, through the choices of all the individual Indians in it. Apparently, compared to the rest of the world, they haven't made very good decisions, and no doubt this is largely due to the culture they chose and created for themselves. So again you have 2 influences (the society and culture you were born into, which you couldn't help [unless you're Hindu and you believe that you could help it!]), and your own reaction, your degree of acceptance or rejection of that culture. And I'm saying here that God works on both levels, all levels, of the tension between fate and free will, whether it's your birth situation, or the situations you find yourself in throughout your life (like getting stuck on a desert island).
Isn’t what Jeremiah said in Jeremiah 32:18-19 contradictory? (You show steadfast love to thousands, but you repay the guilt of fathers to their children after them, O great and mighty God, whose name is the Lord of hosts, 19 great in counsel and mighty in deed, whose eyes are open to all the ways of the children of man, rewarding each one according to his ways and according to the fruit of his deeds.)
Can there be any better example or proof of God's mysterious ways?
How could God allow a lying spirit to be sent to cause the prophets to lie? (I Kgs 22:16-22) Why did God send the lying spirit in the first place if Micaiah was going to tell the truth anyway and more than this, Ahab believed it enough to do something about it (disguise himself as a regular soldier)? (I Kgs 22:1-38) What’s more, God told the lying spirit that it would succeed, but it didn’t. The truth all came out and Ahab was made to die in battle not by direct fighting, but through an accident. So you see, he tried to run from fate, but it got him anyway. (I Kgs 22:20-23, 30-35)
Well it definitely goes to show that you can't escape the divine plan.
How can the Lord deceive these prophets and then be right to punish them? (Ezk 14:9)
Though I list only one verse reference here, as if this were the only incident of its type, I hope that by the point you've reached this point of the page that you can see that this actually applies to everyone and every temptation. It's how God does things. So I guess depending on your perspective, this can either make the "problem" better or worse.
Why did the old prophet lie to the prophet from Judah? How could he possibly condemn him if he was the one who had tempted him? (I Kgs 13:1-32)
This to me is more difficult to answer than the preceding questions (not that I've answered the preceding questions), because whereas in previous examples it seems somehow OK for God to use spiritual beings (ie, demons) to serve his own purposes, the same standards don't seem to work for a fellow human. After all, if a demon tempts someone, and if that person falls, it's that own person's fault, and we can blame the demon too as being wholly evil (hope that doesn't sound like a pun). Anyway, in this situation, things are more ambiguous. While the prophet from Judah can be blamed for not obeying his instructions from God, what are we to think of the old prophet? Was he good or evil? I think that's the crux of this question. It's kind of hard to continue if I can't even make up my mind about that.
How is that God can give permission to do evil? I don't see how this is much different from doing evil himself. (Jb 1:12)
I can really only think of one example where God permitting evil, or to be more exact, actually planning for it -- the crucifixion, led to a good outcome. In such a case, I can see how using humanity's evil is justified, while God comes out clean and beyond reproach in the end. Unless we place all temptations and evil in this category (which I don't see why we couldn't), I think the question still stands. However, does this mean that an answer depends on the final outcome of evil, which we know is the glory of God? Perhaps. As Paul said, "We know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose." (Rom 8:28)
If God had given Balaam permission to go with the princes of Moab, why did he get mad at him? (Nm 22:20, 22) How could Balaam trust the angel of the LORD telling him to go if previously he had told him to go and then got mad at him? (Nm 22:35)
In the law God said that the people could have a king, so why when they wanted one did he say that they were sinning? (Dt 17:14-15, I Sm 8:7) He even picked a king for them that turned out to be no good. (I Sm 8:7) (This implies extreme support for their "wrongdoing", since God himself decided to get involved in the decision. Even worse is that God ended up disapproving of and rejecting this king. As ironic is that is, I think it's actually a clue into what God had in mind.)
I can only think of one other scenario in the bible that's similar to this one (ie, God letting someone get away with sinning), and that's when David took Bathsheba as his wife after he killed her husband. To me, that's pretty messed up. Technically, he did nothing wrong by doing this, since she was a widow, and free to marry, but it's messed up because he's the one who made her a widow. You would think that God would have said something against this, since I think the only way David could have shown that he was truly repentant was if he had given up Bathsheba and totally forgotten about her (he was having his cake and eating it too, which is exactly what we can't allow, ie, getting away with sin). What would Uriah have thought if he could see them together? Wouldn't he have thought that was just really messed up?
But was it really a sin to have a king? I don't think so. I think what was sinful was their motivation, although even here I fail to see what's so wrong with their intention. The text implies that they were rejecting God in wanting a king. How this is true I don't know, since the text doesn't explicitly say, but we're just going to have to go along with it since we have no other details.
So perhaps they were sinning, but then why would God get involved, that is, getting involved as an accomplice? There are two possible ways of explaining this, and I think they're both equally true: 1) that God wasn't getting involved in their sin, but remained sin-free by merely getting involved in the sin-neutral acquisition of a king, as I said above that wanting a king, or having a king, in itself is no sin, and this is the part that God got involved in. 2) It could be said that if God allows or even gets involved in people rejecting him, that is no sin on God's part. This particular case is like a divorce. God often describes himself as a faithful and good husband in the bible, and Israel as a treacherous, unfaithful wife, which is pretty much what's going on here. We've seen it so many times in the Old Testament. It's pretty much the story of the Old Testament. So if this treacherous, unfaithful wife leaves him, decides to divorce him, then he just lets her, since he can't keep her against her will. And if he pays alimony and child support for her and their children, as the law would require, that's too bad for him since it wasn't his fault that his wife is messed up, and although you could say he was aiding and abetting her in leaving him (since without his financial support she wouldn't be able to carry out her antics), it wouldn't be fair to say that.
We see this again when Judas betrays Jesus. When Jesus points out who his betrayer is (at the Last Supper), he tells Judas, "Go, do what you are about to do quickly." This could be seen as Jesus encouraging or even supporting Judas in his betrayal, or you could see it as Jesus merely saying something to the effect of, "Let's get this over with; we both know you've already made your decision."
So the same thing is going on here in God picking a king for the Israelites. God doesn't like that they're rejecting him, but just because he picks a king for them doesn't mean that he is in any way aiding or abetting them in their sinfulness.
But that's not all -- what about God picking a bad king for them, one that he ultimately rejected? Even that makes sense, based off of everything we've talked about so far. In God giving Israel a bad king, he was punishing them for their bad intentions, as we know is one way God uses to punish a people from Is 3:1-15 (Punishment of the Leaders - Since Your Leaders are Evil, I Will Give You Bad Leaders). And Saul, also was punished, although he actually punished himself (in committing suicide). But in the end God had his way, because the next king he chose, not of the line of Saul, David, was a man "after his own heart". And David's lineage he did set up as an everlasting dynasty, to be culminated in the King of Kings. So we see that if salvation has or ever will come to the Jews, it was not through their own efforts or planning, "that no one may boast". (Eph 2:9)
So did I categorize this question under the right page? Yes, I did, although at that time it was only a hunch. But now we can see the interwovenness of human lives and what I call "the ripple effect" in action. There are several "layers" going on here. One, the Israelites have one objective (to have a king), and not for a good reason. Their objective goes against the Lord's. But the Lord has another objective, and his objective has both a short-term and long-term range. The short-term objective is to punish the people for their sin. But the long-term objective is to save his people from their sins, not just the first chosen people (the Jews), but the fullness of his chosen people (the elect from all the nations). So the Israelites send out one ripple, which bounces against God to get 2 ripples. One bounces off of Israel to their destruction, the other for their salvation. The destructive ripple reaches its end when Saul self-destroys and the armies of Israel are left to be scattered on Mt Gilboa. They wanted a king to lead them and lead them into battle against their enemies, but we see that that completely and totally backfired, because not only did they lose their king, but their king was the one who took his own life, and left them defenseless against their arch-enemies, the Philistines. The other ripple, the ripple of salvation, spreads from the line of David, to Israel, and to the whole world. So we see how God can take human action and turn it toward the fulfillment of his own will. In so doing, the human ripple becomes a divine ripple, and this is one reason why I say "the interwovenness" of human lives. Each human action (or ripple) interacts and intertwines with all other human actions/ripples, and all these are subsumed under God's mighty wave (the divine plan).
Why would God even mention Job to Satan? Now I know that of course he has his purposes, so my real question is -- doesn't Satan know that God has his purposes? Doesn't he know that even he fulfills the will of God?
So what's the alternative? That he refrain from getting involved in the divine plan at all, knowing that his involvement will all be to the glory of God? Why does he not choose this avenue? Why does he feel that he gets more out of "cooperating" with God?
God obviously knows what a person's breaking point is -- why doesn't Satan? Doesn't this mean that Satan, just like us, is affected by chance and ignorance, doesn't always, can't always know, if he's making a good investment of his efforts? (Jb 1:11, 20-22) That he tries his best but can screw up just like anyone? So then God is the one who really has all the cards in his hand. And yet Satan still insists on playing.
Why would Satan enter into Judas? Did he not know he was becoming a part of the fulfillment of God’s plan and his own ruin? Did he not hear or know when Jesus said to Peter “Get behind me Satan!”? (Lk 22:3, Mt 16:23) Because that really would have been a dead giveaway that by putting in motion the crucifixion of Jesus, he was actually acting in concert with God's will, albeit, in a twisted way.