OK you asked for it…
The foolish little girl put forth the argument:
“WHAT IS A MENU?”
When I ignored the question for some time, she insisted:
“Will you please answer the question: WHAT IS A MENU?”
OK, IF YOU INSIST:
The “question” is meant as a set-up question so the freewill chick can imply that a menu is a “CHOICE”.
If she can get me to say that a menu offers a “choice” then she thinks she’s won the argument as to whether or not mankind has a so-called “FREEWILL”.
What she doesn’t know about the word CHOICE is this:
By it’s very nature the word “choice” implies the best thing for you.
You don’t go to a restaurant and expect a “MENU” to contain items meant to poison you, gag you, make you terribly sick and even kill you.
No. On a “menu” are things of choice. Things that are good for you.
No menu contains dog vomit, rat poison, putrid, smelly meat, sawdust-cement soup, etc.
Yet, you’ll see, the “menu” of the freewill chicks of the world are like this:
“Choose heaven or choose hell”.
That is not a menu of choice. That is coercion, plain and simple.
If I say… “You must either go to heaven or I will pull off your toenails and fingernails endlessly so that you’ll know nothing but pain for ever and ever.” —
Then, no one goes to heaven out of “choice” but out of coercion.
Even the phrase “bad choice” (although slang) in our language, implies a mistake, that one regrets, based on bad information.
If a girl marries “Mr. Right” the guy with money, power, fame, charm, and good looks… then Mr. Right was choice.
If she marries a guy who turns out to be a drunk slob, wife-beater, then he was not choice.
Perhaps it’s not known until sometime later that he was not “choice”.
But… To say the slob, wife-beater was a “bad choice” is slang. It’s not proper english.
You may say the slob, wife-beater was not choice.
But you may not say “He was bad choice.”
“Choice” is the ideal.
No one “chooses” the have their fingernails and toenails endlessly pulled off. That is not ideal.
No one “chooses” endless hell, endless punishment as opposed to “eternal bliss” in heaven.
If one makes a mistake, it was not ideal. It was not choice.
To suggest that God loses 95% of mankind to endless hell makes God out to be no more than a petty gambler with no real skin in the game, thoughtless, clueless, reckless, an embarrassment really. Perish the thought.
“What is a menu?” — A menu contains items of choice.
Not elements of death and destruction, regret and sorrow.
Final human destiny is not man’s “choice”. It is the “choice” of God.
“God wills all mankind be saved and come to a realization of the truth.” Perhaps you’ve heard of this verse from the Bible. (I TIM 2:4)
It’s powerful but mostly ignored by freewiller types, who prefer slang and the mythology of ogre gods who endlessly punish their subjects for making less-than-ideal decisions.
Freewiller types are endless circling around their own pride. So proud that they have “chosen” correctly, and everyone else must pay a heavy price for not being as wise as they.
What is a menu? Indeed. The bible is not a “menu”.
It is an account of God’s creative and redemptive work.
It is a record of God’s eonian purpose.
It outlines what God is doing and when he does it.
It is the grand story of the cross of Christ and all that it accomplishes.
It is the story of beginnings and consummations.
It is the story of God, who was all in Himself. And how he becomes All, in all.
It is the story of God’s choice.
Ace
The Ace Theological Company 