So, if He knows before He creates a person that He will be casting the person into the lake of fire, why do you suppose He goes ahead and creates the person anyway?
Scripture does not tell us every reason God creates individuals whom He knows will ultimately perish. What it does tell us is that God does all things according to His own wise and holy purpose (Ephesians 1:11), that He is under no obligation to save any sinner (Romans 3:23; 6:23), and that His glory is displayed both in His mercy and in His justice.
Paul anticipates a similar objection in Romans 9. After teaching God’s sovereign election, he asks, “Why does He still find fault? For who has resisted His will?” (Romans 9:19). Paul’s answer is not to deny God’s sovereignty, but to remind us of the Creator-creature distinction: “Who are you, O man, to answer back to God?” (Romans 9:20).
Scripture further says:
“What if God, willing to show His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: And that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy…” (Romans 9:22-23).
Read the context, test everyting I post with Scriptures…
God’s justice is revealed in the punishment of sin, and His mercy is revealed in the salvation of sinners. None receive injustice from God. The lost receive justice; the saved receive mercy.
The real question is not, “Why does God save some and not all?” but rather, “Why does God save anyone at all?”
Since all have sinned against Him, salvation is an act of sheer grace.
So here’s my question to you @rstrats
Do you believe God’s foreknowledge is limited? If God knows all things before creation (Isaiah 46:9-10), then even in a non-Calvinist view God knowingly created people who would ultimately be lost. The question is not unique to Calvinism; it applies to any view that affirms God’s exhaustive foreknowledge.
That last point is important because the difficulty is not primarily election, it is God’s omniscience. Anyone who believes God knew the final destiny of every person before creation must wrestle with the same question.
J.
It always blows my mind to think about this…If God knows all, then He knows that I’ll continue to be stubborn and make wrong choices. If that’s the case, then am I already predestined to either succeed or fail? And if we’re all predestined to either succeed or fail, what good is that? God gave us free will, but if He already knows what we’ll choose, then what’s the point? (I know the Biblical reasons. I’m just throwing this out there as a general mind-blowing circle of questions. Makes me think of the Matrix. “Would you have still knocked over that vase if I hadn’t said something?”)
I don’t think God knows what I am going to do next, but I think he is awfully good at predicting what I will do next, and maybe he has a Plan A if I do this and a Plan B if I do that.
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Friends
This will likely not help this conversation very much, but I’ll throw it out there as a contribution to this theological stew.
If we remember that “time” is a creation, we recognize it as a supernatural reality that has been (or is being) comprehensively created by a skilled Creator. This means it is not just a universal circumstance all of us, including God, are constrained by. Thinking like this gives the concept of “Time” a new perspective.
Time, as a created thing, exists solely at the behest of its Creator. It seems illogical to imagine a Creator creating something he doesn’t understand intimately and thoroughly; It is unimaginable to think a Creator could make something not fully known to Himself. Every creation is fully known by it’s Creator, and a Good Creator observes His own creation, as an expression of His own Goodness, and deems it Very Good.
Time is a creation, and creations are like clay in the hand of The Master Potter, (Isa 64:8) (Jer. 18:6), He has ultimate “power over the clay. (Romans 9:21)
KP
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Someone “liked” your two liner, but is it biblical?
Consider…
Isaiah 46:9–10 “I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done…”
Psalm 139:4 “For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether.”
Psalm 139:16 “In thy book all my members were written… when as yet there was none of them.”
Matthew 26:34 Jesus knew Peter would deny Him three times before it happened.
John 13:19 “I tell you before it come, that, when it is come to pass, ye may believe that I am he.”
Acts 2:23 Christ was delivered up according to the “determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.”
Your statement also creates another difficulty, if God only predicts the future, then prophecy becomes uncertain. Yet biblical prophecy is presented as certain because God knows what will happen and often ordains what will happen.
For example.
Isaiah 44:28–45:1 names Cyrus long before he was born.
Micah 5:2 foretells the Messiah’s birthplace.
Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 describe details of Christ’s suffering centuries beforehand.
Your idea that God has a “Plan A” and “Plan B” is sometimes associated with forms of “Open Theism,” which teaches that some future free choices are not yet known by God.
The difficulty is that Scripture repeatedly presents God as never learning, never guessing, and never being surprised:
Numbers 23:19 “God is not a man…”
1 John 3:20 “God knoweth all things.”
Hebrews 4:13 “All things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do.”
A more biblical way to state it would be, in my humble opinion.
“I may not know what I will do next, but God does. Yet I still make real choices and am responsible for them.”
That preserves both truths taught in Scripture: God’s exhaustive knowledge and man’s genuine responsibility.
J.
Hmm interesting distinction. I think it begins with recognizing our need for God. Adam and Eve needed God even before they fell into sin. We were made to “Glorify God and enjoy him forever,” (according to the Westminster Shorter Catechism), so while that certainly includes obeying him, I actually think our imago dei (being made in his image) is broader and can’t be boiled down to only obeying him (which is action-oriented and doesn’t speak to our very nature as human beings).
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this is really great information
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Love this. Yes, Time is timey whimey. We have to ride the ride, and we have no Idea where we are heading. God is outside of time; He is in the past, present, and future all the time. He wrote the book. Like any good author, He knows the beginning, the story, and the end. I do not believe that foreknowledge is the same as forced direction.
Peter
Welcome @islaava135. Glad you are here.
Peter