Character and Nature of God

This weeks topic was about the character and nature of God and Tom Hallas was our speaker. He's great. He is definitely not a traditional speaker and he caught us off guard many many times this week with very unexpected comments haha. Pretty interesting. He really challenged a lot of things that I believe. One of the things is God knowing everything and that He can be surprised which I'll comment on in a second.
Something that I thought that was really cool was that the trinity, out of perfect love and unity, created us and that if one of them decided they'd had enough the entire world would cease to exsist. In that Jesus was sent for different reasons and one thing we pulled out of that this week was that by Jesus becoming fully man, they (the trinity) showed us how precious human life is. That they would send God down to walk as one of us. And to now be seated in heaven as a human with God. I can't really explain it that well but just the thought of how highly the human race is thought of my God is mind boggling. And then how that love is transfered to us individually is just so much more intense I can't even imagine.
Anyhow .. so our speaker said this week that it is impossible to know everything in the past, future and present and still be in relationship with someone because it removes the surprise factor.. or grief or whatever. As a class we started to think about what He really meant that as and I guess we kinda came to a place where God can be surprised by us you know. In Isaiah? .. Jeremiah? dang it can't remember, anyhow it says somewhere something a long the lines of 'it never came to my mind that they could do such a thing.' So we tossed around the idea that because God is fully good and has no space for evil in or around him, we as humans have in a sense surprised God with evil. You know when he created us it was to be in relationship with Him, which means we needed to have complete freedom to chose and by doing that he put himself at risk to be hurt (by evil/sin/etc). Which in my mind is incredible.. for Him to have put Himself out there like a spiritual dart board you know? It's just so crazy to me that forever He will be taking hits from AND for us.
Something else that we talked about was that forgiveness was available before the cross, without any sacrifice. Different times in the old testiment God says he just wants someones heart and they didn't need to sacrifice.. in the New Testement Jesus forgives people - the man and the mat and the woman with the perfume and more. I always kind of thought in the back of my mind that sending Jesus was plan B.. Adam and Eve messed it up so God had to clean it up. But we talked about how Jesus was always plan A. Jesus was going to be coming either way. When Jesus died, in a way humanity died we all died with him and now we have the ability to live beyond ourselves in heaven. Plus Jesus came to bring a different level of relationship. So even if we had never sinned Jesus still would have come to bring that. There are other things in there as well that I'm still kinda trying to understand so a lot of this is unexplainable but they're things that are interesting to me and challenging to wrap my head around. I obviously haven't fully grasped any of this considering the lack of explanation I've given but ya, just a few floaters I guess.
Please keep praying for health and safety while we're hear. Just told today that this biker gang is coming to northbridge which is like a subburb over next week and I guess they causes mass chaos and fights on the east coast. Not a safe bunch of gentlemen to be around. So just a covering in that sense. Also I just found out today that I only need 1500 more for the covering costs of lecture phase so you if you could join my in continual prayer for not just the 1500 but and abundance outside of that for outreach and the internship and generosity to others that would be great. Thanks so much. Much Love