You're listening to Amy Hall and Greg Kokel on Stand to Reasons hashtag STRASK podcast.

All right, Greg, are you ready to get started?

Yes, ma'am.

Here's a question from Cash Benson. Matthew 548 says that God's will is good and that he is perfect, but in Genesis 6-6,

it says that God regretted that he had made humans. Does this mean God made a mistake? And how could

God be perfect if you regret something that he did? I'm a strong Christian,

but I cannot find an answer to this. Well, the answer, it's a great question. It does come up with

some frequency in light of passages like this, but there is a good answer. Now, I'm pausing because

I realize, though there's a good answer, some people don't like the answer.

And what they end up doing is choosing an alternative that takes them completely off the reservation, okay, like Greg Boyd, for example, and other open theists.

So the Matthew passage says, I'm turning to it now, it says here,

therefore, and it isn't quite the way it was just characterized, therefore you are to be perfect

as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Okay?

What it's referring to there about God's perfection is probably his moral perfection,

because what the first chapter of the Servant and the Mount focuses in on is the demands of the law.

Once you get past the beatitudes,

then Jesus gets into clarifying what the law's demands actually are. And he says,

you have heard it said, but I say to you. Now, what's interesting is when Jesus says,

but I say, in other words, speaking as one

with authority himself, to clarify God's law, and there's an implicit divine claim there about

Jesus himself, he is clarifying the demand of the law over and against what humans have said it means. And so he takes on murder, for example.

...