you, that you will be who you are, when you will come into the pattern of world history and what part you will play in it. And it is true that He also knows all that concerns you, but His primary object of foreknowledge is based upon something. What is it? How does God foreknow who will be in this world and then make His choice? I think we can answer that very easily. He does it the same way we foreknow things. W e are made in the image of God in this respect. W e think after the pattern that He does. It is true that He does it in infiniteness and we do it in finiteness but nevertheless the principle remains the same. Take my church building for example. Before it was built we had an artist’s conception of it drawn up and it looked very much as it actually does now that it has been constructed. Was that artist gifted with omniscience that he could see what this building would look like? How did he know, out of all the possible shapes and sizes and colors of buildings, what this building was going to look like even before a stone was laid or a spade of earth was turned up or one stick was placed on top of another? You say, "That’s easy; he drew it up from the blueprint. Somebody determined what it would be like.” That is exactly the way God knows! He determines what takes place and therefore He foreknows what’s going to take place. The only alternative to that is to maintain that God doesn’t foreknow everything. I f you and I really have free will in these mat ters of choice in the ultimate absolute sense, then we have to say that God has to wait until we make up our minds before He knows what we are going to do. But of course God doesn’t. "Known unto God are all his works from the beginning of the world.” He doesn’t have to wait until we make up our minds to know what we are going to do. Not in any sense at all. It becomes very clear if you think it through on the basis that God determines and therefore He foreknows and His election is based upon His determination. I f you would like to see a Scripture that sets that forth you will find it in Acts 2 *2 3 where Peter is preaching to the assembled hosts of Israel and he is reminding them of what they had done to CONTINUED
may be in us. Remember how Paul says flatly in 1 Corinthians 1:27, "God has chosen the foolish [weak] things of the world” and the despised and the things that are not to set at naught the things that are. He’s chosen the castoff and the foolish and the ignorant that He might put to naught the wisdom of this world. God has chosen some of us who haven’t much potential and so it is demonstrably true that this minister’s reason ing is a completely false basis for election. Others have attempted to explain this dilemma by going back to foreknowledge. Quoting 1 Peter 1:2 they say we are, "Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanc tification of the Spirit, u n t o obed i enc e and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ. . . . ” "Elect according to the foreknowledge of God.” What does that mean? "W e ll,” they say, “ you see, God knows everything. God looked down through the centuries and He saw us and He knew that when the Word was preached to us we would believe, and so knowing who was going to believe, He elected them.” Unfortunately that’s a very backward way of putting it. There isn’t really any election of God there, is there? It’s man’s choice and then God just confirms it and in that case it is man who makes the election and not God. That in itself is sufficient to answer this argu ment but look at it a little bit further. A t first it sounds very reasonable that since God foreknew what you were going to do that He simply chose you on the basis of what He foreknew — elect according to the foreknowledge of God. But what does it say He foreknew? W e just assume that God foreknew that we would decide but Scripture never says that anywhere. The only place in which it mentions the object of God’s foreknowledge is in Romans 8 : 28 , 29 , " . . . we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be con formed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.” Now notice it doesn’t say what He foreknew but whom He foreknew. The foreknowledge of God has to do largely with who we are, the fact that we exist. Scripture makes clear that God foreknows
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The King's Business/January 1958
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