The Tulip Driven Life

Chapter 3 of my Treatise of Calvinism:                I was always taught, as long as I could remember, that God knew all things. And, if we leave it at that, that is believable enough. After all, if God can create everything out of nothing, then for Him to be able to know all things isn’t really a stretch. The limits of my human mind and ability are not a good reason to demand that God be limited to only that which I myself can understand and do. Anyone who thinks like that is not a Christian, for they would never believe in a God greater than them, since from the outset they remove the possibility of God doing anything or knowing anything that they themselves cannot do or at least fathom.                 So it is certainly acceptable, and reasonable, to believe that God knows all things, past, present, and future, even though I cannot. However, what we should not be affirming as Christians is a contradiction. The law of non-contradiction is basic to human logic. Something cannot

Chapter 2: Free Will- The Master’s Master Plan? I was always taught from my Christian school that God gave man a choice to either obey God or disobey Him in the Garden of Eden. That was God’s master plan, to plant a tree that was forbidden for them to eat of, to test them. It was never really said if God knew what would or would not happen beforehand. The school believed that God was all knowing, so they would have claimed that God knew man would fall if they were pressed, I would assume, but they never addressed that issue. I, and most of the other students, never thought   that issue through either. It was an answer we were given, and in my shallow understanding of things, it worked. I was isolated in a Christian bubble, sealed off from the “real world” full of unbelievers and believers with different interpretations, counter-arguments, and rebuttals. In fact, I thought this was the only interpretation for the Christian. I took the school at its word, and thought little more of i

Chapter 1- Shortchanging Jesus                                 Talk to a typical Christian in the United States, and you will soon realize that, despite their claims to loving God and desiring to see others saved for Jesus, they don’t know a whole lot about the Bible. If you asked them how a loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful God could allow evil and possibly be considered good, you are sure to get a glazed-over look on many faces, because most American Christians have never even considered such a question before. They may appeal to the free will of man, but the question remains, “How can a supposedly loving God, who is all powerful and knows all things, allow evil?” God made man with a free will, thus allowing the entrance of sin into the world. How can God do that? With that, I have just stumped the vast majority of American Christians.                  You see, for my whole life (twenty-one years) I have grown up in a Presbyterian church and attended a basically Baptist Christi