The Gadarene Swine

The Gospel Lesson for the 5th Sunday after Pascha is Matthew 8:28-9:1      THE GADARENE SWINE     

Archbishop Lazar Puhalo in his book Not by Bread Alone: Homilies on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew  (a review of the book can be found in IN COMMUNION) writes about the Gospel lesson:

“Now once more, Christ reveals both His authority and the meaning of redemption. There is no doubt that Christ had power; he will say so directly at the moment of His betrayal. Nevertheless, it is necessary for us that we see not an exercise of infinite power, but a loving exercise of lawful authority. Indeed the exercise of power is part of the very sickness of the fallen nature which Christ came to heal. The demons had seized power over the Gadarene demoniacs, but Christ had healed the men by exercise of the lawful authority which He has over all created things. We understand, therefore, that we are not saved by the coercion of power, but by our own willing submission to the lawful authority of Christ. Christ came to release us from bondage and make us free children of the household, saved by love, not led into a new bondage by the exercise of a power though He certainly did possess ‘all power in heaven and on earth.’”

Psalm 72 and “America the Beautiful”

Yesterday in my daily scripture reading I read Psalms 72 , which says it is a “Prayer for Guidance and Support for the King” written by Solomon.

The Psalm made me think of the wonderful hymn, “America the Beautiful“, for a couple of reasons.  First, in verse 8 the Psalm says, “May he have dominion from sea to sea” which is paralleled by the songs “with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.”  Second, the Psalm verse 16 says, ”May there be abundance of grain in the land; may it wave on the tops of the mountains” which is paralleled in the songs “For amber waves of grain.”   Third, verse 3 says “May the mountains yield prosperity for the people, and the hills, in righteousness”  which is paralleled in the songs “Purple mountain majesty.”  I have no idea whether the songs composer, Katherine Lee Bates, had Psalm 72 in mind (or any other Psalm for that matter), but the Psalm verses did remind me of the song verses.

This made me also think about the claims that America is a Christian nation.  For in Psalm 72 we are given a very particular image of what godly leadership consists.   And while the Psalms are Old Testamental, thus pre-Christian, many Christian Patristic writers believed the Psalms represented the mind of Christ.

So how does Psalm 72 envision godly leadership in a godly nation?

 [72:1] Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to a king’s son.

[2] May he judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice.

[4] May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor.

 [7] In his days may righteousness flourish and peace abound, until the moon is no more.

[12] For he delivers the needy when they call, the poor and those who have no helper.

[13] He has pity on the weak and the needy, and saves the lives of the needy.

[14] From oppression and violence he redeems their life; and precious is their blood in his sight.   (The Septuagint according to the Orthodox Study Bible reads “He shall redeem their souls from usury and injustice.“)

One thing which is clear in Psalm 72 is that the ruler of a godly nation provides justice to the poor and helps secure that the poor benefit from the righteousness of the nation.   The godly nation – the Christian nation – is to care for and provide for its poor.   The godly ruler takes up the cause of the poor and defends them, has pity for them, and delivers them in time of trouble.

Another thing made clear in the Psalm is the hope that peace will abound for the godly ruler and the godly nation.  The poor often suffer the worst of all citizens in the time of war as they already live on the edge of not being able to support themselves.   If there is such a thing as a peace dividend, it ought to be used to help the poor.

 Finall the godly nation and the godly rulers protect the poor from usury – the demands of interest charged by lenders.  There is a financial burden the godly nation must bear to help its poor. The godly nation is not to just make lending to the poor easy, or even to make lending cheap.   Rather the godly nation relies on generosity from its prospering citizens to provide for the needs of the poor and the disabled.   A godly ruler is one who cares about the poor and insures that they are treated well by the nation and by the people.

Money: A Good Servant but a Bad Master

3rd Sunday After Pentecost   2009        Gospel:  Matthew 6:22-33

The Lord Jesus said:  “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.”  (Matthew 6:24)

Though the Lord Jesus clearly taught us that we cannot love “God and….”, many have tried.   God and money.   God and pleasure.   God and self.   God and political power.   God and selfishness.  God and ego.   God and self indulgence.   God and greed.  God and gaud.   This of course is not the same as saying we cannot serve God through success, or wealth, or prosperity, or politics.   We are to love God first and above all and to pursue His Kingdom and His righteousness.   We can use the things God bestows on us for His glory.   To put it in another way, “Money is a good servant, but a bad master”  (attributed to Francis Bacon in the 17th Century).  

Life is full of choices, and the choices we make matter.   Americans love prosperity, God and money.

Bishop Nikolai Velimirović in commenting on the words of our Lord from Matthew 6:24, wrote about the impossibility of loving “God and….”

Can two wheels of a wagon move forward and two backward? Can a man look eastwards with one eye and westwards with the other? (Abba Isaiah says: “As on eye cannot look heavenwards and the other earthwards, so the mind cannot combine cares for the things of heaven with those of the earth.”) Or can one foot walk to the right, and the other the left? They cannot. It is therefore also impossible to go to meet God and to remain in the world’s embrace. A man cannot serve God and sin, for he will either hate God and love sin, or vice versa: love God and hate sin. In order to emphasize this truth the more clearly, the Lord repeats it in other words: “or else he will hold to the one and despise the other”. If a man holds to God, he cannot also hold to God’s enemy. And love for this world is hatred for God. God seeks our whole heart, and to this end He offers us all His help and all His gifts. “For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew Himself strong in behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward Him” (II Chronicles 16:9): perfect, whole, pure; emptied of faith in the world, and filled with faith, hope and love for God the living and immortal.

Ending the Limitations of Slavery

As I continue reading through Doris Kearns Goodwin’s TEAM OF RIVALS: THE POLITICAL GENIUS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN I really am stuck by what a totally amazing thing it is that the citizens of the United States elected an African-American as president in 2008.  

Goodwin’s book explores the many tumultuous issues surrounding slavery that were churning in the mid-19th Century in America.  What is also very clear is that even the abolitionists had no good plan for what to do with the millions of slaves once they were free.   The Northern states were adopting “Black Laws” – laws which sharply curtailed the rights and freedoms of blacks in those states.  Illinois itself had adopted a law making it illegal to bring into the state anyone whose was even one-quarter black.  No wonder the Southern States in which more than one third of the population was slave were alarmed at what the abolition of slaves would mean for them.

Lincoln and his cabinet and the Republican Party’s anti-slavery ideas mostly wanted to limit slavery to the South, not abolish it everywhere in America.  They were not abolitionists and in their own speeches distanced themselves from the abolitionists.  When Stephen Douglas warned white America that voting for Lincoln meant submitting themselves to black voters and judges, Lincoln denied that he was advocating such a thing. 

Slavery was abhorrent to Lincoln and his Republican cohorts, but they were only advocating that blacks be treated as humans, not as citizens.   Basically the main argument was being fought between the pro-slavery people who framed the argument in terms of state rights (and thus could appeal to the War for Independence and Constitution as the basis of their convictions) and the anti-slavery folk who were pushing for human rights for blacks not the rights of full citizenship for them.  The anti-slavery Republicans wanted “all men” to be treated as “equals” meaning as human beings, but that didn’t mean to them that blacks should be given full citizenship or seen as equal to the whites in terms of voting or political power. 

Stephen Douglas said to cheering crowds:

“the signers of the Declaration of Independence had no reference to negroes at all when they declared all men to be created equal.  They did not mean negro, nor the savage Indians, nor the Fejee Islanders, nor any other barbarous race.  They were speaking of white men… I hold that this government was established.. for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and and should be administered  by white men, and none others.”

What truly amazes me is that in America, the land of the free, just 90 years before I was born slavery was still practiced.  When I was born, there were people still alive who had been born when slavery existed.  When my parents were born there would still have been alive former slaves.  The slavery issue is not something from the distant past of America but has had its repercussions right down to the present.

One black American I know always told his children, “you can be anything you want in America, except for President of the United States.”  Though he is a pro-life, Republican voting conservative, he told me that the election of Barack Obama has truly shattered the shackles of slavery for all people of color in this country.   That is something for conservative Americans and Republicans to think about.   It is not the policies of Obama they need to embrace, but they need to consider he does represent symbolically the end to the limits slavery imposed on every black American.   Argue against his policies, but give recognition to the fact that he does represent what the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, sweated and “slaved” over to save these United States from tyrannizing over anyone.

As we approach our Independence Day holidays, we can be humbled by the land of the free’s willingness to enslave a people.   The strength and wealth of America was built upon denying freedom to millions.   We also can be amazed at the American ability to end adversity and overcome adversaries by spreading freedom to all.   Freedom comes with a price, freedom is invaluable, and it is worth giving freedom to every American.

Giving the black man freedom, electing a black man as president, doesn’t mean that we will have greater oneness of opinion, but we have been strengthened as a nation by the competitiveness and cross pollination of ideas which comes with giving full recognition to our ideal “that all men are created equal.”   The united part of the United States is formed into a more perfect union by granting freedom and citizenship to all.

And I will say that I think the example of the debate and the issues which swirled around slavery give us an example and a hope for recognizing the humanity of and citizenship to the children in our country conceived and yet unborn.   It was a painful and hard fought battle to recognize black Americans as humans let alone as citizens.  I think we will awaken to the truth that all are created equal, and that each child conceived deserves to be treated as a human being deserving the rights and protection which our Constitution guarantees for all citizens.   Abortion is no more a right than is owning a slave.   One day we may come to recognize this self evident truth that we do not limit citizenship nor humanity to landowners, to the educated, to whites, or to males.  Neither should we limit them to those children conceived and living in their mother’s wombs.

Freedom as Fatelessness

I previously commented on Nobel Prizewinner Imre Kertesz’s novel FATELESSNESS in my blog The Holocaust: Not Hell but Human and in my blog Descent into Hell.  The story’s hero is the 14 year old Hungarian Jew Georg Koves and consigned to the Nazi concentration camps where he does survive, minute by minute, never trying to understand the totality of what was happening to himself or others, but always forcing each event into something which still resembled humanity and sanity.    He could not explain it as it was so totally irrational, but he did want to continue living even in the concentration camp.  His embrace of life over death made him see the concentration camp as beautiful, neither hell nor non-existence, but very human, and though horrible still a place to be alive. 

When his elder uncles persist in telling Georg to accept what had occurred as some accident of fate, to forget the horrors as if they had never occurred in order to move on in life,  Georg defies their advice and says his and anyone’s effort to survive was worth remembering and exactly that which not only denies but triumphs over fate.   The freedom to live is far too valuable to disregard or forget.   One  uncle (they were not put into a concentration camp) continues to protest  that in the face of Nazis one could not resist fate:

“But what could we do?” he asked, his face part irate, part affronted.  “Nothing, naturally,” I said, “or rather, anything,” I added, “which would have been just as senseless as doing nothing, yet again and just as naturally.”

For Georg, it was the willingness to take the next step, and then the next – the willingness to carry on which was essential.  It didn’t matter what you did, nothing could change the senselessness of what was occurring.  But it mattered that you bothered to take the next step and continue despite the apparent meaninglessness of what others or you did.  Doing the next thing was in fact choosing freedom over fate, choosing freedom as fatelessness.

On the very day when liberation was announced in the concentration camp, Georg continued to deal with things in the same way which allowed him to survive the horrors – one moment and one event at a time.   As the loud speaker was proclaiming freedom  in all the different languages of the camp George knows it is the same hour when the camp rationed soup was usually doled out.   Georg’s caution continued as he heard the announcement in his native Hungarian:  “However hard I listened, though, all I heard of from him, as from everyone before, was about freedom, but not a single word about or in reference to the missing soup.”  Survival has its own instinctive priorities.

Though Georg is told to forget what happened as soon as he can, he challenges and questions this.  Why should he forget – unless it was all just fate and so meaningless, but if it is meaningless then the suffering is unbearable.  But if freedom exists and things aren’t governed by a mindless fate, then it means everything happens with a meaning and an importance and one can mine the meaning and importance out of the most horrible of conditions.  One is not forced to see only the ”atrocities”  but one can see how people willed to survive against all odds.  This was beautiful.  This zeal for life was chosen – it was not fate, but the freedom of humans to will to survive and to triumph over fate.

“Everyone asks only about the hardships and the ‘atrocities,’ whereas for me perhaps it is that experience which will remain most memorable.  Yes, the next time I am asked, I ought to speak about that, the happiness in the concentration camps.”

So he will not accept the advice to forget, to act as it never happened, to deny what happened.  But neither is he forced to accept it as meaningless and fateful evil, he has the freedom to remember the horrors and discover the meaning and he has the freedom to remember the good in it too – nothing needs be forgotten as if it had never happened, no lie needs to be told to make it more palatable or comprehensible.

“…I now needed to start doing something with that fate, needed to connect it to somewhere or something; after all, I could no longer be satisfied with the notion that it had all been a mistake, blind fortune, some kind of blunder, let alone that had not even happened.    ….   if there is such a thing as freedom, then there is no fate… that is to say, then we ourselves are fate.” 

Whose Freedom of Conscience?

Having recently finished reading James Madison’s WRITINGS with the high value he puts on the conscience of the individual as versus the demands of the majority, I found Stanley Fish’s opinion piece Conscience vs. Conscience   from the 12 April 2009 NEW YORK TIMES to be both an interesting topic and important discussion.

Fish wrote about the so-called “conscience clause,” the Provider Refusal Rule, which “allows health care providers to refuse to participate in procedures they find objectionable for moral or religious reasons.”  I had previously written about this in my blog Freedom of Conscience and Health Care Workers and voiced support for allowing health care workers the opportunity to exercise their own consciences and refuse to do some procedures for moral or religious reasons.

Fish raises another level of concern which is worth considering: the freedom of the individual’s conscience as versus the right of a democratic society to decide that some procedures are health rights for all.

Citing the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, Fish writes:

Hobbes’s larger point — the point he is always making — is that if one gets to prefer one’s own internal judgments to the judgments of authorized external bodies (legislatures, courts, professional associations), the result will be the undermining of public order and the substitution of personal whim for general decorums: “. . . because the Law is the public Conscience . . . in such diversity as there is of private Consciences, which are but private opinions, the Commonwealth must needs be distracted, and no man dare to obey the Sovereign Power farther than it shall seem good in his own eyes.”

Fish argues that the values of the Enlightenment which have served religious diverse cultures well is that individuals may believe what they want but when operating in the public domain the rule of law trumps personal beliefs.  He says this is a cornerstone of multicultural democracies.  It is also the complete compartmentalization of religion which is a hallmark of secularism. 

Referring to a U.S. court case from 1878 which has been upheld more recently by the courts, Fish writes that the courts have not viewed favorably actions taken by individuals which follow one’s religion but which are opposed to “generally applicable laws” because “To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”

In other words the court has defended the right of society to promulgate laws the promote the social order at the expense of individual beliefs.   The court thus defends “society” as a legitimate legal entity which also has “rights.”  Thus the courts do not accept the rights of the individual to be unlimited and inviolably sacrosanct.   There are legal and social limits to what any one individual can do even in the name of their conscience or religion.

The issue in regard to health care workers being allowed to exercise their own consciences and to refuse to participate in medical procedures which are legal could open a Pandora’s Box as these workers declare their conscientious objection to blood transfusions, organ donations, vasectomies, vaccinations, reproductive technologies, biracial or “illegitimate” babies, STD patients, AIDs patients or any other number of medical issues which have moral implications to some.

Will patients walk into health care facilities not knowing whether they will be given legal and available treatments because one or more workers have moral or conscientious objections to doing the medical procedures?  How will health facilities or the police for that matter monitor or enforce such rules? 

Though the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm is not always given nor always required, do health care professionals have any obligation to perform legal medical procedures which a patient requests or needs?  Whose conscience rules when there is a clash of consciences and cultures?  These are indeed the difficult questions an individualistic and diverse society has to wrestle with.

America has a conscientious objector right when it comes to military service which allows citizens to refuse to engage in actions that are morally reprehensible to them (see also my blog Soldiers of Conscience).  This has also been part of Christian tradition, but I do not think the Quran allows for conscientious objection to war.   So we do have precedence for allowing some to opt out of certain professions or “procedures” based on their own consciences.  How this can work in the complicated world of health care is perhaps not as clear.

“Seeing” with our Ears is Believing

Being a person with little training in music or the arts of any kind (I never took a music class after 7^th grade until I had my one semester of music at seminary), the world of art and music remains to my perception a foreign language – I have a hard time recognizing the patterns of meaning that others so appreciate (see my blog Let There be Light).   When viewing art or listening to music I feel the scriptural words are fulfilled:  “‘You will indeed hear but never understand, and you will indeed see but never perceive” (Matthew 13:14).

I found the Mars Hill Audio Journal interview “Patterns of Musical Meaning” with Jeremy Begbie, a musician and Duke University theology professor (Number 94, Nov/Dec 2008) to be most intriguing.  The interview inspired me to purchase Begbie’s new book RESOUNDING TRUTH: CHRISTIAN WISDOM IN THE WORLD OF MUSIC, which I am now reading with great interest (and will comment on the book in a future blog).   Among the things that host Ken Myers and Jeremy Begbie discussed which caught my attention and imagination:

Culture is the ordering of meaning, providing a framework of understanding of the world around us.   Christian culture seeks to perceive the meaning to be found in God’s creation.  In this thinking any form of art is about the discovery of order and meaning in the universe.  (The Akathist, “Glory to God for All Things,” says, “The breath of Your Holy Spirit inspires artists, poets and scientists. The power of Your supreme knowledge makes them prophets and interpreters of Your laws, who reveal the depths of Your creative wisdom. Their works speak unwittingly of You.”)    Artists see and help us see things and to perceive meaning that are not immediately obvious to us, but they help us make connections which enable us to “see”.   Begbie offered the quote, “Love achieves its creativity by being perceptive.”     That is the job of the artist and the poet and the scientists – to be perceptive enough to see patterns and meaning and truth in the world around us.  It is also what “wisdom” contributes to the spiritual life – not law but understanding the world to know the when, why, where and how to apply the teachings of Christ. 

The main idea of Begbie’s which I found most provocative was his sense of how music is a different way of “seeing” the world.  When we see the world with our eyes alone, space takes on a certain meaning -  we can see only one thing in a given space, and anything that occupies one space is not present in the rest of space.   But with music one “sees” space in a totally different way.  For in music, though one note fills the space around us, we still can add more notes to the same space and yet still perceive the different notes at the same time in the same “heard” space.  He gave several examples of this and I will only mention the sympathetic resonance – where a note is played with the same note one octave lower – the sounds do not cancel each other out but in fact magnify each other. 

Begbie offers this characteristic of music – the ability for more than one thing to fill a space at the same time and still be clearly perceived – as an alternative way to understand how an omnipotent God can allow His creatures to have free will.  If our only way of “seeing” the universe is visually, we cannot understand how we can be free beings and have an omnipotent God.  But if we “see” the world in the “heard space” of music, we come to understand how this is possible.  Sympathetic resonance gives us a clue.  God’s freedom doesn’t oppose or replace ours.  God’s freedom and ours can enhance/resonate with one another and even increase the freedom for us to be who we are. 

If we only perceive visually we cannot see how God’s activity in the world can be consistent with ideas of human freedom – since visually only one thing can occupy any given space.  Music however gives us a model to re-image or re-imagine how freedom might work.   It also allows us to “see” better the Trinity – how the Three Persons can share the One divine nature – for as in music any “space” can be occupied by more than one note or Person even when that “space” was completely filled by the first.

Myers called harmony singing “a parable of what it is to be free” – for voices singing in harmony are each freely following their own path, and yet together they make beautiful music.   It is also an image of how Christian are to help one another – working in harmony to build up the church by having each freely use the gifts God’s Spirit has bestowed upon him or her.

“Seeing” the universe through music seems so appropriate for Christians.  For in the beginning, when God spoke there was light (Genesis 1:3).   It is not sound but light which God’s spoken word brought into existence.   We see space and time visually but we also need to “see” the ”heard” space and time if we are going to use all of the senses with which God has blessed us to discover the meaning He has implanted in the cosmos.

See also my blog Resounding Truth: Music and the Flourishing of Humankind

The All Powerful Self-emptying God

The question gets asked as to why if God is omniscient (all knowing) and omnipotent (all powerful) is there evil?

At least a partial answer is offered by John Polkinghorne  in his  THE FAITH OF A PHYSICIST):

“I have suggested from a theological point of view the roles of chance and necessity should be seen as reflections of the twin gifts of freedom and reliability, bestowed on his creation by One who is both loving and faithful.   … God’s gift of ‘freedom’ to his creation is conveyed by his respect for the integrity of these processes.   …   The act of creation involves divine acceptance of the risk of the existence of the other, and there is a consequent kenosis of God’s omnipotence.  This curtailment of divine power is, of course, through self-limitation on his part … It arises from the logic of love, which requires the freedom of the beloved.”

What I get from Polkinghorne is specifically that God giving free will and freedom to His human creatures means God does accept a degree of chance in His creation.  Humans really do have choices to make with real consequences, and so what humans think, say and do, matters for all; we are shaping our future in the same way that the universe is expanding and forming its own boundaries.   God is not predetermining or predestining every decisions and action of every human being, and is allowing human decisions to shape history.  Humans are thus influencing the space time continuum. 

God gives humans freedom and free will and then freely chooses to circumscribe His own powers to relate to and work with the humans in His creation.  The incarnation is the main story of God’s self emptying (kenotic) love.  The Virgin Mary is Theotokos containing the uncontainable God in Her womb in an inexplicable mystery. 

Freedom and free will are the corollaries of love – you cannot have one without the other.  Thus for love and forgiveness to exist in the world, there has to be free will, and if there is free will there is the potential for evil.  This is the strange manner in which the self emptying and self limiting love of God allows evil to exist.  It is not that God wishes evil to exist, but His love is such that He allows His creatures to reject Him and to practice evil rather than destroying His creatures.  This is the mystery of the phrase, God is love.

James Madison and the Free Exercise of Religion

The shaping of the American attitude toward freedom and religion, at least according to Steven Waldman’s FOUNDING FAITH: PROVIDENCE, POLITICS AND THE BIRTH OF RELIGIOUS FREDOM IN AMERICA,  is largely attributed to the work of James Madison.   As Waldman writes:

“Madison … proposed ‘that all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience, unpunished and unrestrained by the magistrate, unless… the preservation of equal liberty and the existence of the State are manifestly endangered.   

The change from ‘toleration’ to ‘free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience’ made religious liberty a fundamental human right, no longer subject to definition by those in power but inherent, immutable, and inalienable.”

It was, according to Waldman, Madison, who radically changed the notion of freedom of religion.  For Madison, the freedom to practice one’s religious beliefs is not something granted to us by king nor even by vote of a majority.  It is a right of conscience – something granted to us by God Himself.

This freedom of religion based in personal conscience has also been a blessing to the Orthodox Church in America - an historic Christianity that is neither Catholic or Protestant, but has been given the opportunity to teach and practices its beliefs within the boundaries of this country.   We too believe this a freedom and priviledge granted not by the government, nor even by the democratic vote of the people, but by the gift of conscience granted to each of us by our Creator.

See my other blogs on Waldman’s book.

Trivia or Providence?

The cover story for Newsweek July 7/14 2008 is based on the coincidence that Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were both born on 12 February 1809, and thus next year will be the 150^th anniversary of their births.  In 1860, the year Lincoln is elected as the 16^th president of the United States, Darwin was defending evolutionary theory as presented in his ORIGIN OF SPECIES at Oxford in England.  Two remarkable men of the 19^th Century who shared the planet at the same time in world history and of this concurrence one can imagine Darwin saying “it was chance” and Lincoln, “The Almighty has his own purposes.”

To me a more extraordinary coincidence happened on July 4, 1826 as the United States celebrated the 50^th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  For on that very day, two of the founding fathers of America, and contributors to the Declaration and past presidents of the country both died within about 3 hours of each other.  John Adams at age 90 and Thomas Jefferson at age 83 both passed away on July 4, 1826.  They had fought for the establishment of the nation, then fought each other for the presidency, but ended their lives as friends and with some understanding of what they had accomplished.

Whether one thinks all things happen providentially or that some things occur serendipitously, it seems totally possible to me that an omniscient God who gifts His human creatures with free will really does take a chance with His humans and makes chance part of His creation and plan.  If this were not the case, then “free will” is a sham and humans are nothing more than automata – carrying out God’s will whether they do good or evil.

But a God who is also free and loving, takes great risk in creating free willed beings who have to choose whether or not they will love Him back.   And since the creation of the world, humans have exercised their freedoms, sometimes for good and sometimes for evil.  God on the other hand has synergistically worked with His humans for their salvation. We have at times cooperated with Him in working out our salvation, and at other times have rebelled against Him.   Despite our sins, the merciful God fortuitously engages the world for our salvation.