kurt vonnegut said:
ramblin_ag02 said:
Too much exposure to His power would coerce us into loving Him, eclipse our free will, and make that impossible.
The above feels non sequitur to me. Did God coerce and remove free will from the people in the Bible that he spoke to (Abraham, Noah, Moses, etc.)? Would Lucifer be considered a counter example of a being choosing against God despite a high exposure to Him?
Yes and no. The term free will here is the ability to reject God, God's teachings, and run away from him to pursue our own agendas, sin, and consequences like death. So 'free will' is already a charged term in Christianity. We're not talking about free will like consciousness versus automation or free will like the ability to create and control matter, move anywhere freely like you're Dr. Manhattan. Humanity and this world wasn't created in a neutral space. God created all of it.
My belief is that Lucifer and his followers had free will to follow God and decided to seize power for themselves. God put the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden to continue to give humans that choice.
God promised Abraham that he would make a future people out of his generation and that he wanted to use Abraham's line to make a people set apart from the ways of the fallen world. Seems like a great honor to me. And a strong compelling reason to get your act together. Could he have rejected it? Yeah he almost did. His wife brought him to his senses though.
Noah, was picked because he was the only remaining righteous man who still revered God in those times. I would again, call that an honor to be picked to go forth for God.
Jonah is a good example of free will 'removed' as God sent levathian up to eat him. Jonah was a terrible prophet. Lazy, prideful that God chose 'his side', and disobeyed God's call for him to go preach to Jonah's enemies. So yeah, God broke 'free will' there. Jonah didn't rest in the belly for three days like he was camping. Jonah died and was sent to the abyss. God resurrected him on the shores of where he was supposed to be going and told him to get to preaching like he was supposed to as a prophet.
The bible starts with humans given free will, us screwing it up royally, making ourselves out to be gods, trying to define good and evil for ourselves. The story of Gods interaction with us is Him intervening to even give us an option to rejoin Him in the first place since we couldn't do it on our own.
Even in the old testament under King Solomon they were quick to put an idol outside of the temple and it stood for 300 years. God isn't going to stand for a 'free will to sin and bring death and destruction.'