The writer of 2 Peter seemed to think so. He gave that as the reason for the delay in the coming of Christ:kaufmannphillips wrote:Does G-d allow any person to die if he believes that, given more time, the person might yet repent and come to participate in the world to come?
First of all you must understand this, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own passions and saying, "Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things have continued as they were from the beginning of creation."
The Lord is not slow about his promise as some count slowness, but is forbearing toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. 2 Peter 3:3,4,9
Anyway, the main problem in this thread seems to be a fear among many people that if God in not involved in every detail of our lives, then He is unable to be so involved, or else He doesn't really care how much pain we suffer. Thus they come up with all sorts of ingenious ways to show that, contrary to all appearences, He really IS involved in every detail, many claiming that He is actually the cause of every event on earth no matter how horrendous.
I have personally experienced healing in response to prayer. A doctor diagnosed me as having a particular, serious medical condition. After my church prayed for me, a later visit with the doctor revealed that the condition was no longer present. The doctor concluded that he must have made a mistake in his diagnosis.
However, I have seen many more cases of fervent prayer for people's healing where no healing took place. That is one of the reasons I say that God seldom intervenes. That fact in no way implies that we should not pray for healing nonetheless.
Where genuine healings take place in substantial numbers, thousands flock to the venue in order to be healed. This was the case with the healings which took place in Katherine Kuhlmann meetings. Katherine didn't know the Lord was going to use her in this way; she was simply a preacher of the gospel. But one day in one of her gospel meetings a couple of women came to greet her after the meeting to say that while Katherine was preaching they were healed of their medical conditions. Then the Lord gave Katherine the ability to see in the spirit, who was being healed. She would announce in her meetings that certain people were being healed, and they always were. She had medical doctors present to verify the healings. But strangely to say, fewer than 5% of people who came to the meetings to be healed, were in fact healed. Katherine said that this would be the first question she would ask the Lord when she saw Him. Why so few?
I can relate unmistakable signs the Lord gave me in my own life, on two different occasions, to identify false prophets. But such occasions were rare and can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
I believe that God was taking a great risk in creating man in His own image, another autonomous being with free will like his Creator, and who propagated billions of other free will agents. Yet, it is not as if these many free will agents can "run free" without restraint in carrying out their individual wills. This is where God's sovereignty enters. There are boundaries outside of which He will not allow them to go. Sometimes it seems that these boundaries are very broad indeed, when we consider the atrocities which man has committed against one another for thousands of years, and it continues in the very day in which we live.
But as an example of what God will probably not allow man to do, would be to annihilate himself completely through the use of nuclear warfare (though the recent boasts of North Korea may cause one to doubt even that).
If God is not controlling man's choices as I affirm, then people are fearful. How can they trust Him, if He is not in control of man's choices? The fact is we can trust Him anyway, for that which is everlasting cannot be compared to that which is temporal in this world. God did not usually deliver from death either the early Christian martyrs nor those in the middle ages, nor those in recent times under the Soviet regime, not those in Muslim countries today.
Yet many of these martyrs trusted God completely in spite of their impending deaths!
I think the belief that God meticulously controls every event on earth gives people a sense of security --- a false sense of security, I must add. It is analogous to the sense of security which people in the secular world have, the ones who believe in determinism --- the view that no event which has ever occurred could have been otherwise due to prior causes. Such a belief if carried to its logical conclusion removes all responsibility for human atrocities (I could not have done otherwise because of prior causation). The same applies to the notion that God is in meticulous control and is the cause of every event, either directly, or by "allowing it". Someone who thinks like this may say, "If God caused me to murder my wife, then it is not my fault." Some may believe that statement to be too extreme. They may reply:
"God didn't cause you to murder your wife, though He 'allowed you' to do so. He must have had a higher purpose in allowing you to do so --- otherwise He would never have allowed it."
The response to this could be, "Very well, if God allowed it in order to fulfill a higher purpose, then I am not at fault for murdering my wife. Indeed, I am fulfilling God's will in order to achieve this higher purpose."
When we see that such thoughts about God's total involvement in our lives logically leads to a denial of moral responsibility, we may find that the belief that God sometimes intervenes in human affairs but usually doesn't, is a far closer approximation to the realities we face every day, than the belief that God controls our every action, or at least allows it for a "higher purpose."
