his laws in the Word as we are bound by ours. But what does that make
divine omnipotence, if it is restricted by laws? It takes all the absolute-
ness out of omnipotence. Isn’t God’s power then less than the power of a
monarch on a worldly throne? Monarchs can turn the laws of justice in
another direction as easily as they turn the palms of their hands. They
can have the absolute power of an Octavian Augustus; they can also have
the absolute power of a Nero. After we thought for a while about
omnipotence bound by laws, we felt drunk and likely to lose conscious-
ness if we didn’t find some remedy very quickly.
“Our prayers have been said on the basis of our faith. We have prayed
for God our Father to have mercy for the sake of his Son, believing that
he could have mercy on whomever he wished, forgive the sins of
whomever he pleased, and save whomever he wanted to. We wouldn’t
have dared take away in the least from his omnipotence. Therefore bind-
ing God with the chains of some of his own laws seems unspeakable to
us, because it goes against his omnipotence.”
[ 2 ] When they finished they looked at me and I looked at them.
They appeared thunderstruck. I said, “I will take an appeal to the Lord
and bring back a remedy to enlighten the issue. In the meanwhile,
though, I’ll resort to some examples.
“God Almighty created the world from the design in himself,” I said.
“The divine design in which he is and which he follows as he rules is
something he built into the world. He endowed the universe and every-
thing in it with its own design. Human beings have theirs, animals theirs,
birds and fish theirs, insects theirs; every species of tree, even every type
of grass has its own design.
“As examples to provide enlightenment, I’ll briefly give the follow-
ing. There are laws of the divine design imposed on human beings that
indicate that we are to acquire truths from the Word for ourselves and
that we are to base our thinking on them in an earthly way and, as much
as we can, in a rational way. This is how we develop an earthly faith for
ourselves. On God’s side, there are laws of the divine design dictating
that he is to come closer, fill those truths with his own divine light, take
our earthly faith, which is only knowledge and persuasion, and fill it
with a divine essence. This is the only way for faith to become capable of
saving. There is a similar process for developing goodwill.
“Let’s list some other points briefly. According to God’s laws, he can
forgive us our sins only to the extent that we follow our laws and stop
doing them. God cannot regenerate us spiritually beyond the point to
which we, following our laws, have regenerated ourselves in an earthly
singke
(singke)
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