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Does God truly hear our prayers?

Deeje

Avid Bible Student
Premium Member
If god exists and is all-powerful and all-knowing.

Then he could see the future, including what actions people will take.

Can you not comprehend what I said? We are free willed beings, made in the image of our free willed Creator. He can choose to see and know whatever he wishes. But sometimes he chooses NOT to know, so that free willed beings can make their own choices and learn from the consequences of their own actions. He allowed ample time to have all eventualities play out naturally. At the end, when the Kingdom takes over world rulership, all will return to the days before the fall.

Since our thoughts and by extension our actions come from our own personalities which come from genetics and environment, both of which god would be responsible for, god chose what outcome your life will have.

The gene pool from which we are all produced has nothing to do with God directly. He is the one who designed the system of reproduction, but he does not choose our specifics genes for us.....we choose our own partners and produce children with a random selection of genes from two parents. This is why God only selects those ones with qualities that he desires in citizens he is choosing for life in his Kingdom. God is not responsible for our personalities or choices.....genetics and environment shape who we become.

The only way around this is to say that god cannot see the future, in which case he is not all-powerful or all-knowing. Or by saying that god is not all-good.

Either one contradicts scripture.

Nothing contradicts scripture.
You limit things to two choices when that is not the case. God can see into the future if it suits him, and we have Bible prophesy to prove that he has knowledge of the future and can make it known to us. Your assertion has nothing to do with him being all powerful. A heavy-weight boxing champion doesn't have to go around knocking everyone out just to prove his title does he?

A genius doesn't have to go around spouting his equations all the time to prove how smart he is. They just have to prove themselves once to demonstrate their abilities and have them recognized. God has proven himself by creation itself. "Nothing can come from nothing." "All life can only come from pre-existing life"....this is what science knows, yet it denies it when it comes to promoting evolution. Go figure. :shrug:

I have had many prayers answered personally, some of them were answered in ways I had not anticipated, but everything turned out well in the end. God sees what we cannot and acts to answer prayers in different ways according to the exercise of our faith.

Too many people see God as some kind of celestial waiter, where they can snap their fingers and expect him to grant their every wish. I think we need to consider ourselves in the position of Job. If our faith is tested through adversity by the devil, we have to be confident that God knows our limitations and will make the way out so that we can endure our trials. (1 Corinthians 10:13)
Too much emphasis is placed on the trials themselves and not enough on the outcome. Look how it ended for Job....?

Job 42: 10-16
"After Job had prayed for his companions, Jehovah removed Job’s tribulation and restored his prosperity. Jehovah gave him double what he had before. 11 All his brothers and sisters and all his former friends came to him and ate a meal with him in his house. They sympathized with him and comforted him over all the calamity that Jehovah had allowed to come upon him. Each of them gave him a piece of money and a gold ring.
12 So Jehovah blessed the last part of Job’s life more than the beginning, and Job came to have 14,000 sheep, 6,000 camels, 1,000 pairs of cattle, and 1,000 female donkeys. 13 He also came to have seven more sons and three more daughters. 14 He named the first daughter Je·miʹmah, the second Ke·ziʹah, and the third Kerʹen-hapʹpuch. 15 No women in all the land were as beautiful as Job’s daughters, and their father gave them an inheritance along with their brothers.
16 After this Job lived for 140 years, and he saw his children and his grandchildren—four generations. 17 Finally Job died, after a long and satisfying life."


It's not what we go through, but how it ends that counts. God rewards faithful service. (Hebrews 11:6)
 
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