Hi, Michael
I absolutely agree that God can know what will come of every minute detail in this earth. My contention is that a) we don’t know that He chooses to know these things (He may so choose, but we don’t know that), and b) even if He does choose to know, whether He set it up to happen in just that way, or whether many happenings are mere side-effects of setting up OTHER things that He does want to control and cause to happen.
The world is so complex that no one can possibly figure out all the possibilities. God can, but even He often has to take the best compromise. I’m thinking of a thing I heard about the human eye, and I wish I could remember it better – but it had to do with a purported design flaw in the eye. Later it was discovered that the “flaw” was necessary in order for some other part of the eye to work correctly. So I guess you could say the “flaw” wasn’t really a flaw at all, but more of a compromise. It was necessary in order to get the eye to work correctly under the natural laws of this world (which God set up, of course, and could have set up differently – but He had to set them up SOME way, and this is what He decided on).
So we look at this thing which seems to us a flaw or an anomaly and say, "Why did God do/allow that? But God knows that the “anomaly” was necessary. It played an important part in His plan. Or it allowed or facilitated something else that played an important part. Or maybe it was a by-product of some important thing God was/is doing, and will later play its own role.
The blind man was born blind so that God could be revealed by Jesus’ healing of him. But perhaps another man is blinded so that he can stop depending on his own natural fleshly strengths and rely completely on God’s life within him. Or perhaps someone looses her eyesight simply because she lives in a place where this is a danger. God wanted her there, the child of these particular parents, because it was necessary in order to craft her into just the person He is creating. The blindness is a part of that – it has to be, whether it was a primary objective or not.
I agree with Talbott that God likely had a limited number of choices in creating a world populated by free agents that meets His finished criterion. Just guessing, but let’s speculate that His criterion include that the world must a) eventually deliver each and every person as a redeemed child of God, b) reach this goal as quickly as possible for as many people as possible, c) produce the right mix of people to completely express God’s attributes through the natural world, d) deliver the least possible dose of human suffering, and e) produce mature offspring to Abraham who cannot be numbered (by Abraham, at any rate) and who shine like the stars in the skies.
How many possible worlds will meet these requirements? Many might come close, but only one will be the best. It will be a compromise, though, because in order to get the best outcome for everyone, Abba will have to allow a degree of suffering and sometimes rather horrendous suffering. We can’t know how much better or worse it could have been if He had chosen a different world to create, but if we trust Him, if we know that He is good, it makes sense to assume that He chose the best possible option.
Now a person could get all fatalistic and say that “Whatever I do, that’s what God planned,” but I think that’s seeing things from the wrong angle. We are free (more or less) moral agents, and while what we do may be foreknown, that doesn’t mean that what we do doesn’t matter. We have to struggle to mature, and we have to learn to obey Jesus’ commandments. We do it in His strength, but we also must choose whether to do it at all. Eventually, we will become mature, but it will take longer (maybe far, far longer) if we refuse whatever situations Father has placed us in to develop us into His grown-up, competent, magnificent sons and daughters.
He has given us certain commandments and He’s commanded us to obey them. That used to discourage me no end because I knew I couldn’t do that – just couldn’t, and that’s that. But I think I’ve begun to understand. When He gives a commandment, it’s like in the beginning, when He said, “Light, Be!” And the light was. The power to obey is in the command. The light has no ability to resist God’s command, but we do have that ability. So we choose to resist, or we choose to appropriate that power that came in the commandment, and to obey.
It’s not like we have no input, no effect. Otherwise, there’d be no point in Him giving us commands. He means for us to obey them. If we don’t obey, He’ll work around that (it’s not like He’s surprised), but we miss the blessing of growing through obeying that command, and perhaps someone else, someone we were supposed to bless, also suffers from our lack of obedience. Yeah, God knew that would happen, but it didn’t have to happen, and we genuinely made it happen by our bad choices. God just worked around it.
Okay, I feel like I’m rambling here – sorry; I think I got off the topic.
Coincidences . . . sometimes I do think they mean something. I tried to post an e-mail the other day and three times it refused to go through. Was God telling me not to talk to the person about that subject? Maybe; maybe not – but it wasn’t an essential communication, so I deleted it.
Often I’ll be researching a subject and I’ll notice an on-line friend posting about it, someone else in my circle brings it up, I click on a book I bought months ago and promptly forgot about, and find it’s just what I need. You could easily (and possibly rightly) ascribe natural causes to that, but I can’t help thinking that things like this are a nudge from God that He does want me to be searching out that subject.
I read a story yesterday about a couple of native church planters whose bike died a mile from a village they seriously didn’t want to stop in, but by the next day they had met with a group of “freedom fighters” (whom they would NEVER have talked to) and planted a fellowship. When they were ready to order parts for their bike, they tried it again and it started right up, so they went on their way, but since that time the gospel has spread throughout that area like yeast.
So yes, I absolutely think God sometimes causes coincidences. On the other hand, sometimes they’re just coincidences. I think it’s possible and desirable to see God’s hand in nature and in civilization. I don’t necessarily think that seeing a sign that says “no left turn” means the pastor should caution his congregation about liberalism, though. It may be that God WOULD speak to a person through a street sign, but I’d expect that to be a fairly infrequent occurrence. I guess I’m saying I wouldn’t make a doctrine out of it. The important thing is to know Jesus’ voice and be able to tell when He’s talking to you and when it’s just one of those things. You can explain it any way you like, but if God is trying to talk to you through it, and you’re trying to listen, He’ll get through.
I like what you said about meaning vs. purpose. It’s a good point. Sometimes things do have a meaning, and sometimes a purpose. Other times maybe any meaning or purpose will be so obscure that we wouldn’t know about them until God told us. Maybe the meaning/purpose is for someone else, or maybe the occurrence is just a side effect of something else that does have a meaning/purpose.
So . . . I’m going to quit now and go to bed, before I paint myself into a corner. 
Praying for you and your folks,
Love, Cindy
