Restless Wonderer

Readers of the Bible might be forgiven for thinking that Israel was at the centre of history in the centuries before Christ, but in reality for most of their history the people of Israel were under the dominance of other great powers.   Only in the time of David and Solomon (around 100 years before Christ) did Israel make its mark on the world stage.   Before that, Egypt was the mega-power and other local enemies, including the arch-enemy, the Philistines, continually threatened the tribes descended from Jacob.   After Solomon the united tribes fractured into two kingdoms and their power was gradually eroded in the face of the growing power of kingdoms to the northeast – first the Syrians (or Arameans), then the Assyrians and lastly the Chaldeans (or neo-Babylonians).   Eventually the two kingdoms of the people of Israel fell – the northern kingdom to Assyria in 722 BC and the southern kingdom of Judah to Babylon in 586BC.   From a purely historical persp...

In our home group this week one of the younger members asked the question: “Does God decide everything that is going to happen to us?”   He had been wondering since a Christian friend had said that he didn’t need to worry about the future because God had it all planned out for him.   The question isn’t a new one, but it certainly is important.   Do we have real choices, is ‘free will’ a reality, or is everything already determined?   This question isn’t just one for Christian theology, within which there is a rich tradition of debate about how divine sovereignty and human responsibility can coexist.   It is also hotly debated in the realms of philosophy and neuroscience, with a significant number of neuroscientists suggesting that we live in a deterministic world – our actions are merely the result of chemical and electrical processes in our brains – and the majority of philosophers insisting that free will must exist.   This debate isn’t far removed from...