God is Creator of all that exists, of all that is, seen and unseen, including each human being ever to exist (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), and He creates each human being, in the words of Wayne Grudem, to be a unique representative of the triune God upon the earth. God creates all of the "inward parts" (related to that which is metaphysical within us) of our own unique being and our existence (Ps. 139:13)--shaping us body, soul (heart or personality), mind (intellect) and spirit or the metaphysical (cf. Heb. 4:12).
GOD'S CREATIVE KNOWLEDGE
The Psalmist declares: "Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in Your book before one of them came to be" (Ps. 139:16 NIV). God says to Jeremiah: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations" (Jer. 1:5). Volumes could be written on these two verses alone. For in them we discover God as the divine Artiste, the Creator of all that is, of flesh and spirit. We discover God as a Script-writer, meticulously conscripting future-history from His own wisdom, sovereignty and providence, bringing to pass righteousness from our evils, using all that is to bring to pass what is not yet. We also discover the divine Appointer, providentially working through His creation to bring to fruition His eternal plan for the ages, using people who do not yet exist except in His own creative Mind, Purpose, and Will. This, I think, reveals something of His eternal knowledge.
For, if He has planned for days to occur, then He has planned for certain creatures to experience those days according to His plans. When He tells Jeremiah that He has sanctified him (set him apart) from his mother's womb for His own purposes, even before he was formed in his mother's womb by God his Creator, there was compete knowledge of Jeremiah as a person--all that comprises the human Jeremiah is known by God, foreknown and thus foreordained by God, and this knowledge includes all that can be known about Jeremiah in the Mind and Will and Purposes of God. This knowledge of Jeremiah cannot be abstract or nebulous because God's knowledge is complete and meticulous. This knowledge of Jeremiah must be exhaustive--his desires, his struggles, his failures, his predispositions, his habits, his existential context, his limitations, his own knowledge, his culture, his dreams, his beliefs, his errors, his potential, his training and education--whatever can be known in the Mind of God for Jeremiah as a unique human being is innately known to God before He creates him in his mother's womb.
GOD'S INTIMATE KNOWLEDGE
This knowledge of Jeremiah is personal, intimate, exhaustive. This knowledge in God is not obtained by foresight, by somehow peering into the future to see if a Jeremiah of God's description will exist, and if this Jeremiah will freely do what God wants him to do. No. This knowledge must eternally exist within the eternal Mind of God, so that there was never a time when God conceived of Jeremiah, and then brought that Jeremiah into existence. A thought never occurred to God. All knowledge is present to God from all eternity. All knowledge is present in God from His own inherent and innate Godness. All knowledge belongs to God by His own divine nature, His own and sole essence, His own cognitive possession. God frames all true knowledge. God contextualizes all knowledge, all truth, all reality. God's portrait of Jeremiah is given birth by God's eternal solidity. God knows all that can be known about Jeremiah because Jeremiah is God's divinely creative project.
GOD'S LOVING KNOWLEDGE
The same is true for you, my brother or sister in Christ, and should bring a sense of awe to your heart. God took great delight in creating you in His image (Gen. 1:26); He set His eternal love upon you by bringing you to Himself in Christ (Jer. 31:3; John 16:26; Eph. 1:4, 5, 11); and He will see to it that you are ultimately conformed to the image of Jesus Christ (Rom. 8:29, 30; 1 John 3:1, 2). He loves you just as He loves His one and only Son Jesus Christ (John 17:23). He has taken all of your sin and put it on His Son, Jesus Christ, and taken all of Christ's righteousness and laid it upon you (Rom. 3:21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28). He views you in Christ as holy, blameless, sinless (Eph. 1:4, 5). God the Father loves you out of His own nature (John 3:16, 17; 17:23, 26). He does not love you because you are sweet, or kind, or giving, or loving, or obedient. He does not love you because you are irresistible. He does not love you because you do your best. At heart, we are all sinners, and we are, truly, none of these things. His love for you comes from His own eternal love for you--His heart to see you saved, reconciled, restored and whole.
In other words, God's love for you is not object-oriented, dependent upon you. That is good news! Because if God loved you for something you did, or for the kind of person you are, then He could stop loving you if you stop doing whatever you did, or being the kind of person you were, that caused Him to love you. No. His love for you comes from His own desire and will. That should bring you the greatest comfort imaginable. You did not earn His love and you cannot in any sense conceivable dissuade Him from His love for you. His love for you is eternally stubborn.
GOD'S COMPASSIONATE KNOWLEDGE
"If this is true then why do I suffer?" First, please consider that we live in a fallen world, and that reality brings about a whole host of difficulties (Rom. 8:20). From weather events to car accidents to strife with others--this life can be tragic. But such tragedies are not to be perceived as God punishing or not loving you. Second, we are promised by Jesus that life will be rough (John 16:33), even devastatingly so (Luke 13:1, 2, 3, 4, 5). When tragedies strike, we need not always ask if God is punishing us, but accept them as our current reality in this world of sin. We want Heaven on Earth now and this is far from reality. Third, we should not obsess about God's foreordination of whatever comes to pass, given that God is not necessarily causing a man to rape, causing someone to hurt you, causing disease to destroy one's life.
If an event happens then it must happen within the context of God's sovereignty. That is just reality because God is sovereign. Could God have prevented what happened? Yes. If He allowed it then He foreordained it and even in some sense brought it to pass. Learn to think and to pray in this way: "Lord, if this is what I must face, then do in me what I cannot do for myself." Embrace His sovereignty. But we do not mean to say that God brought it about in and of Himself, as though merely to terrify someone, or as to actually be the primary cause of an evil. He does not have to because we are quite capable in and of our sinful selves to bring about evil--to say nothing of devils and other forces of evil wanting to see destruction. However, we must agree with Scripture, as John Piper has well noted: How God governs all events in the universe
Indeed, God has had mercy upon us, and He often does demonstrate that mercy and compassion. Many of us live normally happy lives with relatively few troubles. Granted, some people in third-world countries have despairing lives, and sometimes the fault is with a government and / or with the wealthy refusing to help the needy. But we should also gain a proper perspective. As far as God is concerned, people do not love Him, but rather hate Him. We sinners are not only weak and spiritually helpless (Rom. 5:6) but are actual enemies of God (Rom. 5:10). In our fallen, sinful state, we do not want God because we love darkness rather than Light (John 3:19). So we cannot play the victim, as though God is unjustly bringing upon us what we do not deserve, and if we have goodness in our lives at all then that is grace and mercy enough.
LOVE HIS SOVEREIGNTY
If you have been redeemed by the grace of God through faith in the Person and Work of Jesus Christ then you have reason to rejoice not only in God's eternal and exhaustive knowledge but even of His foreordination and predestination of all that occurs according to His own eternal wisdom, divine mercy, and sovereign will. If you are convinced of inerrant Scripture that God can perform no wickedness imaginable (Job 34:12), nor even tempt someone to commit sin (James 1:13), then you can rest in the hands of a God who has loved you from all eternity.
"It is unthinkable that God would do wrong, that the Almighty would pervert justice. Who appointed Him over the earth? Who put Him in charge of the whole world? If it were His intention and He withdrew His spirit and breath, all humanity would perish altogether and mankind would return to the dust" (Job 34:12-15 NIV). This is because in Him we each live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28 ESV). You should learn to love God's sovereignty because the attribute of His sovereignty is grounded in His love for His people, His eternal love for His one and only Son Jesus Christ, and, rightly, His love for His own glory. He alone is right to magnify His own glory because He is righteousness personified; He is all holiness; He defines and rightly contextualizes all justice and all well-being of eternal peace; He is reconciliation.
God is grace shedding holy and pure blood from a Cross; He is white linen wrapped around Him in a borrowed tomb; He is resurrection life; He is ascension on high and seated on a sovereign throne of justice; He is life-giving Breath, in Spirit that is Holy, bringing redemption and righteousness to the unrighteous and undeserving; and all of this flows from an eternal and sovereign power that creates the expanse of space and of countless planets and explodes stars and expands galaxies--and at the same time catches the tiny and weightless sparrow that falls from a tree in order to deliver that precious little flying fluff to the eternal Tree of Life that will one day heal all the nations of this sin-drenched world (Rev. 22:1, 2). Behold, this is your sovereign God, innately worthy of your love, of your worship of Him, now and forever.
GOD'S CREATIVE KNOWLEDGE
The Psalmist declares: "Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in Your book before one of them came to be" (Ps. 139:16 NIV). God says to Jeremiah: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations" (Jer. 1:5). Volumes could be written on these two verses alone. For in them we discover God as the divine Artiste, the Creator of all that is, of flesh and spirit. We discover God as a Script-writer, meticulously conscripting future-history from His own wisdom, sovereignty and providence, bringing to pass righteousness from our evils, using all that is to bring to pass what is not yet. We also discover the divine Appointer, providentially working through His creation to bring to fruition His eternal plan for the ages, using people who do not yet exist except in His own creative Mind, Purpose, and Will. This, I think, reveals something of His eternal knowledge.
For, if He has planned for days to occur, then He has planned for certain creatures to experience those days according to His plans. When He tells Jeremiah that He has sanctified him (set him apart) from his mother's womb for His own purposes, even before he was formed in his mother's womb by God his Creator, there was compete knowledge of Jeremiah as a person--all that comprises the human Jeremiah is known by God, foreknown and thus foreordained by God, and this knowledge includes all that can be known about Jeremiah in the Mind and Will and Purposes of God. This knowledge of Jeremiah cannot be abstract or nebulous because God's knowledge is complete and meticulous. This knowledge of Jeremiah must be exhaustive--his desires, his struggles, his failures, his predispositions, his habits, his existential context, his limitations, his own knowledge, his culture, his dreams, his beliefs, his errors, his potential, his training and education--whatever can be known in the Mind of God for Jeremiah as a unique human being is innately known to God before He creates him in his mother's womb.
GOD'S INTIMATE KNOWLEDGE
This knowledge of Jeremiah is personal, intimate, exhaustive. This knowledge in God is not obtained by foresight, by somehow peering into the future to see if a Jeremiah of God's description will exist, and if this Jeremiah will freely do what God wants him to do. No. This knowledge must eternally exist within the eternal Mind of God, so that there was never a time when God conceived of Jeremiah, and then brought that Jeremiah into existence. A thought never occurred to God. All knowledge is present to God from all eternity. All knowledge is present in God from His own inherent and innate Godness. All knowledge belongs to God by His own divine nature, His own and sole essence, His own cognitive possession. God frames all true knowledge. God contextualizes all knowledge, all truth, all reality. God's portrait of Jeremiah is given birth by God's eternal solidity. God knows all that can be known about Jeremiah because Jeremiah is God's divinely creative project.
GOD'S LOVING KNOWLEDGE
The same is true for you, my brother or sister in Christ, and should bring a sense of awe to your heart. God took great delight in creating you in His image (Gen. 1:26); He set His eternal love upon you by bringing you to Himself in Christ (Jer. 31:3; John 16:26; Eph. 1:4, 5, 11); and He will see to it that you are ultimately conformed to the image of Jesus Christ (Rom. 8:29, 30; 1 John 3:1, 2). He loves you just as He loves His one and only Son Jesus Christ (John 17:23). He has taken all of your sin and put it on His Son, Jesus Christ, and taken all of Christ's righteousness and laid it upon you (Rom. 3:21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28). He views you in Christ as holy, blameless, sinless (Eph. 1:4, 5). God the Father loves you out of His own nature (John 3:16, 17; 17:23, 26). He does not love you because you are sweet, or kind, or giving, or loving, or obedient. He does not love you because you are irresistible. He does not love you because you do your best. At heart, we are all sinners, and we are, truly, none of these things. His love for you comes from His own eternal love for you--His heart to see you saved, reconciled, restored and whole.
In other words, God's love for you is not object-oriented, dependent upon you. That is good news! Because if God loved you for something you did, or for the kind of person you are, then He could stop loving you if you stop doing whatever you did, or being the kind of person you were, that caused Him to love you. No. His love for you comes from His own desire and will. That should bring you the greatest comfort imaginable. You did not earn His love and you cannot in any sense conceivable dissuade Him from His love for you. His love for you is eternally stubborn.
GOD'S COMPASSIONATE KNOWLEDGE
"If this is true then why do I suffer?" First, please consider that we live in a fallen world, and that reality brings about a whole host of difficulties (Rom. 8:20). From weather events to car accidents to strife with others--this life can be tragic. But such tragedies are not to be perceived as God punishing or not loving you. Second, we are promised by Jesus that life will be rough (John 16:33), even devastatingly so (Luke 13:1, 2, 3, 4, 5). When tragedies strike, we need not always ask if God is punishing us, but accept them as our current reality in this world of sin. We want Heaven on Earth now and this is far from reality. Third, we should not obsess about God's foreordination of whatever comes to pass, given that God is not necessarily causing a man to rape, causing someone to hurt you, causing disease to destroy one's life.
If an event happens then it must happen within the context of God's sovereignty. That is just reality because God is sovereign. Could God have prevented what happened? Yes. If He allowed it then He foreordained it and even in some sense brought it to pass. Learn to think and to pray in this way: "Lord, if this is what I must face, then do in me what I cannot do for myself." Embrace His sovereignty. But we do not mean to say that God brought it about in and of Himself, as though merely to terrify someone, or as to actually be the primary cause of an evil. He does not have to because we are quite capable in and of our sinful selves to bring about evil--to say nothing of devils and other forces of evil wanting to see destruction. However, we must agree with Scripture, as John Piper has well noted: How God governs all events in the universe
without sinning, and without removing responsibility from man, and with compassionate outcomes is mysterious indeed! But that is what the Bible teaches. God "works all things after the counsel of His will" (Ephesians 1:11). This "all things" includes the fall of sparrows (Matthew 10:29), the rolling of dice (Proverbs 16:33), the slaughter of His people (Psalm 44:11), the decisions of kings (Proverbs 21:1), the failing of sight (Exodus 4:11), the sickness of children (2 Samuel 12:15), the loss and gain of money (1 Samuel 2:7), the suffering of saints (1 Peter 4:19), the completion of travel plans (James 4:15), the persecution of Christians (Hebrews 12:4-7), the repentance of souls (2 Timothy 2:25), the gift of faith (Philippians 1:29), the pursuit of holiness (Philippians 3:12-13), the growth of believers (Hebrews 6:3), the giving of life and the taking in death (1 Samuel 2:6), and the crucifixion of His [guiltless and sinless] Son (Acts 4:27-28).Piper rightly continues: "Lest we miss the point, the Bible speaks most clearly to this in the most painful situations. Amos asks, in time of disaster, 'If a calamity occurs in a city has not the LORD done it?' (Amos 3:6). After losing all ten of his children in the collapse of his son's house, Job says, 'The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away. Blessed be the name of the LORD' (Job 1:21). After being covered with boils, he says, 'Shall we indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity?' (Job 2:10)." You might ask yourself: "Has God no compassion on us?"
Indeed, God has had mercy upon us, and He often does demonstrate that mercy and compassion. Many of us live normally happy lives with relatively few troubles. Granted, some people in third-world countries have despairing lives, and sometimes the fault is with a government and / or with the wealthy refusing to help the needy. But we should also gain a proper perspective. As far as God is concerned, people do not love Him, but rather hate Him. We sinners are not only weak and spiritually helpless (Rom. 5:6) but are actual enemies of God (Rom. 5:10). In our fallen, sinful state, we do not want God because we love darkness rather than Light (John 3:19). So we cannot play the victim, as though God is unjustly bringing upon us what we do not deserve, and if we have goodness in our lives at all then that is grace and mercy enough.
LOVE HIS SOVEREIGNTY
If you have been redeemed by the grace of God through faith in the Person and Work of Jesus Christ then you have reason to rejoice not only in God's eternal and exhaustive knowledge but even of His foreordination and predestination of all that occurs according to His own eternal wisdom, divine mercy, and sovereign will. If you are convinced of inerrant Scripture that God can perform no wickedness imaginable (Job 34:12), nor even tempt someone to commit sin (James 1:13), then you can rest in the hands of a God who has loved you from all eternity.
"It is unthinkable that God would do wrong, that the Almighty would pervert justice. Who appointed Him over the earth? Who put Him in charge of the whole world? If it were His intention and He withdrew His spirit and breath, all humanity would perish altogether and mankind would return to the dust" (Job 34:12-15 NIV). This is because in Him we each live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28 ESV). You should learn to love God's sovereignty because the attribute of His sovereignty is grounded in His love for His people, His eternal love for His one and only Son Jesus Christ, and, rightly, His love for His own glory. He alone is right to magnify His own glory because He is righteousness personified; He is all holiness; He defines and rightly contextualizes all justice and all well-being of eternal peace; He is reconciliation.
God is grace shedding holy and pure blood from a Cross; He is white linen wrapped around Him in a borrowed tomb; He is resurrection life; He is ascension on high and seated on a sovereign throne of justice; He is life-giving Breath, in Spirit that is Holy, bringing redemption and righteousness to the unrighteous and undeserving; and all of this flows from an eternal and sovereign power that creates the expanse of space and of countless planets and explodes stars and expands galaxies--and at the same time catches the tiny and weightless sparrow that falls from a tree in order to deliver that precious little flying fluff to the eternal Tree of Life that will one day heal all the nations of this sin-drenched world (Rev. 22:1, 2). Behold, this is your sovereign God, innately worthy of your love, of your worship of Him, now and forever.
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