The porpoise driven wife

We have been playing with the name of this book a little. Chris managed to mis-hear me, and thought I said something a little more interesting, but ho hum.

Today we're not particularly impressed.

The sentiments Rick Warren is trying to express - that God loves each of us, and chose us for himself - are spot on. But the detail in the description is inconsistent both with itself and with scripture. One moment it suggests that God choses and specifies every detail of our lives: our parents, character, hair colour, each moment of the day, every step we take. Then it says that we can chose our jobs, partners, house etc.

He's stumbled over predestination, and rather than tidy the mess up for others, has made it worse.

Now the spirit of the book IS good. Don't get me wrong, I KNOW we were chosen by God, and He's the one that gives us purpose. But when we were chosen I'd suspect it was rather like selecting a car "I'll have that Ford Escort THERE, and accepting the fact that we happen to come with head restraints in the front but not the back, and our spare tyre is only a space-saver type. It also dodges round the idea that IF God chose how everyone was, then why do some people have spinabifida, Down syndrome etc by saying God 'permitted it'. Either He specifies or He doesn't.

Now the arguementative might say "what about the scripture that says 'He formed us in our mothers womb' and 'before we were born He knew us'"? This is still perfectly true - the bible also talks about God making seeds grow, even though we plant and water them. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that an omniscient God who was able to view time from start to finish would know our characters and *what we were going to do* even before we were conceived. But this is substantially different from deciding every aspect of our lives, including each step we take - if that were the case then there would be no free will, and sin could not be sin because God would have decided for us that we were going to do those things, and therefore they would be in line with the will of God!

This doesn't lessen the involvement of God both in the world as a whole and in our lives directly. But it is important to remember that God is a father who handles us a s a father and not a giant pupett master, pulling an ever more complex tangle of strings as He steers the world through crisis after crisis.

There is a temptation to anthropomorphise God - to make Him in our image. The bible tells us the reverse is true - He made us in His image. It is important to bear this in mind when we view God and His actions.