Predestination, Salvation of the Elect and Free Will

This essay is intended to consider that there may be Godly reasons why or what people can be for eternity in relation to the Lord and why there may be different courses necessary for people with and without the Lord as their Savior. I will consider that God may confer predestination through retro-causality upon some of the lost-to-sin human constituency and additional difficult-to-understand problems of the criterion of being while living within a temporal order. Predestination and determinism are not incompatible with human freedom of choice.

I suppose that the human condition of being having started in original sin means that all people still have some hardness of heart and moral failure. Without the direct grace of God none would be saved. The question is why God rescues anyone from the state of original sin? I guess that if God wants anyone to exist besides Himself and God is implicitly perfect the imperfect creatures will need to be saved through their relationship to the Son Jesus Christ. Jesus covers the sin with His perfection.

Maybe God likes having less than perfect sentient beings existing as some sort of pluralistic array within His monism yet can’t tolerate imperfection unless it is compartmentalized; limited like explosion in an internal combustion engine to a somewhat useful application.. Creatures exist as some sort of function of the Omnipotent God who actualizes all things in theory and fact even if some are within in a contingent and potential state of realized hypothesis. There may be value in having some human beings exist. More may be better.

For those that have some qualification for God’s use there seems to be a good working-retirement plan for eternity with better prospects than social security.

In some respects the problem of why some people are saved and others chose to chase after pleasure mirages instead of moral perfection is comparable to why some just things can be eternal and not everything. Why don’t temporal things like stars or polar ice caps exist forever-why does anything decay or change? As the joke goes, death and temporality make way for more and new things. Seriously though, temporal being is a form of making things exist with more degrees of freedom than if they existed forever. Imagine if God made real and permanent everything he ever thought of in some concrete form-it would be the worst hoarding collection of stuff ever invented. There would be Universe after Universe to an infinite extent full of junk piled in. A lot of eternity would be spent arranging the stuff in nice neat rows or thrown in like junk with no hope of a garage sale to clear out a few thousand Universes of the stuff occasionally. Temporality may be some nice neat way of ordering concepts that are real yet don’t stay around past their expiration date. Expiration dates allow more products to exist than if every product created had to exist eternally. Imagine a container of milk that existed forever, or maybe a loaf of bread without refrigeration? How would one have bacteria exist without meat that rots and vice versa?

Jesus said that in heaven people neither marry nor are given in marriage (not only because of their relationship to God I would think or because of that especially). It is also a part of their eternal nature transformed into a body without temporal characteristics-and I find that hard to imagine. A temporal body’s form is that adapted specifically to a given physical niche. Trees grow tall for instance, yet are limited in height for one reason because the water transport ‘veins’ going up break down under the force of gravity at a certain height. People have grown with similar constraints or definitions that in eternity would not be required or useful maybe. A human spirit might be adapted to a different spiritual presentation. 

 Creation & Cosmos; THe Literal Values of Genesis (free download)