I don't know the answers to your questions. All I know is what I believe, which I have expressed here. Sorry it was so far off topic. Perhaps someone else can help?

PS - Would you be willing to reread my Jan 4 posts and answer the questions you haven't addressed? Mainly, do you believe God knows the precise day and hour of Jesus return? If so, how long has He known? And, the one concerning Boblee.

I don't like the word "intention" in this context. Sin was inevitable because God created beings He knew would choose to sin. I'm glad we agree regarding the questions God asked in Eden. And, I find it hard to believe God hasn't known the exact day and hour of Jesus' return from eternity. How do you explain what Jesus said about it? See Mark 13:32.

My question involves God's intent. That's the main part of the question. You say that God put events into motions of which the inevitable results were sin. You also say that God's perfect plan involved dealing with sin. This statements imply that it was God's intent that sin should occur. I could ask the question this was (acutally I did)

"Was it a part of God's 'perfect plan' that sin should occur?"

Regarding God's knowing when Christ would come, I think this is a question of autority, not intelligence. Christ knows as much as God does, since He is omniscient as well as God the Father, but the Father has the authority for setting the time. The phrase would be similar to saying, if I had a daughter, I only will know the time that she is mature enough to start dating.

God cannot know the future as fixed, because it isn't fixed. There is no fixed date for Christ's coming. He could have come in the 1850's; not only could have, but would have, had those who were alive then acted differently. He was supposed to come shortly after 1888, and was "disappointed" that He was not able to come. We are able to hasten and delay Christ's coming, and have in fact delayed it. A lot. All of these facts point out that the future is not fixed.

In addition, if the future were fixed, God would be responsible for the entrance of sin, since He could have chosen to create things in such a way that the inevitable results would not have been sin entering into the world.

Perhaps we should end our discussion with the following words of wisdom. And it might be best if we let them speak for themselves, without adding our own comments.

DA 22
From the beginning, God and Christ knew of the apostasy of Satan, and of the fall of man through the deceptive power of the apostate. God did not ordain that sin should exist, but He foresaw its existence, and made provision to meet the terrible emergency. {DA 22.2}

AG 129
But the defection of man, with all its consequences, was not hidden from the Omnipotent, and yet it did not deter Him from carrying out His eternal purpose; for the Lord would establish His throne in righteousness. {AG 129.2}

GC 493
Nothing is more plainly taught in Scripture than that God was in no wise responsible for the entrance of sin; that there was no arbitrary withdrawal of divine grace, no deficiency in the divine government, that gave occasion for the uprising of rebellion. Sin is an intruder, for whose presence no reason can be given. It is mysterious, unaccountable; to excuse it is to defend it. Could excuse for it be found, or cause be shown for its existence, it would cease to be sin. {GC 492.2}

Well, Mike...you may wish to bow out, but I think it is up to others whether they wish to close a discussion, don't you, especially since Tom opened the topic??

Tom: The flexibility of the future, in view of God's supreme love of free-will to all His creatures (angels also have free-will), puts much upon the shoulders of the saints, wouldn't you say? If we dodge our responsibilty we hinder His coming, His finishing His work in the Sanctuary, then, as horrific as it may sound, the blood of untold millions upon our hands as a movement. This would needed to be seen, repented of and sent to Him in the Sanctuary, for Him to cleanse us from.

If we as a people had obeyed EGW and eagerly supported missions in Europe, perhaps there would have been no WW1 and WW2...

If we as a people had been faithful to health reform, we would still have real sanitariums, hygenic restaurants and millions would have lived.

If we as a people had been faithful to Bible-based, private education, there wouldn't be the dearth of spirituality in our families and churches..

Etc., etc....The onus is on His followers, not His "timetable", else He would not have held the 4 angels back the destruction that Satan is so eagerly wanting to unleash upon the world.

The normal view I have observed among "fixed futurists" is that God has a "signs" agenda, will force fit people's and nature's events to match the stated signs, and then cruelty & with malice destroy them for not doing what they could not do without Him anyway. Seems like a stacked deck, just like Satan claims.

Yes, of course, Ikan. Please notice that I said end "our" discussion. I didn't mean to imply you cannot continue discussing it. Please, say on. And, I might ask - Since God is not willing that any should perish, which is one of the reasons why Jesus hasn't returned yet, was WWI and WWII God's will? Or, was He willing to deal with them because He wasn't willing that any should be lost by sending Jesus too soon?

2 Peter
3:8 But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day [is] with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
3:9 The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
3:10 But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.

Mike,

Permit me to look at the subject of this thread from a different perspective. Let me take you back to your high school physics where the nature of light was being studied. Until about the end of the nineteenth century, it was obvious that light consisted of some kind of wave motion in a medium called ether. There were several ways to prove it including the fact that two rotated polarizing filters could completely block a beam of light. Being curious in those days, the scientists wondered about the nature of the medium in which the light traveled. Among other things, since the ether presumably permeated all space, knowledge of its nature would tell them a lot about the nature of the universe. Two men in particular, Michelson and Morley, conducted numerous experiments designed to determine the nature of ether and more specifically, determine the speed and direction Earth was moving within it. But they couldn't find any evidence of an ether at all! That stirred up quite a predicament. They couldn't imagine something wiggling (waves) without something to wiggle in.

Meanwhile, with the advent of radio, people were experimenting with vacuum tubes. One of them noticed that some vacuum tubes acted different when they were in a lighted area than when they were in the dark. With a little experimentation, they found that light was knocking extra electrons out of the metals in the tubes. With more experiments, Compton found that the electrons quit being ejected at a particular wavelength of the light that hit the metal. No matter how strong the light, no electrons would be ejected if the wavelength of the light was longer than that cut-off value (different for different metals). But waves don't have cutoff values like that. Light was acting as if it were little balls rather than waves. Soon many other experiments supported that concept.

So the dilemma deepened. In one lab, it was proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that light was a wave motion, it couldn't be little particles. But in the next lab, it was proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that light consisted of little particles, it couldn't be wave motion! Did you ever hear of a dilemma like that? Hmmm. One set of scriptures seems to prove beyond any doubt that God can see the future. Another set of scriptures seems to prove beyond any doubt that the future is unknown and unknowable even to God (those scriptures claim man has free will and ability to choose, therefore the future is NOT fixed). Where do we go from here?

In the case of light, someone (I believe it was Einstein) suggested the possibility that light consists of "bundles of waves." In other words, little particles constructed from waves. This concept was developed and today is the standard explanation for the nature of light. In other words, BOTH concepts were correct. But it didn't stop there. Someone wondered, if light can act like particles, could particles (electrons, protons, muons, etc.) act like waves? More experiments. Sure enough, every form of energy we know of can act like either waves or particles (or sometimes both). And from those electrons, we have developed the electron microscope which is much more powerful than a light microscope and developed other instruments using the wave properties of matter. So when an irreconcilable dilemma is encountered, further study often opens up brand new areas of knowledge.

Do you suppose it's possible in the discussion that is transpiring in this thread that BOTH sides are correct? I don't see how it's possible, but neither am I going to discount the possibility that somehow the future in an absolute sense can be known without negating free will among humans and other beings. To me it's something to discuss, something to study, but like many other subjects, nothing to get dogmatic about. Perhaps with further study, new areas of knowledge can be opened up.

RL

You're right Ikan. You're touching on a profound subject.

The Spirit of Prophesy tells us the books in heaven record the sins we would have committed had we had the opportunity. Who of us can claim to have done better than Adam in his shoes? He didn't want to see his wife die alone, so he chose to die with her. And from this choice came all the sin there is in the world.

Boblee:

I think both principles are true. God knows the future perfectly and completely, just as it is. But it is not completely determined. It is determined by free moral agents when they make free choices. Therefore God does not know a determined future, because He cannot know something which doesn't exist. But He does know the future, just as it is.