My latest posts have been mostly about the state of affairs in our country and the moral ramifications thereof. So I feel that it's time for a change of pace. I hope you enjoy and find this next post both interesting and perhaps challenging.
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The title for this entry is a simple question which could be easily answered in a simple fashion as well. However, due to many of our modern ideas about God, such a question is no longer so simple.

Unfortunately, there are ideas that have begun circulating around that God is an 'Omni' God. I'm sure many of you have heard the sermon about the "attributes" of God, I never really took much time to memorize them since they were never particularly useful to me, but I believe that they are, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotence. Firstly, if God has a chance at being any of them He might be omnipresent and omnipotent, but this may just be because I have yet to find conflict within these ideas. However, there are several things that are important to note when having this discussion.

First, none of these 'omni' words are used in the Bible. These words were created and while their definitions are found within the Bible, to simply claim them to be correct can inappropriately ignore the context with which the words were written.

Second, omniscience (all-knowing) is not required for God to know what he will choose to do in the future. This is a big one, because I would argue that every account within the Bible where it claims that God knew that something would come to be can be a true statement simply because God knows what he will do.

Third, the omniscience of God, when applied to knowing what we will choose, goes against the entirety of free will and removes all will for any action.

Having said these three things, I would then put forth that it is possible for God to have hope for us and it is from that that God is filled with joy and consequentally we can be filled with joy. To provide a concrete example of God having hope for the future (why would God have hope if he knows what's going to happen?) take a look at Amos 9:11-15. Here we can see that God is wishing for something different in the future, but he has already laid out that it is contingent upon the people of Israel.

So what does that mean for us? If God has hopes and desires for our lives, in what way should that affect us? I submit that it should give us the footing to make decisions in our lives that in faithful submission to the love that God has shown to us. It should cause us to review every aspect of our lives in a way that there is no such thing as 'secular' and 'religious' because your entire life will be God centered.