In that passage, was she talking about God's free will or man's?

Is this a discretionary decision on the part of the wicked? Are they free to choose another ending? Why can't the wicked decide the live forever instead of dying? Why can't the wicked decide to just happily live in Heaven instead of being destroyed by God's presence?

She talked about both. The wicked are destroyed as a result of their discretion as opposed to God's.

Good questions, Arnold!



Yes. She makes this point quite a number of times. For example, " when one chooses the service of sin, he separates from God, and thus cuts himself off from life." The wicked make the discretionary decision to separate from God, and thus from life.



Yes. They don't have to choose the service of sin. They can't choose for sin not to end in death, because death is "the inevitable result of sin."



They could. They could choose Christ (life) instead of sin (death).



Because they hate heaven.

Not in that passage.

There are two events: sowing and reaping. There are two choices: yours and God's. You decide what you will sow. God decided how the sowing and reaping are related.

That passage talks about sinners choosing what they will sow, and consequently reaping the baleful harvest. That's all on the sinner because God does not exercise His power to make them choose one or the other.

She was not describing God's creative work, where He determined how to relate the sowing with the reaping. That is described elsewhere.

This is true, but not her point. She says the destruction of the wicked is the result of the choice of the wicked, as opposed to an arbitrary act of power on the part of God. Iow, the end is itself due to their own choice. I don't see how else one can read the passage. The word "arbitrary" can only mean, in context, "individual discretion," and she's not considering at all the possibility that God would be forcing the wicked to make some sort of decision. She's talking about the destruction itself and what causes it. It comes as a result of their own choice, as opposed to something God does to them.

Take a look at the second paragraph:



At the beginning of the GC, what is it that the angels did not understand? They didn't understand that sin inevitably results in death. Had Satan and his host been *left* to reap the full result of their sin, they would have perished. It would have appeared that God was causing their destruction, rather than sin. That would have led to doubt in regards to God's character.

Let's go back to the game show analogy, as that was a good choice, I think, of trying to communicate a tricky concept. Why is death behind the door that says "sin" on it? You are suggesting it's because God put it there. He warns us what's behind the door, but He's the one who decides what goes behind the doors labeled "sin" and "righteousness" respectively. This is what I heard you to be saying.

This way of looking at things, to my mind, disconnects sin and death. Death is only the result of sin because God decided to put death behind the sin door. I think sin and death are intrinsically connected. I'm trying to think of a good example. I was thinking of like two sides of a coin, but you could say that God could have put something else on the back of the coin, so I'm trying to think of something else.

I guess we could consider the law. Why does obedience to the law result in good things? Is it because God has so decided? God has decided to put good things behind the command doors? Or is there something intrinsically good about doing what the commandments say, that lead to good results by their very nature? (or, since the law is a transcript of God's nature, one could say the good things happen as a result of God's nature).

So doing the loving thing, as opposed to the selfish thing, brings good fruit not because God has decided it should be this way, but because being selfishness, by its very nature, leads to conflict.

How would Satan have perished? Either God would have ceased to sustain his life, like He did with Ananias and Sapphira, or (more probably) God would have judged him and the weight of his guilt would have crushed him. In both cases God would have used His individual discretion.

I can think of other possibilities. I'll mention just one. The person tells God, "I don't wish to live anymore" and God grants the person his request.

I don't understand why you think the weight of guilt comes of as a result of God's doing something as opposed to simply being the weight of guilt itself. To make this clearer, you appear to look at things like this:

a.People can sin with no problem as far as guilt is concerned. God has to do something (e.g. judge them) in order for guilt to be a problem.

I see it like this:

b.God in mercy does not allow people to come face to face with their guilt. He prevents them from facing it, because it would kill them, and He wants to give them a chance to be saved (which, obviously, couldn't happen if they were killed by their guilt). Once they make sin their "final answer," God no longer prevents guilt from having the impact it should have had all along.

In DA 764 she talks about has Satan and his host been "left" to reap the result of their sin. If their destruction were due to God's judging them, rather than due to sin, it wouldn't make sense for her to speak in terms of God's leaving them to reap their reward. In this case she would say, "Had God judged them at this time, it would not have appeared that this was the inevitable result of sin." Also, it really doesn't make sense for her to say that death is the inevitable result of sin if the reason for death is because of God's doing something to make them die.



If beings die because God does something to make them die, then the above sentence doesn't make any sense, because it wouldn't simply be the case that it would not be apparent that death is the inevitable result of sin, it wouldn't even be true!

What if beings die because God did not prevent it by doing something that was well within His power to do?

"God gives them existence for a time..." DA 764 God can give sinners continued existence, as evidenced by Satan. if God leaves him to reap the natural harvest of his sin, they will die; without God's direct action we would die immediately. When God stops keeping sinners alive, does that not count as "doing something"?

For example, if a train track switch operator sees a kid playing on the tracks, but does nothing to prevent him from being crushed by the train, we could easily say that he just left the kid alone to reap the consequences of his choice. But couldn't we also say that he "did something" that caused the kid's death? In fact, wouldn't most people believe that the operator was responsible?

So also, God leaving sinners to reap death in consequence of their sin can be seen as God "doing something" to cause the death, because He refused to prevent it.

Then in this case people would die because of their choice. Imo a better analogy would be, a person jumps off a building. God could prevent the person from dying by sending an angel to break his fall. So one could say that God "did something" that caused this person's death, but that would be rather an odd way of looking at it I think.



Yes, like a person who jumps off a building. God refuses to do something about this every time He allows this to happen. Again, this seems to me to be an odd way of looking at it.

What seems evident to me from what EGW writes is that the wicked do not want have anything to do with God, with heaven, with those who abide by His presence, that these things are torture for them, and they choose to separate themselves from God. This is all true, isn't it?