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THE DAILY WORD
By Jim Seekamp

Friday April 4, 2008

1 Timothy 2:3,4 (NIV)
This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.

God desires ALL to be saved, and yet He cannot control the fact that hell will be populated, because mankind has a free will! If God were in control of the world, we would all get saved today and go into the millennium tomorrow!

God does know the choices that every person will make, but He won't MAKE people do anything. God's only way of changing circumstances on earth is through answering prayer!

Pharaoh had the free will choice to NOT let the Israelites go, which is why he didn't, through all those plagues. The plagues would have been avoided if Pharaoh had just let the people go in the first place! Of course God knew he wouldn't, but God did not MAKE Pharaoh do anything; He simply answered the Israelites' cries for help:

Exodus 2:23-25 (NIV)
23. During that long period, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. 24. God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob.

Notice that God RESPONDED TO PRAYER! The Israelites cries for help went up to God, and the result was that God worked an ANSWER to their prayers!

If the Israelites had not by their own free will cried out to God, they would not have even been delivered, and the Egyptians would not have been effected.

There are instances in the Bible where some people believe that God interfered on His own; like when Sarai was saved from Pharaoh when Abram called her his sister:

Genesis 12:12,13 (NIV) (Abram talking to Sarai)
12. "When the Egyptians see you, they will say, 'This is his wife.' Then they will kill me but will let you live. 13. Say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you."

Genesis 12:14-20 (NIV)
14. When Abram came to Egypt, the Egyptians saw that she was a very beautiful woman. 15. And when Pharaoh's officials saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh, and she was taken into his palace. 16. He treated Abram well for her sake, and Abram acquired sheep and cattle, male and female donkeys, menservants and maidservants, and camels. 17. But the LORD [causitive Hebrew tense: "afflicted", permissive Hebrew tense: "ALLOWED"] serious diseases on Pharaoh and his household because of Abram's wife Sarai.
18. So Pharaoh summoned Abram. "What have you done to me?" he said. "Why didn't you tell me she was your wife? 19. Why did you say, `She is my sister,' so that I took her to be my wife? Now then, here is your wife. Take her and go!" 20. Then Pharaoh gave orders about Abram to his men, and they sent him on his way, with his wife and everything he had.

The entire Hebrew Old Testament was translated in the causitive tense, when many Bible scholars (and Jews) know that there is also a permissive tense; that should have been used in numerous places in the scriptures. These translations have a huge bearing on the meaning of phrases that seem to say God DID something when He actually only permitted it.

The New Testament explains more clearly what happened to Pharaoh when he took Sarai as his wife:

Romans 1:27 (NIV)
In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.

God did not have to interfere; sin comes with it's own penalty. If you think about it, if God HAD intervened with Sarai, He would have kept Pharaoh from ever marrying her in the first place, which He did not! It was because of the affliction caused by Abram's lie and Pharaoh's sin that Pharaoh let her go. God had nothing to do with it.

God is not in control of any situation unless Christians pray about that situation in faith!

PRAYER
Thank You Father for Your Word, that tells us You are not evil, and You don't show partiality by overriding any person's free will. Help me to see You as a loving Father instead of as a Tyrant who plays with human puppets.
In Jesus Name, Amen.

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