foreknowledge – Good Question

Doesn’t the Bible teach election based on God’s foreknowledge?

Q. Doesn’t 1 Peter 1:2 teach that election is based on foreknowledge? Then why do people preach otherwise? Isn’t it very wrong to do so?

I believe that God’s sovereign choice in election and our morally accountable response to God are two sides of a mystery or paradox, and that we need to hold to both sides at once in order to be faithful to the full counsel of God in the Scriptures.

It’s true that there are statements in the Bible that seem to say that people are saved essentially because God has chosen them in election. For example, Luke describes in the book of Acts how Paul and Barnabas proclaimed the gospel in Pisidian Antioch, and he describes the response to their proclamation this way: “All who were appointed for eternal life believed.”

But other statements in the Bible make it appear that salvation depends on our response to God. When Jesus is speaking of the resurrection in the gospel of John, for example, he says, “Those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned.”

Some statements even seem to have no problem proclaiming divine sovereignty and human moral responsibility in the same breath. Peter says in his message on the day of Pentecost, “This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.”

So I don’t think it’s wrong to preach and teach that the principle of human moral responsibility complements the principle of divine sovereignty in a well-rounded understanding of the Bible.

As for the particular passage you asked about, it’s interesting to me that what Peter says we have been chosen for is not salvation, but sanctification. He writes to those “who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, to be obedient to Jesus Christ and sprinkled with his blood.” In the same way Paul says that “those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.” And I understand the foreknowledge here as relational knowledge (in a sense, God has been in a relationship with us since eternity past), not an advance knowledge of what choice a person will make. I don’t think that is predetermined. (See this post for a longer discussion of God’s foreknowledge in connection with a different question.)

So election based on foreknowledge is only part of the story, and it’s not wrong to bring out the other parts of the story.

A conversation about “Why did God create Satan?”

The following exchange with a reader of this post is shared with permission.

I read your post about “Why did God create Satan?” and I like your comparison to the question about whether God can create a rock so big He can’t move it. That part of the post is understandable. But I still don’t see why omniscience isn’t lessened by a lack of knowledge of the outcome of an event or a decision. And even if God truly didn’t know that His greatest angel would turn against Him, why wouldn’t he just squash Satan like a bug after he did rebel? He’s going to be punished in the end, so why let him cause so much trouble on the earth in the meantime?

The following illustration might help explain what I mean when I say that it’s not a failure of omniscience not to know what cannot be known.

Someone might say, “I know all of my division tables.” So another person tests them:

“What’s 35 divided by 7?”
“5.”
“Very good.”

“What’s 12 divided by 4?”
“3.”
“Very good.”

“What’s 6 divided by 0?”
“There’s no answer to that question, because division by 0 is impossible.”
“Then you don’t really know your division tables.”

Actually, the person does know their tables. It’s not a failure for them not to know what can’t be known.

Does that make sense?

Your example about division by zero seems just like the impossibly big rock scenario. I don’t see how these logical fallacies apply to the concept of omniscience. These situations could never happen anyway. They can only be thought up.

If you mean that God created us, including the angels, with the ability to think and make decisions without His knowledge, and now, because of this, it becomes one of the impossible things for anyone to do, I think I understand your point. I just think God would have this ability.

There is still one more point: Why doesn’t God destroy Satan now because of his incessant meddling? Why must God wait until the end of the ages?

You have understood what I was trying to say: I do believe that that God created intelligent beings, including humans and angels, with the ability to think and make decisions so freely that He wouldn’t know in advance what they were going to decide, and that, because of this, knowing these outcomes in advance becomes one of the things that are impossible for anyone to do. Of course someone might believe something else, but because I believe this, I don’t think God knowingly created a being, Satan, who would inevitably cause massive destruction and evil on a planet-wide scale.

As for why Satan hasn’t already been judged, like human individuals and civilizations that have done great evil, I honestly don’t know. I can’t really come up with a scenario where this is better for us than having Satan dealt with already. But from what I do know of the character of God, by faith I consider this mystery consistent with an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving God.

OK, I do get your point now. But I’ll have to work on the all-knowing, but creating “non-readable” creatures concept.

I’d have no problem with these exchanges being posted on the blog. Others may have the same questions, and I agree with what you do in your book studies: the brontosaurus-sized elephants in the room need to be acknowledged sooner rather than later.

Why did God create Satan?

Q. Did God really know that Satan would rebel? Why would such a monster be allowed to live? I just don’t think He would have let Satan near His other angels, or more importantly, near His earthly creation. I love my children, and if someone threatened them in any way I would do anything in my power to stop it. Satan went after Adam, and ever since then he’s been messing with people’s chances for salvation. God’s judgement was harsh on the enemies of the Israelites. Satan was and is much more wicked. Why hasn’t he been annihilated long ago? Is God really more powerful?

It’s difficult for us to reconcile the belief that God supremely loves his creatures with the thought that God created a monster that he knew would wreak horrible and eternal devastation among them.

So how do we explain the creation and continuing existence of Satan? Is God not all-knowing? (He didn’t realize Satan would rebel?) Or is God not all-powerful? (He thought he could stop Satan but then wasn’t able to?) Or is God simply not all-good? (He doesn’t care whether his creatures are destroyed?)

I think the solution to this problem lies in appreciating the radical nature of the freedom that God has endowed each of His intelligent creatures with. It’s hard for us to understand this because we are created and finite, but an eternal and infinite God can make creatures who are so free that their moral choices are not predetermined and so cannot be known in advance.

But isn’t God supposed to be omniscient and know everything, even the choices that we’re going to make? No, it is no failure in omniscience not to know what cannot be known. And the freedom God has given us is so radical and profound that the essential moral choices we will make cannot be known in advance.

Perhaps an illustration will help. The question of how God can be all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good at the same time, and still allow Satan to exist, is comparable to another question that has often been asked about God: If God is omnipotent, can God make a rock so big that he can’t move it?

The answer is “No.” Not because God isn’t omnipotent and therefore can’t either make the rock or move the rock. The answer is no because the contemplated action involves a logical contradiction and is therefore impossible, and it is no failure in omnipotence not to be able to do the impossible.

The logical contradiction is this: Any created thing is by definition finite, including the largest rock God could possibly make. A rock so big that God’s infinite power couldn’t move it would have to be of infinite mass instead. But nothing can be both finite (created) and infinite at the same time. This question is ultimately asking whether God can do the logically impossible (make something that’s “A” and “not-A” at the same time), and that’s something that by definition can’t be done. (I’m not talking about miracles here; God can do what is naturally impossible and beyond the scope of any earthly power.)

It’s a similar logical contradiction to ask whether God can know in advance what choice a truly free moral agent will make. Can God know what cannot be known? No, no one can.

The implications of this are that when God created the great angel Lucifer, who became Satan when he chose to disobey, God didn’t know for a fact in advance that Lucifer would fall. God’s intentions in creating Lucifer were not to turn a monster loose on his creation. Rather, God intended Lucifer to be an agent of good and blessing just like the archangels Michael and Gabriel, who throughout the Bible are recognized, in glimpses at least, as powerful agents of God’s salvation.

Imagine what good Lucifer could have done if he had used all of his splendor, intelligence, and might to serve God’s purposes in the creation! Imagine what any evil person could have done if they had used their powers in a positive way, and you’ll get a sense of what God had in mind when he created them.

Perhaps one question still remains: Why would God give his creatures freedom if the consequences of bad choices would be so devastating? Here’s the best way I’ve been able to understand this: God knows, in a way that we cannot know, that a world in which there is freedom, and thus the potential for both love and suffering, is infinitely better than a world that has no freedom, and thus neither love nor suffering, and God also knows that these are the only two possibilities.

Anything beyond this is mystery. But we don’t need to wonder about the goodness and power of God.

This post has generated a great deal of conversation. For an exchange with a reader about this post, see this follow-up.

For responses to the questions asked in the comment below about why a loving father would allow anything evil to tempt his daughter, see this post, and about whether God is so different in His dealings with us today as to be almost a different God from the one in the Bible, see this post.

For an answer to the question asked in another comment below about whether God knows in advance what choices the Antichrist will make, see this post.

This photograph of an angel sculpture from a church in Glasgow suggests the beauty, power, and potential for good that Lucifer had when he was originally created. (Photo by Norma Desmond)

Does God harden people’s hearts so they won’t be saved? (Part 2)

Q. Peter clearly states in his second letter that “God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” Several statements in the Bible that seem to be contrary to this don’t make sense to me. Two examples are Joshua 11:20, “The Lord hardened their hearts . . . that they might receive no mercy,” and John 12:40, “He has blinded their eyes and deadened their hearts so they can neither see with their eyes, nor understand with their hearts, nor turn, and I would heal them.” Wouldn’t God want to make it easier for all of us to get to Him? So why would God discourage some people from believing or make it harder for them than for others? Related to this is the way people or nations had their hearts hardened so that God could demonstrate his power. Pharaoh seemed ready to let the Israelites go, but instead God hardened his heart and the plagues came, including death to all the first born.

In my first post in response to this question I discussed the statement in the book of Joshua. Let me now consider the one you cite from the book of John. And next time I’ll look at the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart.

This statement is actually a quotation from Isaiah, as John notes. In Matthew and Mark the same quotation is used to explain Jesus’ method of speaking in parables. John uses it instead to comment on Jesus’ method of revealing who he was through “signs.” But in both cases it refers to a method that can either conceal or reveal, depending on the state of a person’s heart.

In Session 2 of my study guide to Isaiah I explain the background to this statement. Isaiah has just had a vision of God in the temple:

“God asks, ‘Who will go for us?’ and Isaiah eagerly volunteers. But the assignment turns out to be a perplexing one. The new prophet is to bring messages from God to the people of Judah. But they will so persistently ignore these messages that they will become less and less able to understand what God wants. As a result, the nation will ultimately be devastated by its enemies. Only a faint glimmer of hope will remain in the end.

“Even though it sounds here as if God wants the people to resist and be destroyed, this is quite unlikely. We’ll see in the rest of the book of Isaiah, as we also see throughout the Scriptures, that God really wants people to respond positively to his warnings and invitations and so be rescued. Rather, the language here reflects God’s knowledge of the people’s confidence in their own strategies and his realization that they will choose their own way even more stubbornly when they’re challenged. And so God tells Isaiah, ironically, to go and make the people even more insensible and resistant. Whatever their response, the reality of the situation needs to be proclaimed.”

In the study guide I then invite groups to consider questions such as these:
~ C.S. Lewis once wrote, “It is better for the creature itself, even if it never becomes good, that it should know itself a failure.” Do you agree?
~ How can we distinguish between those times when a hard truth needs to be spoken to another person, even if they’re unlikely to be able to hear it, and those times when it’s best to say nothing and wait for the person to become more open?

This was the problem that both Isaiah and Jesus faced: They needed to proclaim something vital about what God was doing in their day, but many of the people who heard them were so set against God that this proclamation would only harden their resistance. But it couldn’t be abandoned on that account. So even though God tells Isaiah to “make the heart of this people calloused . . . and close their eyes,” and John paraphrases this by saying that God himself has “blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts,” it’s the people’s stubborn resistance, intensified by encountering this proclamation, that’s actually responsible.

It’s kind of a no-win situation for God’s prophets and his Messiah: say nothing about the new thing God is doing in the world because most people don’t want to hear it, or proclaim it for the sake of those who might hear, even at the cost of hardening those who are resisting? A difficult problem, caused by people, for a God who is not willing that any should perish.