Polemics - Discernment - Open Theism

How many of you are familiar with the term open theism? Let's start off with that and then a few semi-hand waves and raises there. Open theism is this idea or this concept. I won't call it a doctrine, although it is a teaching. But I hesitate to raise it to the level of something that sounds like it might be part of orthodoxy. It's this idea that God only controls a little tiny bit of history and what's going on, and the rest of it is out of his control. You'll hear variations on that definition, but the general principle is that God is sovereign, kind of.

So, as we dig through this and we look at the Bible verses, we're going to take a look at where they try to get that idea from, the proponents of that, such as Greg Boyd and Clark Pinnock. Now, Clark Pinnock is a name that you see here on the handout. He is what most would consider to be a postmodern theologian.

Okay, and we talked a bit about postmodernism earlier in the apologetics class, but postmodernism, just to reiterate, is this idea that we can't really absolutely know truth, and I can't understand you and you can't understand me because we have a hard time comparing our life experiences.

So it means like when you're reading an English paper or some kind of literature piece, you can't really know what the author intended or meant. Which is where you get into things like Mark Twain promoting homosexuality with Huck Finn and things like that. It's pretty absurd. But it's one of those things where post-modernism, when it starts to creep into theology, you really have some interesting problems. But imagine when you're coming to God's Word that you can't know what the author originally intended. If you're starting with that as a premise, you can derive all kinds of things. And I can't really say you're wrong either. So that's a problem.

Another little nuance here, down in Colorado Springs in 2001 they had a meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society and 30% of the attendees held or agreed or were sympathetic to the views of open theism. Since we've said that, let's ask real quick, if open theism is wrong, what's the right perspective of God's sovereignty? We're going to look at scriptures on this, but I just want to quickly touch on what might be orthodoxy. Stan? It has a capital S, but not a small one. Capital S for sovereignty. Let me ask you this.

Is God surprised when something happens? Does God live inside of the time-space continuum, and He is a victim of the time-space continuum? Or is God sovereign and ruling over the time-space continuum because He created it? It's not in the handout here, but let's take just a quick step back into Genesis. Something we don't spend a lot of energy on here in the United States, especially in modern business practices, but there's a principle throughout the Old Testament and New Testament that if you're the creator of something, you're also the owner of something. And that seems maybe a little trivial, but if God created the earth and the time-space continuum, and he owns the time-space continuum as dominion over the time-space continuum, that doesn't necessarily mean that he's subject to the time-space continuum. And I hate that I use the word time-space continuum so many times in one paragraph, The principle that God is bound to the rules and laws of the universe rather than the creator of the rules and laws of the universe is a very strong contrast and we want to make sure that we have an understanding of that. All right, so let's dive into where this group gets this idea, and then we'll also talk about other Bible passages that we can get some stronger perspective on.

How many of you are familiar with the term anthropomorphism? If I use that term, everybody's okay with that one. Just for the record in the recording, anthropomorphism is to assign human traits. Anthropos is the Greek word for man. So assigning human traits and morphing them onto a subject. In fiction, we often see anthropomorphism as animals talking to one another and interacting with one another like human beings do. And we're giving attributes to them that are man-like attributes. or human-like attributes.

But anthropomorphism can also be ascribed to God. Not biblically, but why is it that we can't biblically ascribe human attributes to God? In Genesis 1.26, which direction did that relationship go? Man is like God, God is not like man. So we get that, let us make man in our image. That goes this direction, not the other direction. Mark Twain put it, God created a man in his image and man returned the favor. And so open theism really just takes the idea of human qualities and attributes and ascribes them to God.

So let's take a look at Genesis 8.1. Here's one of the places where they'd look. He says, but God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the cattle that were with him in the ark. And God caused the wind to pass over the earth and the waters subsided. When we read this, this is not taken as God having forgotten Noah, right? God remembered Noah. That's a human description of an experience, that's not necessarily a literal description of God having been forgetful. Forgetfulness, we'll see in a few other Bible verses later on, is not an attribute that God has.

If you were writing a narrative from a human experience, is it possible that you would write something like that? So I'm writing about my experience. Noah was probably, listen, after quite a few months or even days maybe or weeks of time on the ark, you're going to be like, man, the animals and the tight space that's here is a very real and visceral experience. It's not like anything else you've ever had.

You're Noah. And you might be calling out to the Lord, and you may describe the Lord's response to things as the Lord remembering you, but that doesn't necessarily describe a theologically accurate statement about the Lord's ability to remember or forget things. So it's a literary device, it is not a theological prescription.

So Numbers 11.18 here is the next one.

Say to the people, consecrate yourselves for tomorrow, and you shall eat meat. I'm always down for that. Sorry vegetarians. For you have wept in the ears of the Lord, saying, O that someone would give us meat to eat. For we were well off in Egypt. Therefore the Lord will give you meat, and you shall eat.

When we read that, how many of you imagined physical ears on God the Father. Instead of understanding that the Lord will hear us, or in this case, the children of Israel, hear the children of Israel praying and He doesn't need physical ears that would manifest eardrums and send neurological signals to the brain. Anthropomorphism is a utility the author is using to describe God's hearing in a way that his readers are going to understand, but not making a physiological or biological statement about God the Father.

Deuteronomy 7.17-19, if you should say in your heart, these nations are greater than I, how can I dispossess them? You shall not be afraid of them. You shall well remember what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt. The great trials which your eyes saw, and the signs and the wonders, and the mighty hand, and the outstretched arm by which the Lord your God brought you out. So shall the Lord your God do to all the people of whom you are afraid."

Now again, here's physical attributes of God, arms, hands. We understand hands to mean what in a metaphorical sense here, in an anthropological sense? What do arms and hands represent? Protection. That God is powerful, that God is a protector. Those do not have to mean, when we look at them, that God has a physical presence that's going to do those things.

It's, again, a form of literature. And I don't want to beat this to death, but at the same time, I also want to make sure that as we go through this, we're practicing proper hermeneutics. We're practicing proper biblical interpretation. And when we go through this, the language tips us off to how we should interpret the text. The language tells us what we should do. We're not contriving, this seems like a good place that we would understand metaphor. We don't do that.

Instead, we understand metaphor by the language in the verse and we understand things that are true. In light of the fullness of scripture, we don't just take one verse or one subset of the verse, derive some meaning that's convenient to us, and then move on.

At the top of page 2, the approach to scripture common to the open view is to view any passage that has been seen as anthropomorphic that limits God's view of the future as literal. All other passages containing what have been considered anthropomorphic language are still taken by open theists as anthropomorphic. So, reiterating that, they take all these other passages as non-literal anthropomorphic passages, but when it comes to God's perspective on knowing things, they take it literally. So they have an inconsistent hermeneutic when it comes to one piece of theological understanding. For those of you who like good words for scrabble, that's called isogesis. That's putting a meaning into the text rather than deriving meaning from the text. So here's Jeremiah 32-35.

They built the high places of Baal that are in the valley of Bin Hinnom to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire of Molech, which I had not commanded them, nor had it entered my mind that they should do this abomination to cause Judah to sin.

Was God shocked by this and surprised by it? Or how else could we understand that this didn't enter his mind, that they should do that? It's not his will that they do that. So that's one possible interpretation, that it's not his will. Or there's the open theism interpretation, which is he was surprised by it, which is not the point of the passage. And it's not consistent with the rest of scripture. Right. So when we get into the second part, we're going to see how inconsistent it is with the rest of scripture.

But where is child sacrifice to another foreign god part of God's will? It's not. It's disgusting. Here's a child that's created in God's image, and these people of Israel, or the people of Judah, are following the followers of Molech, and putting their infants, their firstborns, on this scalding hot altar and burning it. So, child sacrifice, disgusting in the moral and just and righteous sight of God, and using literary language to express God's shock, the open theist says, ha ha, God was surprised. And that's not the purpose in the context at all.

Let's take a look at Jeremiah 26.19.

Did Hezekiah, king of Judah and all Judah, put him to death? Did he not fear the Lord and entreat the favor of the Lord? And the Lord changed his mind about the misfortune which he had pronounced against them? But we are committing a great evil against ourselves. Alright, here's God changing his mind. It said it. God changed his mind.

Is that a theological description of God's character or is that a human experience described in written form? It's human experience. When God is revealing something about himself that is a theology proper or a doctrinal statement, he makes a propositional statement. And we're going to take a look at that in a few minutes, where he says he doesn't change his mind. But this is a written description of the human experience. And so the Open Theist says, aha, we have an admission of God changing his mind. No, that's not the point. That's not the way that that was written, and that was not its purpose. So has God opened 24-7? There are two major categories of problem that we see with open theism.

The first one, how many of you have been comforted through Romans chapter 8 when you see the character and the attributes and the qualities of God who He is, what His plans are, and that, for example, God will use all things to His glory, or that nothing can separate us from the Lord. Those are valuable truths, right? How reliable is a God who is not sovereign to implement those things? Hey, God can use all things, we hope. That's the best we get if we're embracing open theism. So practically for us as believers, we have an emotionally and spiritually traumatizing problem when it comes to Romans 8, if God is not Solomon.

In working distinctly and individually in the lives of the believer, sustaining the universe and putting things together in a meaningful way. is interpretational. And we talked about the hermeneutics a little bit earlier. But when you have a very focused one place where you decide to do an interpretational jig, that brings into question your process of interpretation. So how do we understand these passages? The first part here is when scripture makes an explicit and universal truth statement, the statements govern whether any other passage is taken as anthropomorphic.

For example, if scripture speaks as if God has hands or arms, we take that as anthropomorphic because of other scripture, like John 4.24.

God is Spirit. The Father is Spirit. God is Spirit. Christ had a physical manifestation of a body on the earth, right? So we know that the sun had a physical body, or has a physical body. But we know of God himself that got a spirit. So these anthropomorphic statements, again, are more clearly literary devices. Secondly, when scripture speaks of God and time, we find that God can enter time and interact with it, but is not subject to its limitations. In John 8, 58 and 59, and this is really one of my favorite things that Jesus does when he's dealing with the Sadducees, Jesus said to them, Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I am. We could bring up all of the other points at which Christ said, I am, are, ego, and meaning in the Greek, which was a claim to be self-existing and living in the eternal present. But why does it matter that God is outside the time-space continuum?

We kind of referenced this at the beginning. The difference between chaos and order. Because if he's part of this time-space continuum, then there is no control and it's basically randomness. And we are living in the midst of chaos. But if he's outside of this time-space continuum and has control over it, then we have order. I'd rather live in order than chaos. If God is outside of the time-space continuum, then it gives him a sovereignty over all of the time-space continuum. If he's inside of the time-space continuum, as one of multiple players, that changes the dynamic of the whole. Also, according to Psalm 91, he could be a chicken. It's the same thing, because it says that he covers you with his wings. Yeah, there we go. So God is some kind of fowl, if we take that literary term and apply it there.

God's sovereignty over the time-space continuum, as this next section points out, directly ties to the identification truths. Sadly, this week, on Facebook, one of my friends posted a thing from a Catholic website where they had said something about, well, we need to pick up our crosses and die to ourselves daily, rather than the identification truths.

And it's like, oh, my heart broke. makes a big difference if God's sovereign and outside the time-space continuum. It's not a problem for him to link us to the events of Christ and for us. If God is not sovereign, or God has a limited sovereignty, as I think they might try to articulate that, and he's within the barriers of the time-space continuum, that becomes a little bit more complicated. If God is not outside of the time-space continuum, then he is not the creator.

Yeah, when we opened the class, it's critical that God as creator is owner and sovereign and over it rather than God just being trapped inside of it, which is almost like an evolutionary or new age or Hindu-y sort of a thing where we're going to have all of these things linked. It allows him to allow for things to take place and it's his volitional, directional will rather than, and even though it looks like chaos, he's not surprised by it.

And that's important. Psalm 92, 90, colon 2, not 92. Before the mountains were born, or you gave birth to the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. If God made all of creation, then creation is subject to him, and he was before it.

If he's trapped in the time-space continuum, then these creational things were taking place at a beginning that he was integrated with rather than outside of. The third part here, careful examination of passages that are often given as references in support of Openteism, shows that these passages are not intended as the Openteist claims. Okay, so here's Jeremiah 731, they have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the valley and the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command and it did not come into my mind. Is this, what's the intent according to that context of the things leading up to it? Stan?

To me it means that the sin was so outrageous that God wouldn't even think about it. So God, it's not in his mind to be dwelling on and thinking of these sins, and it's not his intention for those sins to be taking place and be going on in the lives of human beings as a whole, per se. Yeah, it's not worship that God has in mind. It doesn't bring glory to him, right?

That's a big deal. Jeremiah 19, 4-5, Because they have forsaken me, and have made this an alien place, and have burned sacrifices in it to other gods, that neither they, nor their forefathers, nor the kings of Judah had ever known, and because they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent, and have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire, as burnt offerings to Baal, I think a thing which I have never commanded or spoken of, nor did it ever enter my mind, The context, again, articulates these things that God had not intended. If you have a reference that is talking about intent, that's significantly different than awareness of. But if you twist it, if you say, aha, look at this, then it's no longer about intent, it's about awareness, and then God's surprised. But that's not in context, that's just It's an interpretational intent, not exposition.

The Lord had warned Israel not to do these things in the law, right? Did he warn them not to do them because he didn't know they were going to happen, but just in case, or to be warned not to do them as the sovereign God of the universe who happens to be outside the time-space continuum.

Let's take a look at Leviticus 18.21.

Leviticus 18.21. And you shall not let any of your descendants pass through the fire to Molech, nor shall you profane the name of your God.

I am the Lord. So he has a very specific thing he's warning them against. Not surprised by it. Very specific thing. And it's the very specific thing that we read about in Jeremiah. It wasn't that it had not entered his mind, because if it had not entered his mind and he was surprised, then this very literal statement would be contradicting that, wouldn't it? We'd have a contradiction in the text. But instead, what we have when we interpret the text as not entering his mind, meaning that it was not something he had intended, well, then it lines up with the existing scripture, and it's not shocking.

Well, I mean, in the grand scheme of things, he knew what was going to come. He marked it as a sin and a transgression way before it ever was, which locked him in and locked all of us in. to understand that we are sent to be a sinning trinity and all of that, which makes the cross his death. All of it. Because he predicted it. He predicted it years prior.

The predictive quality of the text is where we derive part of our doctrine of sovereignty. The open theists will often say that God is controlling a thread through our history to fulfill these prophecies, but not all of history. And I think it's interesting, because they would look at this and go, yeah, God knew this one thing. Not God knows all things, and has all wisdom, and is controlling all these things.

It's highly problematic. One thing I think is interesting is they seem to turn a blind eye to the principles of the dispensations. So for example, when we look at Genesis, what laws did God give Adam and Eve? One. Don't eat from the tree from the knowledge of good and evil. And then we get all the way to Noah, and what does Noah have that God puts in place for Noah, when God makes his covenant with Noah? He eats steak. We can eat steak, yeah. We can eat meat. And what else? Something that I think is interesting is that he says a brother shall not kill his brother, or a man will not kill another man. And if an animal kills a man, it killed the animal as well in retribution. God knew that Cain was going to kill Abel. But God had not established that. He just wanted to show man, given only one law, man will still sin. And then the law comes and it really flames that up to a whole new level.

But the sovereignty of God, it doesn't mean ignorance, but it also doesn't always mean that God would be prescriptive of things. He wants to show man graciously and lovingly and patiently his character and not necessarily through the convenient problems that everyone has often asked, why didn't God just kill Adam and Eve in the beginning and take sin out of the world and start it over? and have it sinless. I've been asked that multiple times in various situations. Because man was made in his image, right? But God was sovereign and knew that was coming, wasn't surprised by it. But as the dispensations of the time and friends move forward, these contexts reveal God's sovereignty in his character, not chaos and a lack of context.

So let's take a look at Jeremiah 32-35 in light of that Leviticus passage. They built the high places of Baal that are in the valley of Ben Haman. We saw that there. And they pastored children to the fire of Moab. There was disobedience to a sovereign God, not a surprise. It was willful disobedience by God. and Jacob.

So Jeremiah 32-35, they built the high places of Baal that are in the valley of Ben-Hurim. My dad, when he put this original together, had to draw out the Hebrew poetry pattern. So you get the little bonus literary form there. The proper use in recognition of the literary form is the Hebrew poetry pattern, not the lack of God's sovereignty.

Were the Chaldeans the ones that initiated the sacrifice of Mulek? What race of people? You know, I don't know that off the top of my head. I should probably know the answer to that, but I have lost this round of Bible trivia. How did they ever get such a terrible...

The Canaanites had all kinds of gross, gross practices. that child sacrifice and all kinds of weird sexual practices and basically things that defiled mankind and disrespected God's character. But if they sacrificed their child for children, what gain was there to it? It was their first child usually, as I understand it, and it was with pagan gods it was an attempt to either get them off your back or to please them so that you'd have more fertility or better agricultural resorts. Some kind of earthly reward.

Satan hates that mankind represents God's image. And so that sacrifice is yet again a disrespect to God and who He is. Well listen, doesn't it say in the law that the firstborn is supposed to be set aside to the Lord? Yeah. Okay, so this is a twist like so many things in scripture that Satan takes what God wants and then he twists it so that they do the exact opposite. So instead of setting aside to the Lord, they kill him. And then obviously they aren't set aside.

So it's disobeying God's law by not making God the only God. It's disobeying God's law by sacrificing the children of the Molech. And it's disobeying God's law by not honoring God's demand for the first children. wickedness. It's just bluntly wickedness.

It's hard for us to think about that except for what's been in the news for the last, I don't know, for decades now actually, but the issue of abortion. So we're not burning them to Molech, but we're killing our children And we're just all about, it's inconvenient, it's not what I like, it's going to have a genetic defect.

My second daughter, Evelyn, the doctor said, well, we've done this test and we think she's got markers for Down syndrome. Let us know if you want us to take care of the baby so that you can try again and have a healthy kid. And Jessica and I were pretty well offended that someone would think that was a good idea. She came out, she has her flaws, but Down syndrome would not have been a reason not to have our child.

I was born supposedly healthy and then I got meningitis at 13 months. Can they do tests where he's going to get meningitis at 13 months? Well, that's going to be painful. Why not try again? All the variations of physical health problems don't justify that we sacrifice our children through abortion either. It's a very real problem today, only we do it in the name of science. and genetic health instead of the name of Molech.

So 1 Samuel 2.35, but I will raise up for myself a faithful priest who will do according to what is in my heart and in my soul and I will build him an enduring house and will walk before my anointed always. Does that sound like a sovereign God? It sounds like a very, very sovereign God who is able to make that sort of commitment.

It's not just a short term thing, this is an eternal quality. I don't know why I was reminded of this verse in Acts 1-7. It's not for you to know the times or the periods that the Father has sent His own authority. It's very clear. So, why is it that God is able to mark those things?

He's sovereign. God is able to do this, and not only is he sovereign over these things that are inside the time-space continuum, but looking at this Samuel passage, when will this anointed one cease to have God the Father with him? What's the time context?

It's always. It's eternal. It's outside of the time-space continuum. It's outside of God's creation. It's eternal. It went back, as we look at other verses, to eternity past, and it goes all the way into eternity future. Something only a God who's not bound by the time-space continuum can say and do. John 1 says, in the beginning, which really wasn't a beginning. It already was existing.

So Randy, what are they trying to gain by bringing God down instead of lifting God up? What's the purpose of this? Well, before I answer, does anybody else have any ideas for why they do this? What is one of the biggest wrestlings for most carnal people is that bad things happen. We look in the news, and why didn't God stop the school shooting? Why did 9-11 happen? And instead of God being sovereign, that can control these things, He's a victim of circumstance, along with us, and unable to control these things.

And so they feel some, and this is bizarre because it's almost like Stockholm Syndrome, they have this comfort in this thing that shows no comfort. Where is the comfort in God being trapped in the time-space continuum with no control? That's a big deal. Well, it kind of subtracts, in my head, what you're saying. It kind of subtracts that inner battle of, why does a good God let bad things happen? And you eliminate that question if he has no control over it. Is that what you're saying? That's exactly what I'm saying, yeah. So it's convenient to say that God had no control over it up front. Oh, that question's out of the way. Oh, good. But it really opens up, then, the next hoard of problems. And it's not one problem.

It's a big swath of problems, because now you have issues of, Well, did the sovereign God of the universe inspire the scriptures? If you say yes, which we've already been over that in previous classes, but if you say yes, then now the sovereign God of the universe inspired these passages, but then how did he preserve them? I can see that by the time. Well, we can say that, yes, from an orthodoxy perspective, God can preserve his scriptures through all the circumstances that they need to be preserved.

But from an open theistic perspective, suddenly the God of the universe is in, I imagine, this is maybe a bad illustration, but I imagine someone juggling. And I can juggle three balls just fine. I can't juggle four at all. So then God has this problem of the finite number of things that God is being sovereign over.

And you hope that the scriptures are one of them, that things don't get complicated. So when you answer the question of why do bad things happen to people, I'm not going to say good people, because I think that we can prove through scriptures people aren't that good. Why do bad things happen to people? If you answer it with this answer, that God just couldn't help it, then you have the rest of the scriptures fall apart, and then there's no hope of them. Crystal?

Well, the Ophidias model is quite a lovely way to shift responsibility from, why do bad things happen, to saying bad things happen because of us. created in our sin, not because God couldn't control it, but because he lovingly allows us to continue because he doesn't want anybody to perish. So it's just that model, if you don't want to say God's God, then you can just shift it and say, well, he's not really as much. Therefore, you're open to not being responsible. or the intense distrust in someone's heart.

Issues of responsibility, issues of salvation becomes impacted, because God can only save so many people, right? Because he can't manage all the people, right? He's got limitations. Really, all of the doctrines of Christianity start to crumble and become susceptible to attack if we have a God who's only kind of, sort of, sovereign some of the time. And if you get to the more liberal sweep of things, it's not sovereign really at all. It's more of a deistic perspective, where you start at the ball rolling and let it go. Stan?

Well, this is the problem with whether it's literal or allegorical, or whether you add spiritualism to the scripture. Because when you do that, then you can justify almost any argument. So they're using this to justify what you just said about the argument of why bad things happen. So again, the allegorical interpretation can be used in so many ways. That's why your dad always talks about taking literal. Yeah, the literal in-context interpretation.

The last page here, I think, actually has a very valuable comparison and contrast with the god of the scripture, or what I would say orthodoxy, versus open theism and paganism. And as this last couple of years, I've gotten to work with folks who are Indian, by which I mean India and Asian-con Indian, not Native Americans. Folks who are Indian, and they're polytheistic, and they're pagan. And it's very interesting to learn about their religious ideas. I had somebody tell me Happy Ganesh Day recently, in the last month or so, and they celebrated Lord Ganesh, who is an elephant god, which is special. But it's paganism, and it's one of those things that is just like Islam, it's coming into our country, slowly but surely, and we need to have an awareness of it.

So, what are the contrasts or the aspects of God's character? What about God's infinite knowledge? The Bible describes God as having infinite knowledge. The God of open theism does not. It's part of what he can't control. Now, one of the things that makes my head hurt but that I think is really cool about God is that God is able to extrapolate infinitely all possible options and all possible variations that could happen. See, a decision A or decision B, God knows the outcome of both of those fully and can extrapolate it. And it's not problematic for him.

Spoken like a programmer. Yeah. Sorry. Definitely spoken like a programmer. But the funny thing is that in software, we have this thing called a Monte Carlo simulation, which kind of generically comes up with randomized options that we can kind of maybe contrive probabilities from. Whereas in God knows with precision, all variations. Because he's infinitely knowledgeable. Infinitely wise? He's bug free. He's bug free. God is bug free. Infinite wisdom?

With orthodoxy, yes. With open theism, no. With paganism, no. In Opentheism and Paganism, the god that's involved, or gods in Paganism, is playing inside the time-space continuum. The infallibility of God. God is righteous and just, and makes righteous and just decisions. Infallibility matters a lot. God changes his mind in Opentheism. In paganism, gods vary.

Greek mythology, always one of my favorite topics when I was in school because they were fun stories. Well, they always gave us the G-rated ones. It turns out I became an adult and discovered how gross they were. But the gods were just super wishy-washy in paganism.

But the God of the Bible is not that way. Unchanging character, and that's really, really huge. God's character never changes. That's why he is able to be an outside authority who is righteous and just, that those attributes don't change. We need that for Christ to be fully God and fully man, and be an appropriate sacrifice on the cross. He's got to have the unchanging character of God.

God doesn't change his mind in orthodoxy, in the scriptures. Obviously we've talked about how open theism says he does. God is not subject to the physical world. He subjected himself as Christ to the physical world, didn't he? But as God sovereignly choosing to do that, not as being a victim. God is infinitely holy. At least in open theism, God is infinitely holy, they say.

But paganism doesn't have that concept. And we only have one God that's identical between scriptural and open theism perspectives. But paganism, obviously, especially in things like Hinduism, where you have all these various gods. How do they explain being pagan? infinite and being subject to the time? Because they described it as a quality that he has within the time-space continuum rather than a quality that he has coming into the time-space continuum. It's not really infinite. It's sort of. Yeah. I'm not much of a dancer, but I think they got a few good moves there.

So is anybody ready to close in prayer and pray to a God who's sovereign? Because when I was reviewing these notes and getting ready for this, the thing I kept thinking about was when I've been through trials and suffering, my comfort was in a God who knew what was going on and was going to use it. And I couldn't imagine comfort from a God who was victim to the same circumstances I was, who was just trying to keep everything moving in the right direction in a few key categories and places. It's not very comforting. But comfort in a God who's sovereign is good.

All right, let's close in prayer. Oh, I just thought I saw a hand go up. Sorry. Nope. All right. Heavenly Father, we ask that you would just Continue to bring these things to our minds over the coming weeks and months and years until you return. Thank you that you are sovereign. Thank you that when we pray to you, we pray to you knowing that you have a plan. We pray to you knowing that you are working all things to the good of those who love you. And Lord, we thank you that we're being conformed to the image of Christ because we are identified with him. We praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.