Trying to get our minds around God is impossible, but that’s alright because we don’t have to. We can know enough about God to so order our lives to please Him. Not the least of the problems we have in understanding an infinite God is those things which have to do with time. God is timeless – no beginning and no end. He is not governed by time and knows everything before it ever happens.
Problems surround the doctrine of predestination – not that God has a problem with it but man certainly does, because man is governed by time and space whereas God is not. Isa. 46:10; Rom. 4:17 God’s foreknowledge is such that He knows what might have happened but did not – Matt. 11:21-24. John Calvin is famous (or infamous) for his slant on predestination. He believed, and rightly so I believe, that God knows everything that will come to pass. He knows who will be saved and who will be lost. I believe that is right too. Where Calvin erred was in suggesting that man had no free-will. He, and many others, had difficulty in seeing how God’s foreknowledge allowed man’s free-will. I remember reading a man in a brotherhood magazine who opined; Does he know who will live, what they will do, and whether they will be saved? Does He know when and how each person will die? If he knows these things, then they are immutable. If God, in His sovereignty, knows the hours of your birth and death, then these things are unchangeable. No need to fret. If Jehovah maps out your life in advance, nothing can change it, for He is God. Why go to a doctor or even have your teeth cleaned? If God already knows how you are going to die and when, it cannot be altered. If what God foreknows can change, then it is not foreknowledge in any meaningful sense. I suggest his error is that his understanding of God’s foreknowledge is too limited. He seems to be suggesting that God can foreknow if a person should choose to do one thing but He is unable to foreknow that that same person would subsequently change their mind! It would be just as easy for God to foreknow that if a certain person never went to a doctor he would die of such-and-such a disease by age 50, but if he had regular checks and the odd operation he would live to 92. Either scenario is just as easily foreknown by God. And God can just as easily foreknow whether we will be disobedient to His will or whether we will obey the gospel and be faithful unto death.
Some have tried to solve the problem, as they see it, by suggesting that God chooses not to know certain things. But if God limits His foreknowledge of only some things, He must have a reason. That reason would be that He knew that at some point in the future it would be expedient for Himself not to know before what would happen. So, it would mean that he would have to foreknow why it was best for Him not to foreknow! The problem is like a person trying to forget a certain thing by remembering each day what it is he wants to forget so he can forget it!
The point is, it is an assumption, an erroneous assumption, to suggest that God can only have infinite foreknowledge by taking away man’s free-will. You may come to me and say you are going to steal a plane from the airport and take it up to 5000 metres and put it into a vertical dive under full power and drive it into the ground. I know that you will die if you do that, but I have not taken away your free-will. I may even try to talk you out of it, but I would still not have violated your free-will.
But our thought in this article is if God knows everything, does He need to test in order to see if man will stand the test? We have made the point often that even though worship is directed toward God and according to His design, it does not benefit God or add to Him in any way. Now we could say with every confidence that it please Him to see His children rendering obedient worship, but it does not add to Him as if He needed anything.
Well, couldn’t He, with His foreknowledge, just know who would pass the tests of faith if they were applied, and proceed on that basis and let us off the hook and live some sort of idyllic untested life? Wouldn’t it be great if when at school the teacher said, Now Ian, I just know you’re a good student, so you don’t have to sit for the exam – I’ll just give you an A+. That never happened to me.
Now, first, if God did that, it would be a form of predestination that would get a lot of howls on Judgement Day for it would not be seen to be fair in any sense of the word. Those who had endured hard lives would be able to bring the same arguments against God that Satan did in the case of Job – these people were faithful to you because you put a hedge around them to shield them from the hard blows of life. Now, of course, God has the power and wisdom to allow a whole range of trials to confront individual Christians. Remember the labourers who had worked all day in the heat who complained about those who only worked one hour in the cool of the afternoon and yet received the same reward? It seems obvious, to me at least, that the trials that come our way are of a different sort than those which came upon the early Christians who lived in the days of Nero and his ilk.
But, second, God is trying to work a work in His children, and there are things that cannot be accomplished in us without the trials of life. We’re as familiar with the great trials of faith in Abraham’s life when he was asked to sacrifice Isaac as we are with the trials of Job’s sufferings. Look at the language of God in Gen. 22:12 in relation to Abraham sacrificing Isaac. Didn’t God know this already? After all, He knows the end from the beginning (cf. Gen. 18:17-19). So why did He say it? The Bible is addressed to man, not God, and so God has to speak on man’s level when He speaks. God may even speak about one thing but have another’s benefit in mind (cf. 1 Cor. 9:9,10). So who benefitted, Abraham or God? Abraham was the one who benefitted. How was he benefitted by what God put him through? The same question can be raised about Job as well as others.
One response to testing can be seen in Acts 5:41. The apostles being tested counted themselves as worthy to some degree, bearing in mind 1 Cor. 10:13. The bigger the test the more one is thought worthy. Your faith can be found unto praise and honour and glory (1 Pet. 1:7). Even Jesus was tried and tested.
It also needs to be considered that one gains a greater faith through trials. To build a bigger shed sometimes you have to knock down an old shed. To build a bigger faith you sometimes have to have an old faith knocked down. When we speak of faith we are not speaking of faith in faith – biblical faith is not some sort of religious P.M.A. (positive mental attitude). Our faith has an object and that object is God and it is in Him that the power lies. It’s not the size of the faith, it’s the size of the God who is the object of it. A faith the size of a mustard seed in a great God in Heaven will move mountains, said Jesus. A bigger and better faith is really a coming to a bigger and better realization of God. We are stunted by beliefs that God is only able to look after us if our health is good, our bank balance is healthy, and our job is secure. Sometimes the only way we can get beyond these weak images of God is if He takes such things away from us and we still survive. We start to learn that God with one hand tied behind His back is greater than us with both hands free. God can lead us through the wilderness of life and sustain us by His power. When you look at the types in the Old Testament: baptism into Moses was a type of baptism into Christ; crossing Jordan into the promised land was a type of the death of the Christian and his entry into Heaven; carry this forward and it is true our life here equates to the Israelites journey through the wilderness. You can imagine the scene on the shore of the Red Sea: across the sea behind them is the land of bondage; washed up on the shore are the dead bodies of the Egyptians; the women sing and dance for they are a free people: wonderful. Then they pick up their possessions and turn to follow God by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar for fire by night. But he didn’t lead them by the easy route around the coastline – He led them out into the desert! That’s where a God is tested, Can He really sustain a nation of several million in an inhospitable wilderness for 40 years!? There’s only one way to find out.
It is through the tests and trials of life that we can learn patience, if we choose to be exercised thereby. Jas. 1:3ff. We not only learn about God we learn about ourselves. Examine yourselves whether you be in the faith – how strong is your faith? It’s the exam that confirms whether we know the material or not. It’s the load that determines whether the bracket is strong enough. In Luke 2:31,32 Jesus warned that the Devil was going to test the disciples. Pete was sifted as wheat – he failed the test- he thought he was a shoe-in to pass it. He learned something about himself. Abraham failed the test of Egypt and learned something about himself only to find out later in Philistine country he still had a ways to go. Passing the test gives us the sense of “I must be converted” – it’s a way of measuring strength – “My convictions are real”. we don’t know till we’re tested. Jim McGuiggan has an imaginary conversation between God and Job after Job’s horrendous ordeal
God: Something happened behind the scenes you were not to know. Job: You shouldn’t have punished me! God: I didn’t punish you. You didn’t do anything wrong. Job: Then you shouldn’t have cursed me. God: I didn’t curse you; I blessed you. Job: You call this blessing?! God: You were slandered and I went to your defence. Job: You call attacking my body “defending me”?! God: It wasn’t your body that was under attack – it was your integrity, your relationship with me! Job: Your putting me to grief made even my friends doubt my integrity. God: I know, but we both know they were wrong. Job: They wouldn’t have doubted my integrity if you hadn’t put me to grief. God: They could never have been sure of your integrity – or their own – if I hadn’t put you to grief. I was betting on you! Job: Your betting on me cost me a lot! God: Yes, that’s very often the case. But the drama isn’t finished until it’s finished. Job: Because of my pain, your silence, and their words, I got to thinking you were punishing me because you thought I was bad, because you were disappointed in me. God: No I put you on the ash heap because I knew you wouldn’t disappoint me. I put you to grief not because you were bad but because you were good. You can’t know how proud I am of you.
God already knew the outcome, but Job didn’t. And it was Job who was the better man, more understanding man, wiser man,…..in the end.