May 30, 2005

Today it rained alot. We stayed in the house almost all day. I took a 3 hour nap from around 11 am to 2 pm. Kristi watched Lord of the Rings (extended version). We took birthday presents to Trent and Laken since we were not able to go to their birthday party's this year.

I got into a discussion with a coworker last week about predestination. The conversation got a little out of control as always when I talk to this particular person about religious things. He has a very juvenile understanding of Christian beliefs. Its very hard for me to discuss Christianity with him because he's so ill informed about Orthodox Christian teaching. He takes the approach that it's just him and his bible and he doesn't need any man to teach him anything.

Anyway the conversation really didn't go anywhere because I was talking past him and he wasn't making any sense to me at all. He doesn't believe that God is soveriegn. He believes it is wrong to say that God "allowed" something to happen in one's life. At one point I was referring to the story in Exodus when God passed over the houses that had the blood on the door post and he stated that he'd never heard or read that scripture. I said its in Exodus in the Old Testament, he said "well I don't read the Old Testament much.

I got so frustrated after showing him Ephesians 1 and Romans 9 that I got online and bought R.C. Sproul's series on predestination. I told him that I'd make him a copy to listen to and maybe he'd see more clearly what I was having such a hard time saying.
I listened to the first two sessions a couple of times this weekend and I heard R.C say something that I really had not seen before. That is, predestination in Christian theology is the teaching about the final destination of the Christian and God determining that destination. It is not God deciding every individual moment of a persons life and what an individual does every moment. That is called devine providence.
So when I think back on the conversation I had, I went down the wrong road anyway. I should have been talking about devine providence not predestination, which is a different subject. Oh well, live and learn.