Does God Know?

Matthew goes to the basement to play video games only to become nauseous. His nausea turns into a severe migraine. Eventually, the migraine gives way to a life-changing brain bleed leaving him profoundly and permanently disabled without the ability to talk, walk, or see.

Robert is a private pilot for a notable Saudi sheik. He has a missionary heart and can’t help but think God has placed him in this position to be a witness for Jesus Christ. Six months into the job he takes a single engine plane into the air only to experience engine failure moments later and nosedives to his death.

Another Matthew travels from London to Atlanta to visit his girlfriend. One morning while in bed he awakens to gunfire outside her apartment. He begins to get out of bed and is struck in the head by a stray bullet fired from 800 feet away and dies the next day.

Did God know in eternity past that these men would face these events? Does God really know our future as a certainty? And did his foreknowledge predestine these things?

Lots of people, religious and otherwise, take it for granted that God knows the future as a certainty. They think the concept of divine foreknowledge exalts him and magnifies his ability to govern the universe. Yet these same people never stop to consider the ramifications of this foreknowledge.

Consider Adam and Eve. Before he creates them, he knows they’re going to fall and plunge the world into chaos but he creates them anyway. How can you argue he isn’t the author of his own infinite and indescribable unhappiness?

Consider the idea of freewill. I am the originator of my choices. There’s no force inside or outside of me that compels me to choose one thing over another. Yet if God knows all my future choices before I make them, then how can you argue I alone am the author of my life? How does foreknowledge not lead to predestination?

The notion that God knows the future as an absolute inevitability is a theory I abandoned a long time ago. It was the most liberating theological leap I’ve ever made. I was finished with trying to chain God’s sovereignty to everything that was happening in my life and in the world. I chose instead to admit the power of moral freedom.

If God doesn’t know my future absolutely, then what does his foreknowledge give him? God knows all the probabilities that could be a part of my future. For example, what I eat for breakfast one year from today isn’t foreknown by God because this future event doesn’t exist. However, he does have a good idea of what I would probably eat. He has watched all of my breakfast preferences for my entire life. Based on this knowledge God can rule out a wide range of foods that will not be a part of my future breakfast, and he can predict with some accuracy the range of meals I will likely eat.

My posts are never going to be a Bible study, but just this once there is a verse that can’t go unmentioned in a discussion of God’s foreknowledge. In Genesis 6:6 you’ll read this: The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled (NIV). How can God regret something when he knew all along it was going to happen just as he foresaw? Entertaining the idea to create the world knowing it would go rogue and regretting his decision at the same time is illogical and leads to the realm of the absurd.

The concept of absolute divine foreknowledge creates a being human reason can never comprehend and barely adore. It makes God unreachable by our minds. Inescapably, we become helpless to answer the charge of the unconverted that God is not loving, righteous, and just. It makes God the originator of his own misery, the cause of man’s ruin, and the reason for a hell. This distortion of his divine nature corrupts his character and we are left with an indefensible faith defending an inexcusable God. Can God really be loving and still foreordain a world that will lead to the eternal torment of billions of people?

If absolute divine foreknowledge is true, then what is the difference between a relationship with a personal God and a relationship with fatalism? Why carry on a conversation with the Son of God when He’s reading a script written from eternity past? Why pray about anything if all things are already predetermined? Why endeavor to evangelize the lost if they’ve been lost from all eternity?

Non-theological Christians, who are only interested in God for the therapeutic moralism they think he condones, sidestep the conflict between foreknowledge and predestination by claiming it’s a conundrum that can’t be rationalized. Philosophical non-Christians are equally muddled to explain how a God of love who predestines the saved and the lost based on his absolute foreknowledge deserves to be worshipped and obeyed. Neither side seems willing or prepared to throw this senseless concept out the window. We would rather content ourselves with contradictions that demolish God and devastate faith.