I recently had a conversation with somebody who was speaking about their Christian friend. In their own words:

When discussing life events, she is always searching for the reason things happened, making statements like, "this wasn't supposed to happen" and "this was meant to be." I don't see life that way. I try to learn from each experience I have,

This brings us to one of the most important theological intersections, free-will vs. God's will. People like this friend point to Scripture that has been misinterpreted for our times to say "God is always for us", "God wants us to prosper" which is true but not absolute.

How can that be? How can God always be for us and want us to grow but allow bad things to happen to us? It is the difference between the "active" and "passive" will of God.

The argument goes (and I agree with it at it's fundamentals), that the active will of God is His deliberate interactions with reality. Jesus would be an agent of the active will of God, one might include prophets as well. The passive will of God is what we might summarize as the Good News or the Christian meta-narrative of Creation-Fall-Redemption. You can rightly say that someone shooting another person dead is against the (passive) will of God or in your friends case, bad things happening to her are against the (passive) will of God.

The problem is where this interacts with human free agency. If any one person can do whatever they want to whoever they want (within all practical constraints) then bad things are going to happen, against the will of God. That's the price of free will.

What I do take great umbrage at is what I call Christian Fatalism. This is Christian non-thinking about God, where we assume He works a certain way because we wish it to be that way.

Christian fatalism is when somebody takes an event in their life and attributes supernatural guidance to it. They might not get a particular job and they will say "That's God closing the door", or if an opportunity comes their way they say "That's God opening the door".

This does not fit into the active/passive theology because it does not leave any room for free will, human error, or even evil, the active force of exclusion.

This is not to say that God isn't active in our lives but that we need to take the advice of John and "Test the Spirits". Test them against our experiences of God and His Word.

I'm going to leave it there. I think this will start a series on discernment. So comments and questions welcome.