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The wisdom in sending a mission to the unbelievers of whom it is known they will not believe — and this is likened to futility.
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I established six considerations for this. First: if He had not sent the unbelievers a mission and set out faith for them, they would have an excuse, saying: if a messenger had come to us, we would have believed in him.
Second: what is in God's knowledge, if it did not emerge into act, would mean that reward and punishment are for His knowledge and not for the servants' acts.
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Third: just as His sensory and rational proofs are placed in the world for believers and unbelievers alike, so His prophetic proofs must extend to believers and unbelievers together.
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Fourth: just as we hold that one who commands evil to one who will not do it has been kind to him and is called unwise, so one who commands goodness to one who will not do it is still kind to him and is called wise.
Fifth: just as He made both equal in reason, capacity, and power, so He must make them equal in command and mission.
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I add: futility only occurs when something is done from which no one benefits. But God's mission to the unbelievers — even if they chose not to benefit from it — still taught and instructed the believers and all other people.
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People also ask: since a servant's being given over to death is one of God's acts — whether as punishment or trial — when a transgressor like Jezebel kills a prophet, how do we speak about that act, and to whom do we attribute it?
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We say: the removal from this world is God's act; the killing is the transgressor's act. If wisdom required removal, and this killer had not transgressed and killed him, he would have perished by some other means.
They also ask: how was David (peace upon him) punished for his sin by causing Absalom to do the same — indeed worse?
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I say: what Nathan reported to David divides into two parts. The first is God's act — namely, giving Absalom the upper hand, extending his reach, and delivering to him all that had been David's.
The second is Absalom's act by his own free choice — and to this refers the phrase: 'And he will lie with your wives before this sun' (2 Sam. 12:12).
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They ask about Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar — and all the killing, destruction, and various forms of wrongdoing they brought into the world — and yet God said about one of them that he was disobeying Him.
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We say: God's act (blessed and exalted) regarding these and others was the granting of power and support. But everything they and their armies did — they did by their own choice and merit recompense for it.
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They also ask: since all events occur by His command, if something forces a believer into having to tell a lie — did He force him into lying?
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There are two answers. The first: one who reflects carefully on how a person becomes forced to lie will find the cause in the person's own error in his management — and his blaming that on his Lord.
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The second: given the reason with which he is equipped, he will never truly be forced to lie — for if he says something that can be distinguished by linguistic metaphor from its literal truth, he is truthful.
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Such as when Abraham (peace upon him) said about Sarah 'She is my sister' — he meant by this the interpretation: my kinswoman, just as we find Lot called 'brother' by linguistic convention.
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Section 6. I shall now add to this discussion a collection of scriptural passages that contain apparent difficulties and doubts concerning the matter of compulsion — their abundance arising from the flexibility of the language.
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I decided to establish the categories of their resolution so they may accord with what reason holds — and once I enumerate how many categories there are and cite samples from each, the reader of scripture can group each type to its category.
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I say they are eight categories. The first of them is the category of prohibition — people confuse restraint by prohibition with restraint of the act itself, and there is a great difference between them.
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For example, God's word about Abimelech: 'I also kept you from sinning against Me' (Gen. 20:6). They think this means He restrained his act — but in fact He restrained him by prohibition, informing him she was a man's wife, and threatening him.