We claim that God knows all that can be known. Open Theists and Process Theists agree and suggest that, since future events have not yet occurred, God cannot know future events and, so, there is nothing for Him to know. That conclusion presupposes, even if inadvertently, that God can only know what materializes. They then argue that God can know what He can (is able to) bring into future-history and accomplish His eternally preordained will without exhaustively, meticulously, and strictly foreordaining and proactively bringing about every event that actually occurs. They state that God cannot be outwitted by some random free choice of an individual because God is infinitely wiser than any mortal and He knows how to intervene concurrently with human beings in order to bring about what He has strictly foreordained to occur. This, they admit, is how God can say to Abraham: "Do not stretch out your hand against the lad [his son], and do nothing to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me" (Gen. 22:12 NASB). Can God learn?
Why would God say "now I know"? Did He not already foreknow Abraham's free choice to sacrifice his son to the LORD? If so then why this language of time--"now that I have seen with My own eyes your willingness to sacrifice your son, now that I have experientially learned the truth regarding your faithfulness, I will at this juncture intervene"? Can we insist that God is omniscient (all-knowing) while also claiming that He can learn information of which He was previously unaware? An omniscient being cannot learn. Many claim that God speaks this way with mortals anthropomorphically--according to their cognitive ability to understand Him. God speaks as though He has ears and hands and arms though, in fact, He is spirit (John 4:24) and without body parts (Deut. 4:12). He speaks "in time" though He is eternal and timeless.
KNOWLEDGE / FOREKNOWLEDGE OF POTENTIAL
We know from Scripture that God possesses knowledge, even theoretical foreknowledge, of freely-willed choices and events that do not, even cannot, and will not actually materialize. So God possesses knowledge of possible events and does not possess knowledge strictly because events and persons and free choices are strictly, meticulously, and necessarily foreordained--though they are, and we cannot escape the Sovereignty of God, or His eternal knowledge, will, and purposes. The Westminster theologians state that God "knows whatsoever may or can come to pass upon all supposed conditions" and we affirm as much in Scripture. "Then He [Jesus] began to denounce the cities in which most of His miracles were done, because they did not repent. 'Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles had occurred in Tyre and Sidon which occurred in you, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes'" (Matt. 11:20-21 NASB). But there were no miracles performed, and no repentance to be found, in Tyre and Sidon and, yet, God possesses knowledge of free choices and events that did not occur. Instead of mercy, and grace, Tyre and Sidon received justice, just judgment, for no one ever receives injustice from God.
The late Dr. R.C. Sproul insists: "If in some sense God does not ordain everything that comes to pass then He is not really sovereign; and if He is not sovereign [then] He cannot be God. If we self-consciously reject the sovereignty of God [then] we are rejecting the very nature of God and are not entitled to the term theist."1 I agree. We are not, after all, deists. By virtue of God's own Essence / Nature we understand that our sovereign God is almighty over all. Dr. Sproul writes: "[God] knows all contingent things [that occur or exist only if certain circumstances are or will be present in order to bring about an occurrence]--things that we say could have happened"2 (emphasis added). Hence, we say, God does not possess knowledge simply and only because He has foreordained to bring about all that shall come to pass. Otherwise God could have no knowledge of possible freely-willed choices and events that were never to occur (like repentance in Tyre and Sidon).
Another possible interpretation, though, is that God is merely making a comparative statement: not that the people of Tyre and Sodom would have actually repented if miracles had occurred in their time, seeing that "the riches of His kindness and restraint and patience [that] leads ... to repentance" is first required (Rom. 2:5), but that, given the nature of wickedness of the people in Tyre and Sidon, the people in Chorazin and Bethsaida are even worse, because God performed miracles through His Servant, Messiah, for them and they treated those expressions of grace with nothing but contempt. Rather than being a commentary on God's knowledge, the statement rather refers to the radical depravity of the Jewish people in Israel, a demonstration of the corruptness of their hearts and the unfaithfulness of their wills toward their God.
Dr. Sproul also suggests that if God could have stopped us from freely-willing one choice over another, but chose not to, then "in a sense" God ordained whatever actually occurs.3 By qualifying these conclusions with the phrase "in some sense" he, and we all, leave room for varying notions as to how God foreordained whatsoever shall come to pass, His knowledge / foreknowledge of whatsoever shall come to pass, and His relationship with the creatures He created in His image in the performance of whatsoever shall come to pass. Dr. Sproul also suggests that, without "necessarily forcing you" to say words or to perform deeds, He nevertheless "ordained that we would" say words and perform deeds4 (emphasis added). Again, as long as we allow the caveat of the notion of God foreordaining such "in some sense," then we allow God His sovereignty and mortals their relative freedom, insisting that God is just, and mortals are accountable to God as Righteous Judge.
But we also must properly understand Free Will, for we do make choices, and those choices have real consequences. However, those choices are not made independent of our Sovereign God, nor of His own will for all of future-history. Moreover, since God is holy and just, then all that transpires in the earth does so via the sovereign will and plan and purposes of God and in every detail of the same. Our Free Will, then, is not absolute. We are subject to the only Absolute Sovereign in the universe. Furthermore, if in Him we each live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28 ESV), then every thought, word, and deed is done in Him, as He must be the primary cause of our being, and that includes our choices--choices that are truly made by us, not by Him, and even choices against His wishes / desires / His revealed will / standards.
"For truly in this city there were gathered together against Your holy servant Jesus, whom You anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel" (Acts 4:27 NASB)--and here we see the free choices of all involved in the Crucifixion of Jesus--"to do whatever Your hand and Your purpose predestined to occur" (Acts 4:28 NASB)--and here we see the Absolute Sovereign bringing about His foreordained plan to redeem sinners. Both the decisions and the actions of human beings are, not forcefully but freely, bringing about what God had predetermined to occur regarding His eternal will and purposes and salvific plan to redeem believers in Jesus Christ.
KNOWLEDGE / FOREKNOWLEDGE OF ACTUAL
We know that Jesus was delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God and that He was nailed to a Cross by the hands of godless men who freely and willingly put Him to death (Acts 2:23). Peter and John are warned by the authorities to stop preaching the Gospel. They recount the event to their companions and then lift up praises to God in response: For truly in this city there were gathered together against Your holy servant Jesus, whom You anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever Your hand and Your purpose predestined, determined beforehand, to occur (Acts 4:27, 28). We know that God willed to crush Christ, putting Him to grief (Isa. 53:10), and that Jesus suffered as much by His own proactive will (John 10:18; 12:27; 17:1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Heb. 10:5). The Trinitarian will in the Purpose and Plan of saving sinners is, like the Messiah Himself, from eternity past (Micah 5:2; Heb. 13:20, 21, 22).
God works all things after the counsel of His will (Eph. 1:11). Job said: "I know that You can do all things and that no purpose of Yours can be thwarted" (Job 42:2). Isaiah said: "For the LORD of hosts has planned and who can frustrate it? And as for His stretched-out hand, who can turn it back?" (Isa. 14:27). The Psalmist writes: "The plans of the LORD stand firm forever--the purposes of His heart through all generations" (Ps. 33:11). Joseph said to his brothers who betrayed him: "As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive" (Gen. 50:20). When King Abimelech takes Abraham's wife Sarah for himself, Abraham and Sarah both telling the King that she is only his sister, fearing that the King will have Abraham killed, taking Sarah for himself because of her beauty, the King responds to God, who appears to him in a frightening dream: "Did he [Abraham] not himself say to me, 'She is my sister'? And she herself said, 'He is my brother.' In the integrity of my heart and the innocence of my hands I have done this.' Then God said to him in the dream, 'Yes, I know that in the integrity of your heart you have done this, and I also kept you from sinning against Me; therefore I did not let you touch her'" (Gen. 20:5-6). God was working His will in man and, yet, the man was also freely acting.
But God does not always act thusly. God does not always intervene when a person sins. Did God control the mind of Abimelech? No. Abimelech had integrity, and innocence, and God even noted the integrity of the man. For this reason, says God, because the man was acting in integrity and innocence, God kept him from sinning. Would to God that He would restrain every act of sin and evil. But that is not reality.
HOW DOES GOD POSSESS KNOWLEDGE?
We cannot biblically deny God's sovereignty. We also, I think, cannot deny His exhaustive knowledge, of potential as well as actual events, and, of course, His exhaustive foreknowledge of all that shall occur. God commands His people: "Remember the former things long past, for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is no one like Me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things which have not [yet] been done, saying, 'My purpose will be established, and I will accomplish all My good pleasure'" (Isa. 46:9-10). How does God foreknow what a person shall freely think, say, and do? In answering this question we must confess that Scripture does not explicitly tell us how God exhaustively knows all that can be known but only that God exhaustively knows all that can be known. Given that God knows potential events, and potential freely-willed choices, we can safely conclude that His exhaustive knowledge / foreknowledge is not based solely on grounds of all that He foreordained to occur--for He knows within Himself potentialities that simply will never materialize.
For instance, when king David asks God if he should attack the Philistines who are attacking the city of Keilah, He said yes (1 Sam. 23:1, 2). David asks again and God says yes again (1 Sam. 23:4). David then hears that Saul wants to siege David at Keilah. So he asks God two questions: 1) will the men of Keilah deliver him into the hands of Saul; and 2) will Saul indeed come to the city looking for him (1 Sam. 23:9, 10, 11). God answers that Saul will come to the city looking for him; but He does not answer the first question (1 Sam. 23:11). So he asks again: "Will the men of Keilah surrender me and my men into the hand of Saul?" (1 Sam. 23:12). God answers yes (1 Sam. 23:12). So David and his men leave Keilah (1 Sam. 23:13), so as not to be captured, and God knew / foreknew what would happen but what did not happen.
Do some in the Reformed faith, who insist that God only knows / foreknows because He has foreordained everything (that God cannot know any circumstance apart from what He has foreordained to occur), deny omniscience to God? By suggesting that the only way for God to know / foreknow is to foreordain is, in the opinion of many, to rob God of His omniscience. The statement is true, I think, that God cannot learn any new information. No thought ever occurred to Him. All knowledge in God resides in His eternally-divine mind from all eternity past. Does this confession, then, demand that we insist the only way for God to know / foreknow any information is for God to have foreordained and meticulously conscripted--and then to personally bring about--each and every single future circumstance / happening (e.g., drug-addiction, prostitution and sex-trafficking, or that on this certain day a depraved monster will ravish a two-year-old little girl, and that this was God's eternal plan for her)? As a matter of fact, those in the Reformed faith (my faith) who insist as much are proven incorrect by Scripture, by Jesus informing us that God knew information about an event that never occurred in history--the repentance of Tyre and Sidon (Matt. 11:20, 21). If God did not strictly foreordain and bring about the repentance of Tyre and Sidon then God cannot know / foreknow any potential repentance of those peoples. To say that God knows the alleged repentance of Tyre and Sidon, which was never to occur, because He knew that if He had foreordained their repentance then they would have repented is, I must confess, a philosophical bridge too far for me.
However, we could understand Jesus' words in a non-literal sense, so that, by way of comparison, He is informing the people just how hard-hearted and wicked they have become. They are supposed to be God's covenant-elect people! Why, then, have they turned away from the God of Israel? Why, then, are they rejecting God's Messiah? So, in essence, He is saying to them: "You, belonging by covenant to My Father, are supposed to be welcoming Me by grace through faith. But you are actually denying Me. 'How much more severely do you think someone deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified them, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace?' (Heb. 10:29 NIV). If I had shown such wonders and grace to the wicked cities of Tyre and Sidon, even they, as wicked and evil as they are, they would have repented and welcomed Me, but not you. So this shows you just how far you have strayed from the LORD." I think this is a viable interpretation and there is, perhaps, no reason to take His words literally.
But we can also rightly conclude that God does not possess knowledge / foreknowledge based on peering into the future to see what we will freely choose / decide to think, say and do, and then foreordain that future, for God cannot learn any new information, because, we think, an eternally-omniscient being already retains all information, all knowledge, from His eternal perspective. I think that even Arminians are obliged to agree with us, for Jacob Arminius (1559-1609) himself insists that, in God's knowledge, He "distinctly understands all things and every thing which now have, will have, have had, can have, or might hypothetically have any kind of being."5 We must settle this matter of God's knowledge as of first importance: God cannot learn any new information. All knowledge is eternally present to Him as the Great I Am.
God's exhaustive knowledge / foreknowledge, in Arminius, includes the order of such beings (or events), the relation and the connection of one being (or event) with another, and even the reasoning faculties of such beings. He also knows all possibilities--all "necessary and contingent, good and bad, universal and particular, future, present and past, excellent and vile"6 notions and thoughts and actions within mortals. God knows all that is knowable "by His own essence" as God "and by this alone, with the exception of evil things, which He knows indirectly [not immediately] by the opposite good things ... [as] privation [the absence of a quality or an attribute that is normally or should be present] is discovered" through abundance. In other words, God's knowledge / foreknowledge of sin and evil is not a direct knowledge, as though God is the Instigator / Orchestrator / Author of evil and is immediately and directly bringing sin and evil to pass in and of Himself.
For instance, God says to His people, "You shall not give any of your offspring [children] to offer them to [the false idol] Molech" (Lev. 18:21 NET). When they sacrifice their children by fire to the false idols Ba'al and Molech, God responds, "Such sacrifices are something I never commanded them to make. They are something I never told them to do! Indeed, such a thing never even entered my mind" (Jer. 19:5 NET); "They built places of worship for the god Ba'al in the Valley of Ben Hinnom so that they could sacrifice their sons and daughters to the god Molech. Such a disgusting practice was not something I commanded them to do. It never even entered my mind to command them to do such a thing! So Judah is certainly liable for punishment" (Jer. 32:35 NET). So what is the relationship of God's knowledge / foreknowledge and this horrendous evil that would have never even entered His mind to decree or predeterminately foreordain for them to bring about of Himself?
KNOWLEDGE AND ESSENCE
God knows what is to happen not by peering into the future to learn, His knowledge is "not that which is successive,"7 but belongs to His own and sole Essence / Divine Nature / as that "by which God exists"8 (Acts 15:18; Eph. 1:4; Heb. 4:13). God knows exhaustively all things as He knows Himself--things "in their [primary or secondary] causes, in themselves, in [and from] His own Essence."9 His knowledge is "certain, and never can be deceived, so that He certainly and infallibly sees even future contingencies, whether He sees them in their causes or in themselves (1 Sam. 23:11, 12; Matt. 11:21). But, this certainty rests upon the Infinity of the Essence of God, by which in a manner the most present He understands all things." In other words, all knowledge, which is exhaustive, is present to / in God and has always been and will always be present to / in God, for God is the eternally-existing I Am (Ex. 3:14, 15; John 8:24, 28, 58). This knowledge of God "is derived from no external cause, not even from an object [such as a mortal],"10 because God is self-sufficient and cannot learn any new information: all information, understanding, and knowledge is present with this great and eternal I Am from all eternity past (without beginning).
By suggesting that this exhaustive knowledge belongs to God's Essence / Nature / Being is to insist that His exhaustive knowledge and His ability to know exhaustively eternally belongs to Him as the Great I Am in such a way that He cannot be called God if His knowledge is derived from any outside source other than His own eternal Self. Open Theism, therefore, is not an option because its philosophical premise undermines the eternal Essence / Nature / Being of God--God cannot be God if God does not possess from eternity all knowledge. If God can learn then God is not God as defined in classical Theism. This is why this doctrine matters. This is why we fiercely defend this truth of God's eternal knowledge and wisdom. This is also why we biblically must reject Open Theism. God can in no sense imaginable learn information.
KNOWLEDGE AND CAUSALITY
Again, Jacob Arminius states that, though the knowledge / foreknowledge / understanding of God is "certain and infallible, yet it does not impose any [predetermined and fore-decreed] necessity on things, [but] rather establishes in them a contingency."11 So, God's knowledge / foreknowledge does not directly cause (think mind-control) what we think, say, or do as deterministically necessary (that we are in any sense imaginable persuaded by God into doing something--most especially something that is evil (James 1:13)--against our freely-willed choice to the performance of any sinful and evil action), but rather establishes contingency in what we think or say or do--meaning that circumstances oftentimes out of our control may influence what we think, say, or do, and God knows / foreknows all of these contingent circumstances, but that He has weaved them all into His eternal Purposes and Will for the ages from all eternity. Yet He knows all such things from eternity due to His Essence, His Divine Nature, His Divine and Eternal Mind. All knowledge is present to Him as the eternal I Am. When God from eternity chose to create human beings--each human being in his or her own time (cf. Acts 17:26, 27, 28)--He knows eternally all that can be known about such creatures; and, in His eternal wisdom and justice, He foreordains what is to come to pass by all contingent and concurrent means.
However, I think Arminius says too much here, and forgets that God is sovereign even over wicked entities--man and devil (Prov. 16:4). God reserves the right to act in just judgment with the wicked--even to this effect: "For God has put it into their hearts to fulfill His purpose, to be of one mind, and to give their kingdom to the beast, until the words of God are fulfilled" (Rev. 17:17 NKJV). God is just / justice-driven / righteous and holy to use wicked people who are hostile to Him for His own purposes. The believer can rest assured that God would never cause him to sin or overwhelmingly tempt him to sin (James 2:13). But toward His enemies, those who hate Him, He may use them for His own divine ends. Moreover, allow this caveat to reign supreme over any discussion of Free Will, none of us are entirely free in the absolute sense of the word. We are not free from indwelling sin. We are not free from temptation of the world. We are not free from the schemes of any devil against us. When we say "Free Will," then, we merely mean to say that God has not forced us to sin and to commit wickedness.
I shy away from Arminius' appeal to contingency because in His eternal mind all of future-history is a settled fact. There are, from His eternal perspective, no strict contingencies. Contingencies belong to our finite perspective but not to His infinite knowledge and will. The Psalmist declares: "Your eyes saw me when I was inside the womb. All the days ordained for me were recorded in your Scroll before one of them came into existence" (Ps. 139:16 NET). This knowledge and foreordination of God is active in the strictest sense of the word because all of future-history is a settled fact in the mind of God. There is nothing contingent about His perfect knowledge or in His perfect and sovereign will. All the days ordained for me were recorded in His book from eternity past and before one of them would ever see the light of day.
What does this mean in our everyday lives with regard to God's eternal knowledge? This means that, in God's eternal mind, everyone who is given the breath of life is known exhaustively by God. He knows all that can be known about you because He created you (Gen. 1:26, 27; 2:7; 5:1, 2; 9:6; Deut. 4:32; Job 4:17; 10:8, 9, 10, 11, 12; 31:15; 33:4; 34:19; Ps. 8:3, 4, 5, 6; 89:47; 95:6; 100:3; 104:30; 119:73, 74; 138:8; 139:13-16; Eccl. 3:11; 12:7; Isa. 17:7; 42:5; 43:7; 44:24; 49:5; 64:8; Jer. 1:5; 27:5; Zech. 12:1; Mal. 2:10; Matt. 19:4; John 1:3; Acts 17:26, 27, 28; 1 Cor. 8:6; Gal. 1:15; Eph. 3:9; Col. 1:16; 3:10; Heb. 3:4; James 3:9; Rev. 4:11). He did not create a blob but a complex human being whose original design was to reflect the image of God (Gen. 1:26, 27). So He eternally knew everything there was to know about you because you came into existence by His own eternal will. God did not know you in the abstract. He knew all that could be known about you--not from learning from you, not from somehow "peering into the future to see what you would do" in any number of varying circumstances, but from His own eternal Essence / Nature / Being. "All souls are Mine," declares our Creator (Ezek. 18:4), and God has His own sovereign right over each one of us (Jer. 18:1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Rom. 9:21). If He designed you then He exhaustively knows His own design. All knowledge in God derives from and belongs to God.
God Himself confesses that, when His people sacrifice their children to false gods and idols, their doing such a horrifying act never entered His divine mind for them to do--and yet they did it (Jer. 19:5; 32:35)! Did He know / foreknow in Himself that they would commit the atrocity? Yes. Did He foreordain / permit them to commit such an atrocity? Yes. Could He have stopped them from committing the atrocity? Yes. That He eternally foreordained / permitted them to commit the atrocity indicates the absence of potential or uncertain contingency of the act in a strict sense--for in Him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28 ESV). He did not foresee their actions by peering into the future to learn what they shall do because an omniscient being cannot learn; yet all knowledge is present to God from all eternity due solely to His own eternal Essence / Nature / Being. Therefore whatever happens in our lives comes to us through the sovereign hand of God. We should be comforted and not fear. He will see His children through the worst circumstances imaginable--even if the result is our homegoing.
Is God the first and immediate cause of their heinous actions? Not in the strictest sense of influencing and necessarily forcing or coercing and fixing or rendering certain their own decisions and actions (James 1:13). However, God must concur with their freely-willed choice and actions if He permits and thus has foreordained for them to manifest the evil that they want to exact, and by "concur with" we mean "sustain their existence while they freely and willingly perform the heinous act." (No one can do anything apart from Him.) They do not decide to sacrifice their children, and actually perform the sacrifice, apart from God sovereignly allowing them to do so, and also sustaining their existence while they do so, even though He hates what they freely-willed to choose to do and so hates the actual performance of the evil. We can never deny the fact of reality that in Him we live and move (act-out) and have (maintain existence of) our being (Acts 17:28 NKJV).
Let us consider an unthinkable act of horror that occurred in our recent history and ask of God's relationship to the perpetrator and to the atrocious act itself. Former Sunday School teacher Melissa Huckaby is guilty of poisoning eight-year-old Sandra Canto and "sexually assaulting her with a foreign object" before killing her, and then forming a noose out of cloth and hanging her, and then "dumping her body in an irrigation pond." Melissa, who pleads guilty in order to avoid the death penalty, states to eight-year-old Sandra Canto's family: "I should not have taken her from you. I owe you an explanation. But I still cannot understand why I did what I did." Focus on "why I did what I did."
Regarding the sovereignty of God, and His will of all--every thought, word, and deed--that occurs in the earth, John Calvin states: "Therefore, whatever men or Satan himself devise, God holds the helm, and makes all their efforts contribute to the execution of His judgments."12 Note that the "efforts" belong to the individual but that God uses those efforts toward His own purposes. Wayne Grudem adds: "God influences the desires and decisions" of all people.13 I think he means the same as Calvin. All good influences come from God, and all evil desires come from within a person, not God (James 1:13). So God does not generally influence evil desires and sinful decisions of people. But God can use wicked people and acts to His own ends (Rev. 17:17 ESV). There is nothing scandalous about God using the wicked hearts and wicked intentions of wicked people for His own purposes. The wicked acts, as Calvin rightly says, still belong to wicked people with wicked intentions; but God is not universally influencing or implanting the wicked desires of wicked people. Melissa Huckaby "did what she did" by her own wicked motives, wicked intentions, stemming from her wicked heart (even if influenced by a demon). She cannot blame anyone but herself.
Again, Calvin writes, "God was the Author of that trial of which Satan and wicked robbers were merely the instruments." This he writes before what I quoted above: "Therefore, whatever men or Satan himself devise, God holds the helm, and makes all their efforts contribute to the execution of His judgments." Yet he admits: "It seems absurd that man should be blinded by the will and command of God and yet be forthwith punished for his blindness."14 He adds: "With regard to secret movements [that God moves secretly in the heart], what Solomon says of the heart of a king [Prov. 21:1], that it is turned hither and thither, as God sees meet [fit, right], certainly applies to the whole human race, and has the same force as if he had said that whatever we conceive in our minds is directed to its end by the secret inspiration of God."15 Some people do not read Calvin carefully. I know I did not. He says that whatever we conceive in our minds (and not whatever God gives birth to in our minds) is directed to its end (finds its ultimate fulfillment) by the secret inspiration of God. Is he suggesting God is the Author of Sin? No. Wicked thoughts come from us, says Jesus (Matt. 15:19), not from God. But what God does with our wicked thoughts and wicked intentions can be "directed to its end" by a sovereign God. That is His right as Creator, Sustainer, and Sovereign Ruler of all the earth.
THE WILL OF GOD
The free will of man will always be subservient to the will of God by virtue of the infinite power and wisdom and sovereignty of God. The will of King Abimelech of Gerar is to take Sarah for himself. The will of God is contrary and His sovereign will prevails. His will always prevails because His will cannot be thwarted. The exhaustive knowledge and eternal wisdom of God, which belongs to God by virtue of His Essence or Nature as God, is that by which He wills our future-history. His will is as eternal as is His knowledge. I think that divulging God of His exhaustive omniscience is to divulge Him of His own Divine and Eternal Essence. This is why I oppose Open Theism and Process Theism. That an infinite, self-sufficient and self-causal Eternal Being, who speaks life into existence from the power of His Word, can learn new information from His finite creation seems, to me at least, illogical at best, demonstrating an inherent deficiency in the Creator at worst.
This eternal knowledge / foreknowledge belongs to His Eternal Mind and is His not by a lesser virtue of meticulously and exhaustively foreordaining all that shall come to pass by means of His own predetermined causation but by the highest ontological perspective available to us as finite creatures--His own self-causal Essence. So that, to say that God can only know what He has foreordained to bring to pass, is to say that God cannot have knowledge in and of Himself of the creatures He wills to bring into reality--and to know all that can be known about these creatures who rely upon Him for their existence every moment of that existence (Acts 17:28). If He can only know that which He has from eternity predetermined to bring about then He cannot know contingencies and He cannot know possibilities of events that will not be brought about into our future-history. Jesus, again, has demonstrated the faulty logic of that premise (Matt. 11:20, 21, 22, 23, 24). With regard to contingencies, or His knowledge of what could have come to pass upon certain conditions, the Westminster Confession admits:
Moreover, the Westminster divines confess that God knows whatsoever may or can come to pass, but not because He foresaw what would happen and then, by that gained knowledge (which would mean that God can learn or attain knowledge from outside Himself), foreordained all that would come to pass. But neither did they say the reason how God can know what shall come to pass is only because He foreordained all that should come to pass--although the statement is rendered that God has foreordained all that would come to pass. Furthermore, we, I think, must agree that in some sense God has foreordained all that would come to pass, because, as stated above, God has the capacity to prevent any happening to manifest; because in Him we all live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28 ESV); so that, if we are to perform any action whatsoever then we do as much "in" Him, meaning that He is sustaining our very lives while we think and say and do what we think and say and do. We cannot leave God, our very Sustainer, out of the equation of all that comes to pass. If He has the capacity to thwart any plan of any individual then He has the final "say so" as to whether or not a person performs any action whatsoever.
We want to avoid suggesting that God planted a wicked thought in the mind of a person, irresistibly compelled the person toward a wicked act, and then effectually motivated the person to carry out the wickedness, such that the person had no other choice but to behave wickedly, not as an act of judgment but from a mere decree. But we also want to avoid rendering men and women a sovereignty that does not belong to them. God is the only Sovereign in the universe. We cannot suggest, in my view, that God is some passive bystander when a person commits a wicked act. God was in utter control during the performance of the wicked act. He could have stopped the heart of the individual and thus prevented him from carrying out the heinous evil. That He did not indicates that the action was in some sense foreordained. I think we must suggest that, due to God's creative act of each person, He knows exhaustively the nature and the disposition of the individual and knows exactly what each person is capable of, not by mere intuition, but by His own and sole Essence as God. He knows what a particular person would think and say and do in any given situation and, out of that exhaustive knowledge and seemingly endless possibilities, He has foreordained what we witness in human history. Theoretically we might say that, given our fallen context, this is the best world history we could hope for due to our fallen natures and desires to sin and to run from God and His righteousness. One day He will set all things right.
THE WILL OF GOD AND THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD
The will of God for all of future-history manifests in the knowledge / foreknowledge of God, is guided by the wisdom and the justice of God, which are properly framed in the holiness of God (1 Tim. 1:17). When we say God is holy (Ex. 15:11; Lev. 19:2; 22:32; Isa. 6:3; Rev. 4:8) we mean that He is other than us and set apart from us, exaltedly sacred, otherly-higher than us (Isa. 55:9) in His absolute purity of soul and mind, to the degree that committing an act of sin never occurred to Him (Jer. 19:5; 32:35)--that such a concept of sinning is as foreign to Him as being an eternally self-causal entity is foreign to us. God's holiness--otherness--is obvious from His own and sole infinity and eternality, His divine intellect and exhaustive knowledge / foreknowledge, His wisdom and justice. Job records this truth about God: In the totality of all His own triune Godness are wisdom and might (cf. Ps. 147:5); to Him belong counsel and exhaustive understanding (Job 12:13 my translation).
The infinite Creator, with all knowledge / foreknowledge innately within His eternal mind, speaks matter--angels (Heb. 1:7) and other beings (Rev. 4:6, 7, 8; 5:8), all matter in the universe and on earth (Gen. 1:6-25)--into being from the power of His Word (Gen. 1:1, 2, 3; John 1:1, 2, 3, 4; Rom. 4:17; Col. 1:15, 16, 17; Heb. 1:1, 2, 3); and He created each of us human beings (Gen. 1:26, 27). God "founded the earth" in His wisdom and "established the heavens" by His understanding (Prov. 3:19). "I, wisdom," as the wisdom of God is personified, "dwell with good, right, and proper judgment: I am found in knowledge and discretion," Heb. mezimmah, purpose or power of planning by careful, wise, skillful thought (Prov. 8:12). Therefore the exhaustive knowledge / foreknowledge of God carefully plans our future-history with meticulous scrutiny in wisdom, which is "the architect and counselor of God in the creation," which is the close companion of a good, right and proper judgment, working concurrently with knowledge and careful planning. God's sovereign plan for our future-history includes our freely-wrought evil because that freely-wrought evil is part of His exhaustive knowledge / foreknowledge. He chooses to include our freely-willed decisions, with their consequences, and weaves together His plan of salvation / redemption (1 Cor. 1:21; Eph. 1:4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11) from all eternity.
THE WILL OF GOD AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
When we say, "But our God is in the heavens; He does whatever He pleases" (Ps. 115:3), we do not mean to suggest that God deterministically brings about and forces evil but is still considered holy. He allows evil entities to freely commit evil within the domain of His sovereignty and Plan for the ages. When we say, "Whatever the LORD pleases, He does, in heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps" (Ps. 135:6), we do not suggest that He is pleased with sin and evil, and that is why He foreordained such in our reality. He despises sin and evil (Prov. 8:13), Jesus came to destroy the works of evil (1 John 3:8), and all evil will one day be eradicated (Rev. 21:8). The problem of sin and evil is our problem, not God's problem, since He does not want us to sin, He commands us not to sin, and He will have all sin judged--either with Jesus on the Cross of Calvary for believers or in eternal Hell for unbelievers (John 3:36). If so then why does God allow / foreordain evil?
The only way for God to disallow sin and evil in the history of our world is to construct a world in which Satan is banned (Satan would have never sinned against God, and become a deranged demon, being kept by God from doing so), though Satan is obviously not banned from earth (Gen. 3:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; Job 1:6, 7), and he and his ilk come to tempt, to steal, and to utterly destroy humanity (John 10:10). With Satan and his followers banned from earth, God must also somehow secure the state of Adam and Eve, so that they will by some measure of certainty remain faithful and obedient to Him. How God can accomplish this and still grant to them their relative freedom is problematic. Because God does not even prevent the angels He created from rebelling against Him (Gen. 6:1-22; Isa. 14:12, 13, 14; Ezek. 28:1-26; Matt. 13:39; 25:41; Luke 10:18; 2 Cor. 4:4; Eph. 6:10-18; 1 Tim. 4:1; 1 Pet. 5:8; 2 Pet. 2:4; Jude 1:6, 7, 9; Rev. 12:1, 2, 3, 4, 7-9). If God allows free will among the angels, and they, existing in God's presence for however long they do before betraying Him, seeing their Creator constantly, and still they rebel against Him, in His very presence, then what hope have human beings, created a little lower than the angels (Ps. 8:5), in remaining faithful in His presence in the Garden of Eden with their relative free will coupled with the deceptive tactics of Satan?
Atheists, skeptics, and others suggest that, if God is the ultimate Good in the known universe, then He will prevent all evil--moral and natural. We argue otherwise--that God allowing freely-willed evil is good, even if the acts themselves are heinous, and that God allowing His creatures the freedom of their own will to commit good for others or to commit evil is itself good and just. Should we hold God accountable for not intervening in freely-willed decisions to enact evil? Dr. Bruce A. Little, in his book, A Creation-Order Theodicy, argues the matter,
If God were to intervene in every single case of natural conditions then reality itself would be in jeopardy. First, God may actually intervene at times, and we do not know about it. The possibility, at the very least, remains. Second, I do not name this category a "natural evil," but a "natural condition," because nature possesses no evil intention to harm us. Third, atmospheric conditions cause hurricanes and tornadoes, and they typically occur within areas in which conditions are ripe for turmoil of nature. To think that God is bringing judgment to people via storms is akin to pagan theology (see Luke 13:1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Is God not angry with sinners who live in areas in which such weather events do not typically occur? We can say the same regarding earthquakes. We can say the same with any condition of nature that poses a threat to the well-being of people. I do not view God as a weather-god who is meting out wrath and judgment through the agency of weather. He can (He is certainly capable by His own power), and He even may (on occasion), but normally does not do so. This is our reality for now.
Tornadoes develop "when wind variations with height support rotation in the updraft." That God allows and / or meticulously governs the earth and the universe to operate as they do, and as they do by His meticulous sovereignty, is not a statement or a judgment on His goodness, His justice, or His love. Two of the "safest" places to live in the United States weather-wise include Columbia, Maryland and Nashua, New Hampshire. Does this indicate that God loves and cares about these people more so than the rest of us? No. Is God expressing His goodness and His justice to these people more so than the rest of us? No. Are these people more holy? No. Are there less sinners who live here? No.
We need to think more carefully, more biblically, about moral and natural evil with regard to human victims and God's relationship to our freely-willed evil and nature-events on earth. God is sovereign over every single element of nature, of the earth, of weather and of the entire universe. Do not misunderstand what I am communicating about Free Will and about Nature. God is in control. Not one molecule escapes His Notice, His Power, His will. Yet He operates within the laws of this fallen creation order, He is sovereign over the same, and whatever happens does so through His sovereign hand, His purpose, His will. I think what most people want is Heaven on Earth. That is not our fallen reality at this time. If you want Heaven on Earth then trust in Jesus Christ today and eagerly wait for His soon return! Today may be the day!
CONCLUSION
The will of God--the ultimate will that governs all of history in its minutiæ--is constructed in eternity according to the exhaustive knowledge / foreknowledge of God, which belongs to Him by virtue of His eternal being, is governed by His wisdom and justice (Rom. 11:33), contextualized by His holiness, and unfolds in real time according to His sovereignty commensurate with the relatively free choices of the creatures He created in His image. This meticulous and sovereign will of God includes all of His creation (Col. 1:16, 17), angels and all heavenly beings and all fallen angels (2 Pet. 2:4; Jude 1:6, 7, 9), the universe and the earth (Rev. 21:5), all creatures He created upon the earth (Matt. 25:31-46), from the Fall of angels to the Fall of Man to Redemption and Consummation. Not one molecule escapes the will of God.
God the Father has covenanted with God the Son to redeem all who believe in Him by the Gospel (Rom. 1:16, 17) in the convicting power of God the Holy Spirit (John 16:8-11; Titus 3:5). All judgment is given to God the Son (John 5:22) and God the Father will sum up all of reality in Christ (Eph. 1:10), when He reveals that Jesus is YHWH (Ex. 3:14, 15; John 17:6, 11; Phil. 2:9), to whom "every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth," and to whom "every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is LORD, to the glory of God the Father" (Phil. 2:10, 11). All the redeemed, all the unredeemed justly judged (for they could have been saved if they would have believed), all redounds to the glory of God, by and through the glory of Jesus Christ, in the glory of the Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen.
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1 R.C. Sproul, Truths We Confess: A Systematic Exposition of the Westminster Confession of Faith (Sanford: Ligonier Ministries, 2019), 70.
2 Ibid., 71.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Jacob Arminius, "On the Nature of God," in The Works of James Arminius, The London Edition, trans. James Nichols (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1996), 2.120.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., 2.121.
8 Ibid., 2.121, 2.114.
9 Ibid., 2.121.
10 Ibid., 2.122.
11 Ibid., 2.123.
12 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., 2008), 1.18.1.
13 Wayne A. Grudem, Bible Doctrine: Essential Teachings of the Christian Faith, ed. Jeff Purswell (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1999), 143.
14 Calvin. 1.18.1.
15 Ibid.
16 Bruce A. Little, A Creation-Order Theodicy: God and Gratuitous Evil (Lanham: University Press of America, Inc., 2005), 163-64.
Why would God say "now I know"? Did He not already foreknow Abraham's free choice to sacrifice his son to the LORD? If so then why this language of time--"now that I have seen with My own eyes your willingness to sacrifice your son, now that I have experientially learned the truth regarding your faithfulness, I will at this juncture intervene"? Can we insist that God is omniscient (all-knowing) while also claiming that He can learn information of which He was previously unaware? An omniscient being cannot learn. Many claim that God speaks this way with mortals anthropomorphically--according to their cognitive ability to understand Him. God speaks as though He has ears and hands and arms though, in fact, He is spirit (John 4:24) and without body parts (Deut. 4:12). He speaks "in time" though He is eternal and timeless.
KNOWLEDGE / FOREKNOWLEDGE OF POTENTIAL
We know from Scripture that God possesses knowledge, even theoretical foreknowledge, of freely-willed choices and events that do not, even cannot, and will not actually materialize. So God possesses knowledge of possible events and does not possess knowledge strictly because events and persons and free choices are strictly, meticulously, and necessarily foreordained--though they are, and we cannot escape the Sovereignty of God, or His eternal knowledge, will, and purposes. The Westminster theologians state that God "knows whatsoever may or can come to pass upon all supposed conditions" and we affirm as much in Scripture. "Then He [Jesus] began to denounce the cities in which most of His miracles were done, because they did not repent. 'Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles had occurred in Tyre and Sidon which occurred in you, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes'" (Matt. 11:20-21 NASB). But there were no miracles performed, and no repentance to be found, in Tyre and Sidon and, yet, God possesses knowledge of free choices and events that did not occur. Instead of mercy, and grace, Tyre and Sidon received justice, just judgment, for no one ever receives injustice from God.
The late Dr. R.C. Sproul insists: "If in some sense God does not ordain everything that comes to pass then He is not really sovereign; and if He is not sovereign [then] He cannot be God. If we self-consciously reject the sovereignty of God [then] we are rejecting the very nature of God and are not entitled to the term theist."1 I agree. We are not, after all, deists. By virtue of God's own Essence / Nature we understand that our sovereign God is almighty over all. Dr. Sproul writes: "[God] knows all contingent things [that occur or exist only if certain circumstances are or will be present in order to bring about an occurrence]--things that we say could have happened"2 (emphasis added). Hence, we say, God does not possess knowledge simply and only because He has foreordained to bring about all that shall come to pass. Otherwise God could have no knowledge of possible freely-willed choices and events that were never to occur (like repentance in Tyre and Sidon).
Another possible interpretation, though, is that God is merely making a comparative statement: not that the people of Tyre and Sodom would have actually repented if miracles had occurred in their time, seeing that "the riches of His kindness and restraint and patience [that] leads ... to repentance" is first required (Rom. 2:5), but that, given the nature of wickedness of the people in Tyre and Sidon, the people in Chorazin and Bethsaida are even worse, because God performed miracles through His Servant, Messiah, for them and they treated those expressions of grace with nothing but contempt. Rather than being a commentary on God's knowledge, the statement rather refers to the radical depravity of the Jewish people in Israel, a demonstration of the corruptness of their hearts and the unfaithfulness of their wills toward their God.
Dr. Sproul also suggests that if God could have stopped us from freely-willing one choice over another, but chose not to, then "in a sense" God ordained whatever actually occurs.3 By qualifying these conclusions with the phrase "in some sense" he, and we all, leave room for varying notions as to how God foreordained whatsoever shall come to pass, His knowledge / foreknowledge of whatsoever shall come to pass, and His relationship with the creatures He created in His image in the performance of whatsoever shall come to pass. Dr. Sproul also suggests that, without "necessarily forcing you" to say words or to perform deeds, He nevertheless "ordained that we would" say words and perform deeds4 (emphasis added). Again, as long as we allow the caveat of the notion of God foreordaining such "in some sense," then we allow God His sovereignty and mortals their relative freedom, insisting that God is just, and mortals are accountable to God as Righteous Judge.
But we also must properly understand Free Will, for we do make choices, and those choices have real consequences. However, those choices are not made independent of our Sovereign God, nor of His own will for all of future-history. Moreover, since God is holy and just, then all that transpires in the earth does so via the sovereign will and plan and purposes of God and in every detail of the same. Our Free Will, then, is not absolute. We are subject to the only Absolute Sovereign in the universe. Furthermore, if in Him we each live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28 ESV), then every thought, word, and deed is done in Him, as He must be the primary cause of our being, and that includes our choices--choices that are truly made by us, not by Him, and even choices against His wishes / desires / His revealed will / standards.
"For truly in this city there were gathered together against Your holy servant Jesus, whom You anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel" (Acts 4:27 NASB)--and here we see the free choices of all involved in the Crucifixion of Jesus--"to do whatever Your hand and Your purpose predestined to occur" (Acts 4:28 NASB)--and here we see the Absolute Sovereign bringing about His foreordained plan to redeem sinners. Both the decisions and the actions of human beings are, not forcefully but freely, bringing about what God had predetermined to occur regarding His eternal will and purposes and salvific plan to redeem believers in Jesus Christ.
KNOWLEDGE / FOREKNOWLEDGE OF ACTUAL
We know that Jesus was delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God and that He was nailed to a Cross by the hands of godless men who freely and willingly put Him to death (Acts 2:23). Peter and John are warned by the authorities to stop preaching the Gospel. They recount the event to their companions and then lift up praises to God in response: For truly in this city there were gathered together against Your holy servant Jesus, whom You anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever Your hand and Your purpose predestined, determined beforehand, to occur (Acts 4:27, 28). We know that God willed to crush Christ, putting Him to grief (Isa. 53:10), and that Jesus suffered as much by His own proactive will (John 10:18; 12:27; 17:1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Heb. 10:5). The Trinitarian will in the Purpose and Plan of saving sinners is, like the Messiah Himself, from eternity past (Micah 5:2; Heb. 13:20, 21, 22).
God works all things after the counsel of His will (Eph. 1:11). Job said: "I know that You can do all things and that no purpose of Yours can be thwarted" (Job 42:2). Isaiah said: "For the LORD of hosts has planned and who can frustrate it? And as for His stretched-out hand, who can turn it back?" (Isa. 14:27). The Psalmist writes: "The plans of the LORD stand firm forever--the purposes of His heart through all generations" (Ps. 33:11). Joseph said to his brothers who betrayed him: "As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive" (Gen. 50:20). When King Abimelech takes Abraham's wife Sarah for himself, Abraham and Sarah both telling the King that she is only his sister, fearing that the King will have Abraham killed, taking Sarah for himself because of her beauty, the King responds to God, who appears to him in a frightening dream: "Did he [Abraham] not himself say to me, 'She is my sister'? And she herself said, 'He is my brother.' In the integrity of my heart and the innocence of my hands I have done this.' Then God said to him in the dream, 'Yes, I know that in the integrity of your heart you have done this, and I also kept you from sinning against Me; therefore I did not let you touch her'" (Gen. 20:5-6). God was working His will in man and, yet, the man was also freely acting.
But God does not always act thusly. God does not always intervene when a person sins. Did God control the mind of Abimelech? No. Abimelech had integrity, and innocence, and God even noted the integrity of the man. For this reason, says God, because the man was acting in integrity and innocence, God kept him from sinning. Would to God that He would restrain every act of sin and evil. But that is not reality.
HOW DOES GOD POSSESS KNOWLEDGE?
We cannot biblically deny God's sovereignty. We also, I think, cannot deny His exhaustive knowledge, of potential as well as actual events, and, of course, His exhaustive foreknowledge of all that shall occur. God commands His people: "Remember the former things long past, for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is no one like Me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things which have not [yet] been done, saying, 'My purpose will be established, and I will accomplish all My good pleasure'" (Isa. 46:9-10). How does God foreknow what a person shall freely think, say, and do? In answering this question we must confess that Scripture does not explicitly tell us how God exhaustively knows all that can be known but only that God exhaustively knows all that can be known. Given that God knows potential events, and potential freely-willed choices, we can safely conclude that His exhaustive knowledge / foreknowledge is not based solely on grounds of all that He foreordained to occur--for He knows within Himself potentialities that simply will never materialize.
For instance, when king David asks God if he should attack the Philistines who are attacking the city of Keilah, He said yes (1 Sam. 23:1, 2). David asks again and God says yes again (1 Sam. 23:4). David then hears that Saul wants to siege David at Keilah. So he asks God two questions: 1) will the men of Keilah deliver him into the hands of Saul; and 2) will Saul indeed come to the city looking for him (1 Sam. 23:9, 10, 11). God answers that Saul will come to the city looking for him; but He does not answer the first question (1 Sam. 23:11). So he asks again: "Will the men of Keilah surrender me and my men into the hand of Saul?" (1 Sam. 23:12). God answers yes (1 Sam. 23:12). So David and his men leave Keilah (1 Sam. 23:13), so as not to be captured, and God knew / foreknew what would happen but what did not happen.
Do some in the Reformed faith, who insist that God only knows / foreknows because He has foreordained everything (that God cannot know any circumstance apart from what He has foreordained to occur), deny omniscience to God? By suggesting that the only way for God to know / foreknow is to foreordain is, in the opinion of many, to rob God of His omniscience. The statement is true, I think, that God cannot learn any new information. No thought ever occurred to Him. All knowledge in God resides in His eternally-divine mind from all eternity past. Does this confession, then, demand that we insist the only way for God to know / foreknow any information is for God to have foreordained and meticulously conscripted--and then to personally bring about--each and every single future circumstance / happening (e.g., drug-addiction, prostitution and sex-trafficking, or that on this certain day a depraved monster will ravish a two-year-old little girl, and that this was God's eternal plan for her)? As a matter of fact, those in the Reformed faith (my faith) who insist as much are proven incorrect by Scripture, by Jesus informing us that God knew information about an event that never occurred in history--the repentance of Tyre and Sidon (Matt. 11:20, 21). If God did not strictly foreordain and bring about the repentance of Tyre and Sidon then God cannot know / foreknow any potential repentance of those peoples. To say that God knows the alleged repentance of Tyre and Sidon, which was never to occur, because He knew that if He had foreordained their repentance then they would have repented is, I must confess, a philosophical bridge too far for me.
However, we could understand Jesus' words in a non-literal sense, so that, by way of comparison, He is informing the people just how hard-hearted and wicked they have become. They are supposed to be God's covenant-elect people! Why, then, have they turned away from the God of Israel? Why, then, are they rejecting God's Messiah? So, in essence, He is saying to them: "You, belonging by covenant to My Father, are supposed to be welcoming Me by grace through faith. But you are actually denying Me. 'How much more severely do you think someone deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified them, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace?' (Heb. 10:29 NIV). If I had shown such wonders and grace to the wicked cities of Tyre and Sidon, even they, as wicked and evil as they are, they would have repented and welcomed Me, but not you. So this shows you just how far you have strayed from the LORD." I think this is a viable interpretation and there is, perhaps, no reason to take His words literally.
But we can also rightly conclude that God does not possess knowledge / foreknowledge based on peering into the future to see what we will freely choose / decide to think, say and do, and then foreordain that future, for God cannot learn any new information, because, we think, an eternally-omniscient being already retains all information, all knowledge, from His eternal perspective. I think that even Arminians are obliged to agree with us, for Jacob Arminius (1559-1609) himself insists that, in God's knowledge, He "distinctly understands all things and every thing which now have, will have, have had, can have, or might hypothetically have any kind of being."5 We must settle this matter of God's knowledge as of first importance: God cannot learn any new information. All knowledge is eternally present to Him as the Great I Am.
God's exhaustive knowledge / foreknowledge, in Arminius, includes the order of such beings (or events), the relation and the connection of one being (or event) with another, and even the reasoning faculties of such beings. He also knows all possibilities--all "necessary and contingent, good and bad, universal and particular, future, present and past, excellent and vile"6 notions and thoughts and actions within mortals. God knows all that is knowable "by His own essence" as God "and by this alone, with the exception of evil things, which He knows indirectly [not immediately] by the opposite good things ... [as] privation [the absence of a quality or an attribute that is normally or should be present] is discovered" through abundance. In other words, God's knowledge / foreknowledge of sin and evil is not a direct knowledge, as though God is the Instigator / Orchestrator / Author of evil and is immediately and directly bringing sin and evil to pass in and of Himself.
For instance, God says to His people, "You shall not give any of your offspring [children] to offer them to [the false idol] Molech" (Lev. 18:21 NET). When they sacrifice their children by fire to the false idols Ba'al and Molech, God responds, "Such sacrifices are something I never commanded them to make. They are something I never told them to do! Indeed, such a thing never even entered my mind" (Jer. 19:5 NET); "They built places of worship for the god Ba'al in the Valley of Ben Hinnom so that they could sacrifice their sons and daughters to the god Molech. Such a disgusting practice was not something I commanded them to do. It never even entered my mind to command them to do such a thing! So Judah is certainly liable for punishment" (Jer. 32:35 NET). So what is the relationship of God's knowledge / foreknowledge and this horrendous evil that would have never even entered His mind to decree or predeterminately foreordain for them to bring about of Himself?
KNOWLEDGE AND ESSENCE
God knows what is to happen not by peering into the future to learn, His knowledge is "not that which is successive,"7 but belongs to His own and sole Essence / Divine Nature / as that "by which God exists"8 (Acts 15:18; Eph. 1:4; Heb. 4:13). God knows exhaustively all things as He knows Himself--things "in their [primary or secondary] causes, in themselves, in [and from] His own Essence."9 His knowledge is "certain, and never can be deceived, so that He certainly and infallibly sees even future contingencies, whether He sees them in their causes or in themselves (1 Sam. 23:11, 12; Matt. 11:21). But, this certainty rests upon the Infinity of the Essence of God, by which in a manner the most present He understands all things." In other words, all knowledge, which is exhaustive, is present to / in God and has always been and will always be present to / in God, for God is the eternally-existing I Am (Ex. 3:14, 15; John 8:24, 28, 58). This knowledge of God "is derived from no external cause, not even from an object [such as a mortal],"10 because God is self-sufficient and cannot learn any new information: all information, understanding, and knowledge is present with this great and eternal I Am from all eternity past (without beginning).
By suggesting that this exhaustive knowledge belongs to God's Essence / Nature / Being is to insist that His exhaustive knowledge and His ability to know exhaustively eternally belongs to Him as the Great I Am in such a way that He cannot be called God if His knowledge is derived from any outside source other than His own eternal Self. Open Theism, therefore, is not an option because its philosophical premise undermines the eternal Essence / Nature / Being of God--God cannot be God if God does not possess from eternity all knowledge. If God can learn then God is not God as defined in classical Theism. This is why this doctrine matters. This is why we fiercely defend this truth of God's eternal knowledge and wisdom. This is also why we biblically must reject Open Theism. God can in no sense imaginable learn information.
KNOWLEDGE AND CAUSALITY
Again, Jacob Arminius states that, though the knowledge / foreknowledge / understanding of God is "certain and infallible, yet it does not impose any [predetermined and fore-decreed] necessity on things, [but] rather establishes in them a contingency."11 So, God's knowledge / foreknowledge does not directly cause (think mind-control) what we think, say, or do as deterministically necessary (that we are in any sense imaginable persuaded by God into doing something--most especially something that is evil (James 1:13)--against our freely-willed choice to the performance of any sinful and evil action), but rather establishes contingency in what we think or say or do--meaning that circumstances oftentimes out of our control may influence what we think, say, or do, and God knows / foreknows all of these contingent circumstances, but that He has weaved them all into His eternal Purposes and Will for the ages from all eternity. Yet He knows all such things from eternity due to His Essence, His Divine Nature, His Divine and Eternal Mind. All knowledge is present to Him as the eternal I Am. When God from eternity chose to create human beings--each human being in his or her own time (cf. Acts 17:26, 27, 28)--He knows eternally all that can be known about such creatures; and, in His eternal wisdom and justice, He foreordains what is to come to pass by all contingent and concurrent means.
However, I think Arminius says too much here, and forgets that God is sovereign even over wicked entities--man and devil (Prov. 16:4). God reserves the right to act in just judgment with the wicked--even to this effect: "For God has put it into their hearts to fulfill His purpose, to be of one mind, and to give their kingdom to the beast, until the words of God are fulfilled" (Rev. 17:17 NKJV). God is just / justice-driven / righteous and holy to use wicked people who are hostile to Him for His own purposes. The believer can rest assured that God would never cause him to sin or overwhelmingly tempt him to sin (James 2:13). But toward His enemies, those who hate Him, He may use them for His own divine ends. Moreover, allow this caveat to reign supreme over any discussion of Free Will, none of us are entirely free in the absolute sense of the word. We are not free from indwelling sin. We are not free from temptation of the world. We are not free from the schemes of any devil against us. When we say "Free Will," then, we merely mean to say that God has not forced us to sin and to commit wickedness.
I shy away from Arminius' appeal to contingency because in His eternal mind all of future-history is a settled fact. There are, from His eternal perspective, no strict contingencies. Contingencies belong to our finite perspective but not to His infinite knowledge and will. The Psalmist declares: "Your eyes saw me when I was inside the womb. All the days ordained for me were recorded in your Scroll before one of them came into existence" (Ps. 139:16 NET). This knowledge and foreordination of God is active in the strictest sense of the word because all of future-history is a settled fact in the mind of God. There is nothing contingent about His perfect knowledge or in His perfect and sovereign will. All the days ordained for me were recorded in His book from eternity past and before one of them would ever see the light of day.
What does this mean in our everyday lives with regard to God's eternal knowledge? This means that, in God's eternal mind, everyone who is given the breath of life is known exhaustively by God. He knows all that can be known about you because He created you (Gen. 1:26, 27; 2:7; 5:1, 2; 9:6; Deut. 4:32; Job 4:17; 10:8, 9, 10, 11, 12; 31:15; 33:4; 34:19; Ps. 8:3, 4, 5, 6; 89:47; 95:6; 100:3; 104:30; 119:73, 74; 138:8; 139:13-16; Eccl. 3:11; 12:7; Isa. 17:7; 42:5; 43:7; 44:24; 49:5; 64:8; Jer. 1:5; 27:5; Zech. 12:1; Mal. 2:10; Matt. 19:4; John 1:3; Acts 17:26, 27, 28; 1 Cor. 8:6; Gal. 1:15; Eph. 3:9; Col. 1:16; 3:10; Heb. 3:4; James 3:9; Rev. 4:11). He did not create a blob but a complex human being whose original design was to reflect the image of God (Gen. 1:26, 27). So He eternally knew everything there was to know about you because you came into existence by His own eternal will. God did not know you in the abstract. He knew all that could be known about you--not from learning from you, not from somehow "peering into the future to see what you would do" in any number of varying circumstances, but from His own eternal Essence / Nature / Being. "All souls are Mine," declares our Creator (Ezek. 18:4), and God has His own sovereign right over each one of us (Jer. 18:1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Rom. 9:21). If He designed you then He exhaustively knows His own design. All knowledge in God derives from and belongs to God.
God Himself confesses that, when His people sacrifice their children to false gods and idols, their doing such a horrifying act never entered His divine mind for them to do--and yet they did it (Jer. 19:5; 32:35)! Did He know / foreknow in Himself that they would commit the atrocity? Yes. Did He foreordain / permit them to commit such an atrocity? Yes. Could He have stopped them from committing the atrocity? Yes. That He eternally foreordained / permitted them to commit the atrocity indicates the absence of potential or uncertain contingency of the act in a strict sense--for in Him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28 ESV). He did not foresee their actions by peering into the future to learn what they shall do because an omniscient being cannot learn; yet all knowledge is present to God from all eternity due solely to His own eternal Essence / Nature / Being. Therefore whatever happens in our lives comes to us through the sovereign hand of God. We should be comforted and not fear. He will see His children through the worst circumstances imaginable--even if the result is our homegoing.
Is God the first and immediate cause of their heinous actions? Not in the strictest sense of influencing and necessarily forcing or coercing and fixing or rendering certain their own decisions and actions (James 1:13). However, God must concur with their freely-willed choice and actions if He permits and thus has foreordained for them to manifest the evil that they want to exact, and by "concur with" we mean "sustain their existence while they freely and willingly perform the heinous act." (No one can do anything apart from Him.) They do not decide to sacrifice their children, and actually perform the sacrifice, apart from God sovereignly allowing them to do so, and also sustaining their existence while they do so, even though He hates what they freely-willed to choose to do and so hates the actual performance of the evil. We can never deny the fact of reality that in Him we live and move (act-out) and have (maintain existence of) our being (Acts 17:28 NKJV).
Let us consider an unthinkable act of horror that occurred in our recent history and ask of God's relationship to the perpetrator and to the atrocious act itself. Former Sunday School teacher Melissa Huckaby is guilty of poisoning eight-year-old Sandra Canto and "sexually assaulting her with a foreign object" before killing her, and then forming a noose out of cloth and hanging her, and then "dumping her body in an irrigation pond." Melissa, who pleads guilty in order to avoid the death penalty, states to eight-year-old Sandra Canto's family: "I should not have taken her from you. I owe you an explanation. But I still cannot understand why I did what I did." Focus on "why I did what I did."
Regarding the sovereignty of God, and His will of all--every thought, word, and deed--that occurs in the earth, John Calvin states: "Therefore, whatever men or Satan himself devise, God holds the helm, and makes all their efforts contribute to the execution of His judgments."12 Note that the "efforts" belong to the individual but that God uses those efforts toward His own purposes. Wayne Grudem adds: "God influences the desires and decisions" of all people.13 I think he means the same as Calvin. All good influences come from God, and all evil desires come from within a person, not God (James 1:13). So God does not generally influence evil desires and sinful decisions of people. But God can use wicked people and acts to His own ends (Rev. 17:17 ESV). There is nothing scandalous about God using the wicked hearts and wicked intentions of wicked people for His own purposes. The wicked acts, as Calvin rightly says, still belong to wicked people with wicked intentions; but God is not universally influencing or implanting the wicked desires of wicked people. Melissa Huckaby "did what she did" by her own wicked motives, wicked intentions, stemming from her wicked heart (even if influenced by a demon). She cannot blame anyone but herself.
Again, Calvin writes, "God was the Author of that trial of which Satan and wicked robbers were merely the instruments." This he writes before what I quoted above: "Therefore, whatever men or Satan himself devise, God holds the helm, and makes all their efforts contribute to the execution of His judgments." Yet he admits: "It seems absurd that man should be blinded by the will and command of God and yet be forthwith punished for his blindness."14 He adds: "With regard to secret movements [that God moves secretly in the heart], what Solomon says of the heart of a king [Prov. 21:1], that it is turned hither and thither, as God sees meet [fit, right], certainly applies to the whole human race, and has the same force as if he had said that whatever we conceive in our minds is directed to its end by the secret inspiration of God."15 Some people do not read Calvin carefully. I know I did not. He says that whatever we conceive in our minds (and not whatever God gives birth to in our minds) is directed to its end (finds its ultimate fulfillment) by the secret inspiration of God. Is he suggesting God is the Author of Sin? No. Wicked thoughts come from us, says Jesus (Matt. 15:19), not from God. But what God does with our wicked thoughts and wicked intentions can be "directed to its end" by a sovereign God. That is His right as Creator, Sustainer, and Sovereign Ruler of all the earth.
THE WILL OF GOD
The free will of man will always be subservient to the will of God by virtue of the infinite power and wisdom and sovereignty of God. The will of King Abimelech of Gerar is to take Sarah for himself. The will of God is contrary and His sovereign will prevails. His will always prevails because His will cannot be thwarted. The exhaustive knowledge and eternal wisdom of God, which belongs to God by virtue of His Essence or Nature as God, is that by which He wills our future-history. His will is as eternal as is His knowledge. I think that divulging God of His exhaustive omniscience is to divulge Him of His own Divine and Eternal Essence. This is why I oppose Open Theism and Process Theism. That an infinite, self-sufficient and self-causal Eternal Being, who speaks life into existence from the power of His Word, can learn new information from His finite creation seems, to me at least, illogical at best, demonstrating an inherent deficiency in the Creator at worst.
This eternal knowledge / foreknowledge belongs to His Eternal Mind and is His not by a lesser virtue of meticulously and exhaustively foreordaining all that shall come to pass by means of His own predetermined causation but by the highest ontological perspective available to us as finite creatures--His own self-causal Essence. So that, to say that God can only know what He has foreordained to bring to pass, is to say that God cannot have knowledge in and of Himself of the creatures He wills to bring into reality--and to know all that can be known about these creatures who rely upon Him for their existence every moment of that existence (Acts 17:28). If He can only know that which He has from eternity predetermined to bring about then He cannot know contingencies and He cannot know possibilities of events that will not be brought about into our future-history. Jesus, again, has demonstrated the faulty logic of that premise (Matt. 11:20, 21, 22, 23, 24). With regard to contingencies, or His knowledge of what could have come to pass upon certain conditions, the Westminster Confession admits:
1. God, from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass [He could have at the very least prevented whatever happens]: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of [secondary] causes taken away, but rather established.Did God not eternally know / foreknow to the very last detail what would occur on the earth throughout its history? Yes. Otherwise He is incapable of declaring the end of all things prior to the beginning of all things (Isa. 46:10, 11). In that sense, then, whatever has happened could not have happened differently because He knew / foreknew what would actually occur from all eternity past. We must concede that God, then, has eternally foreordained every single event that happens in the earth at least in some sense. If He can prevent an action from occurring (e.g., Gen. 20:6), but chooses not to do so--for whatever reason(s) in His own eternal plan--reason(s) we may not understand until we finally see Him and are changed from our mortality to immortality--then whatever occurs must occur, and we must trust Him even in the most difficult of circumstances. God does not call us to fully understand His ways (Isa. 55:8). But He does call us to trust Him (Prov. 3:5).
2. Although God knows whatsoever may or can come to pass upon all supposed conditions, yet hath He not decreed anything because He foresaw it as future [for He cannot learn any new information], or as that which would come to pass upon such conditions (3.1, 2).
Moreover, the Westminster divines confess that God knows whatsoever may or can come to pass, but not because He foresaw what would happen and then, by that gained knowledge (which would mean that God can learn or attain knowledge from outside Himself), foreordained all that would come to pass. But neither did they say the reason how God can know what shall come to pass is only because He foreordained all that should come to pass--although the statement is rendered that God has foreordained all that would come to pass. Furthermore, we, I think, must agree that in some sense God has foreordained all that would come to pass, because, as stated above, God has the capacity to prevent any happening to manifest; because in Him we all live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28 ESV); so that, if we are to perform any action whatsoever then we do as much "in" Him, meaning that He is sustaining our very lives while we think and say and do what we think and say and do. We cannot leave God, our very Sustainer, out of the equation of all that comes to pass. If He has the capacity to thwart any plan of any individual then He has the final "say so" as to whether or not a person performs any action whatsoever.
We want to avoid suggesting that God planted a wicked thought in the mind of a person, irresistibly compelled the person toward a wicked act, and then effectually motivated the person to carry out the wickedness, such that the person had no other choice but to behave wickedly, not as an act of judgment but from a mere decree. But we also want to avoid rendering men and women a sovereignty that does not belong to them. God is the only Sovereign in the universe. We cannot suggest, in my view, that God is some passive bystander when a person commits a wicked act. God was in utter control during the performance of the wicked act. He could have stopped the heart of the individual and thus prevented him from carrying out the heinous evil. That He did not indicates that the action was in some sense foreordained. I think we must suggest that, due to God's creative act of each person, He knows exhaustively the nature and the disposition of the individual and knows exactly what each person is capable of, not by mere intuition, but by His own and sole Essence as God. He knows what a particular person would think and say and do in any given situation and, out of that exhaustive knowledge and seemingly endless possibilities, He has foreordained what we witness in human history. Theoretically we might say that, given our fallen context, this is the best world history we could hope for due to our fallen natures and desires to sin and to run from God and His righteousness. One day He will set all things right.
THE WILL OF GOD AND THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD
The will of God for all of future-history manifests in the knowledge / foreknowledge of God, is guided by the wisdom and the justice of God, which are properly framed in the holiness of God (1 Tim. 1:17). When we say God is holy (Ex. 15:11; Lev. 19:2; 22:32; Isa. 6:3; Rev. 4:8) we mean that He is other than us and set apart from us, exaltedly sacred, otherly-higher than us (Isa. 55:9) in His absolute purity of soul and mind, to the degree that committing an act of sin never occurred to Him (Jer. 19:5; 32:35)--that such a concept of sinning is as foreign to Him as being an eternally self-causal entity is foreign to us. God's holiness--otherness--is obvious from His own and sole infinity and eternality, His divine intellect and exhaustive knowledge / foreknowledge, His wisdom and justice. Job records this truth about God: In the totality of all His own triune Godness are wisdom and might (cf. Ps. 147:5); to Him belong counsel and exhaustive understanding (Job 12:13 my translation).
The infinite Creator, with all knowledge / foreknowledge innately within His eternal mind, speaks matter--angels (Heb. 1:7) and other beings (Rev. 4:6, 7, 8; 5:8), all matter in the universe and on earth (Gen. 1:6-25)--into being from the power of His Word (Gen. 1:1, 2, 3; John 1:1, 2, 3, 4; Rom. 4:17; Col. 1:15, 16, 17; Heb. 1:1, 2, 3); and He created each of us human beings (Gen. 1:26, 27). God "founded the earth" in His wisdom and "established the heavens" by His understanding (Prov. 3:19). "I, wisdom," as the wisdom of God is personified, "dwell with good, right, and proper judgment: I am found in knowledge and discretion," Heb. mezimmah, purpose or power of planning by careful, wise, skillful thought (Prov. 8:12). Therefore the exhaustive knowledge / foreknowledge of God carefully plans our future-history with meticulous scrutiny in wisdom, which is "the architect and counselor of God in the creation," which is the close companion of a good, right and proper judgment, working concurrently with knowledge and careful planning. God's sovereign plan for our future-history includes our freely-wrought evil because that freely-wrought evil is part of His exhaustive knowledge / foreknowledge. He chooses to include our freely-willed decisions, with their consequences, and weaves together His plan of salvation / redemption (1 Cor. 1:21; Eph. 1:4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11) from all eternity.
THE WILL OF GOD AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
When we say, "But our God is in the heavens; He does whatever He pleases" (Ps. 115:3), we do not mean to suggest that God deterministically brings about and forces evil but is still considered holy. He allows evil entities to freely commit evil within the domain of His sovereignty and Plan for the ages. When we say, "Whatever the LORD pleases, He does, in heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps" (Ps. 135:6), we do not suggest that He is pleased with sin and evil, and that is why He foreordained such in our reality. He despises sin and evil (Prov. 8:13), Jesus came to destroy the works of evil (1 John 3:8), and all evil will one day be eradicated (Rev. 21:8). The problem of sin and evil is our problem, not God's problem, since He does not want us to sin, He commands us not to sin, and He will have all sin judged--either with Jesus on the Cross of Calvary for believers or in eternal Hell for unbelievers (John 3:36). If so then why does God allow / foreordain evil?
The only way for God to disallow sin and evil in the history of our world is to construct a world in which Satan is banned (Satan would have never sinned against God, and become a deranged demon, being kept by God from doing so), though Satan is obviously not banned from earth (Gen. 3:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; Job 1:6, 7), and he and his ilk come to tempt, to steal, and to utterly destroy humanity (John 10:10). With Satan and his followers banned from earth, God must also somehow secure the state of Adam and Eve, so that they will by some measure of certainty remain faithful and obedient to Him. How God can accomplish this and still grant to them their relative freedom is problematic. Because God does not even prevent the angels He created from rebelling against Him (Gen. 6:1-22; Isa. 14:12, 13, 14; Ezek. 28:1-26; Matt. 13:39; 25:41; Luke 10:18; 2 Cor. 4:4; Eph. 6:10-18; 1 Tim. 4:1; 1 Pet. 5:8; 2 Pet. 2:4; Jude 1:6, 7, 9; Rev. 12:1, 2, 3, 4, 7-9). If God allows free will among the angels, and they, existing in God's presence for however long they do before betraying Him, seeing their Creator constantly, and still they rebel against Him, in His very presence, then what hope have human beings, created a little lower than the angels (Ps. 8:5), in remaining faithful in His presence in the Garden of Eden with their relative free will coupled with the deceptive tactics of Satan?
Atheists, skeptics, and others suggest that, if God is the ultimate Good in the known universe, then He will prevent all evil--moral and natural. We argue otherwise--that God allowing freely-willed evil is good, even if the acts themselves are heinous, and that God allowing His creatures the freedom of their own will to commit good for others or to commit evil is itself good and just. Should we hold God accountable for not intervening in freely-willed decisions to enact evil? Dr. Bruce A. Little, in his book, A Creation-Order Theodicy, argues the matter,
Suppose we represent the evil in the world by X and the varying degrees of evil by X + 1, X + 2, X + 3 and so forth, where the higher the number associated with X, the worse the evil. X + 3 is a worse evil than X + 1. For argument's sake, let's also assume that X + 5 is the worst evil imaginable to man. Man requests that God prevent X + 5. The request is for God to prevent the evil before it happens ... This means it will never have been a part of the human experience. Assuming God prevents X + 5, the worst evil in the human experience will be X + 4. However, when the same logical procedure is applied to X + 4 as was to X + 5, the worst evil in the human experience is now X + 3. Taken to its logical conclusion, the request would not stop until God has prevented all evil16 (emphases added).Even if the atheist balks at the freedom of moral evil, but tolerates this explanation, he will insist that God, if He is Good, should intervene in all natural evil (hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes). Due to our freely-willed sin we exist within a fallen natural condition (Rom. 8:20). The first law of thermodynamics explains that energy in the universe can be neither created nor destroyed. We ascribe to God not only creative power (Gen. 1:1, 2; Rom. 4:17; Col. 1:16, 17; Heb. 1:3) but also a power to deconstruct energy (Matt. 10:28). If God retains the power to create matter and energy out of nothing, ex nihilo, then He de facto retains innately the power to destroy matter and energy. The second law of thermodynamics explains that, as energy is transferred or transformed, more of it is wasted. Matter is breaking down because God proactively subjected the universe to decay because of our sin (Rom. 8:20). Even though God in Christ is sustaining the universe (Col. 1:17; Heb. 1:3), He does so commensurate with the reality of entropy, until He recreates "the heavens and the earth" (Isa. 65:17; Rev. 21:1).
If God were to intervene in every single case of natural conditions then reality itself would be in jeopardy. First, God may actually intervene at times, and we do not know about it. The possibility, at the very least, remains. Second, I do not name this category a "natural evil," but a "natural condition," because nature possesses no evil intention to harm us. Third, atmospheric conditions cause hurricanes and tornadoes, and they typically occur within areas in which conditions are ripe for turmoil of nature. To think that God is bringing judgment to people via storms is akin to pagan theology (see Luke 13:1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Is God not angry with sinners who live in areas in which such weather events do not typically occur? We can say the same regarding earthquakes. We can say the same with any condition of nature that poses a threat to the well-being of people. I do not view God as a weather-god who is meting out wrath and judgment through the agency of weather. He can (He is certainly capable by His own power), and He even may (on occasion), but normally does not do so. This is our reality for now.
Tornadoes develop "when wind variations with height support rotation in the updraft." That God allows and / or meticulously governs the earth and the universe to operate as they do, and as they do by His meticulous sovereignty, is not a statement or a judgment on His goodness, His justice, or His love. Two of the "safest" places to live in the United States weather-wise include Columbia, Maryland and Nashua, New Hampshire. Does this indicate that God loves and cares about these people more so than the rest of us? No. Is God expressing His goodness and His justice to these people more so than the rest of us? No. Are these people more holy? No. Are there less sinners who live here? No.
We need to think more carefully, more biblically, about moral and natural evil with regard to human victims and God's relationship to our freely-willed evil and nature-events on earth. God is sovereign over every single element of nature, of the earth, of weather and of the entire universe. Do not misunderstand what I am communicating about Free Will and about Nature. God is in control. Not one molecule escapes His Notice, His Power, His will. Yet He operates within the laws of this fallen creation order, He is sovereign over the same, and whatever happens does so through His sovereign hand, His purpose, His will. I think what most people want is Heaven on Earth. That is not our fallen reality at this time. If you want Heaven on Earth then trust in Jesus Christ today and eagerly wait for His soon return! Today may be the day!
CONCLUSION
The will of God--the ultimate will that governs all of history in its minutiæ--is constructed in eternity according to the exhaustive knowledge / foreknowledge of God, which belongs to Him by virtue of His eternal being, is governed by His wisdom and justice (Rom. 11:33), contextualized by His holiness, and unfolds in real time according to His sovereignty commensurate with the relatively free choices of the creatures He created in His image. This meticulous and sovereign will of God includes all of His creation (Col. 1:16, 17), angels and all heavenly beings and all fallen angels (2 Pet. 2:4; Jude 1:6, 7, 9), the universe and the earth (Rev. 21:5), all creatures He created upon the earth (Matt. 25:31-46), from the Fall of angels to the Fall of Man to Redemption and Consummation. Not one molecule escapes the will of God.
God the Father has covenanted with God the Son to redeem all who believe in Him by the Gospel (Rom. 1:16, 17) in the convicting power of God the Holy Spirit (John 16:8-11; Titus 3:5). All judgment is given to God the Son (John 5:22) and God the Father will sum up all of reality in Christ (Eph. 1:10), when He reveals that Jesus is YHWH (Ex. 3:14, 15; John 17:6, 11; Phil. 2:9), to whom "every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth," and to whom "every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is LORD, to the glory of God the Father" (Phil. 2:10, 11). All the redeemed, all the unredeemed justly judged (for they could have been saved if they would have believed), all redounds to the glory of God, by and through the glory of Jesus Christ, in the glory of the Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen.
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1 R.C. Sproul, Truths We Confess: A Systematic Exposition of the Westminster Confession of Faith (Sanford: Ligonier Ministries, 2019), 70.
2 Ibid., 71.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Jacob Arminius, "On the Nature of God," in The Works of James Arminius, The London Edition, trans. James Nichols (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1996), 2.120.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., 2.121.
8 Ibid., 2.121, 2.114.
9 Ibid., 2.121.
10 Ibid., 2.122.
11 Ibid., 2.123.
12 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., 2008), 1.18.1.
13 Wayne A. Grudem, Bible Doctrine: Essential Teachings of the Christian Faith, ed. Jeff Purswell (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1999), 143.
14 Calvin. 1.18.1.
15 Ibid.
16 Bruce A. Little, A Creation-Order Theodicy: God and Gratuitous Evil (Lanham: University Press of America, Inc., 2005), 163-64.
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