Subject: Why does God love the world (us)? |
Bible Note: Hello, Meredith. Being, as I am, a simple man with an honest but unsophisticated approach to semantics, it often occurs to me that more frequently perhaps than we realize, some of our problems with misunderstanding one another, especially in the areas of complex concepts such as predestination, lie in the usage of words such as this without having a clear, firm grasp of their exact meaning. Now this is not to accuse you of this practice -- not in the least -- but rather to ask you, and others who would care to, to define with as much precision as you can muster what you mean when you use the word predestination and, perhaps, its close cousin, the word election. And of course I would add the sine qua non that these definitions, to be valid, ought indeed to be in harmony with the contexts in which Scripture uses these words. --Hank |