gracEmail
Edward Fudge

FOREKNOWLEDGE AND FREE WILL (1)

A gracEmail subscriber writes: "I have been trying to work out in my mind how God can give us free will to choose salvation and also know beforehand who will be saved. Can you explain this?"

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I cannot explain the paradox of sovereign grace and human duty any more than I can explain the Trinity, the Incarnation or the Resurrection. God's thoughts and ways are simply higher than ours, and only a foolish person claims to understand more than God sees fit to reveal (Deut. 29:29; Psalm 131:1; Rom. 11:33-36). But let us notice some things we can understand.

Knowing about an event does not cause the event, whether that knowledge comes before or after the event. If you see a movie twice, or read a book the second time, you know already what will occur in the book or movie, but your knowing does not make it happen. However, God's foreknowledge involved more than a divine preview of us or our lives. It meant his "knowing" us in loving relationship, when neither we nor the world yet existed (Rom. 8:29; Amos 3:2).

As for that celebrated "free will," it just might be more illusory than we commonly suppose. The will which is enslaved to sin is really not free at all (John 8:31-34). That does not prevent genuine choice, however, or true decision-making, or ultimate accountability. The Bible talks often about human responsibility, which always grows out of an encounter with the Creator. It does not ever discuss "free will," which is a term of the philosophers.


gracEmail
Edward Fudge

FOREKNOWLEDGE AND FREE WILL (2)

A gracEmail subscriber writes: "I have been trying to work out in my mind how God can give us free will to choose salvation and also know beforehand who will be saved. Can you explain this?"

* * *

God has told us in Scripture that he will finally bring home to himself for all eternity a very great multitude of people, representative of all humankind (Rev. 7:9-10). The eternal blessing of the saved will not reflect any merit on their own part; it will rather be a free gift of God's kind favor, based on Jesus Christ's substitutionary work in their stead (Eph. 2:7-9). That is true whether those saved knew Jesus in this life or not (Rom. 3:24-25; Heb. 11:40).

We can also say from Scripture that God's kindness to the saved did not begin on Judgment Day, nor even during their earthly lifetimes, but that he set his love on them before the world began -- and that he gave them to Jesus for his inheritance even then (John 6:37-40; 17:1-4). Yet God's grace in eternity past did not depend on anything he saw in his people, looking forward, any more than his grace will depend on anything his people deserve when God looks backward in review at the End (2 Tim. 1:9; Rom. 9:16).

Finally, Scripture assures us that God will not judge unfairly anyone who is finally lost, and that all who are not saved will themselves have freely rejected God's kindness and friendship throughout their lives on earth (John 3:19; Acts 13:45:46; Rom. 2:14-16; 9:14). The whole human population will finally consist of those whom God chose, and those who did not choose God. Each of those realities stands alone, and neither is the cause of the other.

For more on divine sovereignty and human choice, click here.