Saturday, October 18, 2014

God's Knowledge and Our Will

I have read several books that have tried to reconcile God's foreknowledge and our free will: The Bondage of the Will by Martin Luther, Freedom of the Will by Jonathan Edwards, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God by J. I. Packer, and others. I am reading the puritan, Stephen Charnock, right now. I do not know if I agree with his approach, but his conclusion seems sound. In the end, we must affirm God's wisdom and sovereignty along with our responsibility for our sin. It is matter of trust in God's promises and faith in His character as exhibited in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Stephen Charnock
But what if the foreknowledge of God and the liberty of the will cannot be fully reconciled by man? Shall we therefore deny a perfection in God to support a liberty in ourselves? Shall we rather fasten ignorance upon God and accuse him of blindness to maintain our liberty? God doth foreknow everything, and yet that there is liberty in the creature are both certain; but how fully to reconcile them, may the understanding of man. Some truths the disciples were not of bearing in the days of Christ; and several truths our understandings cannot reach as long as the world doth last; yet in the mean time we on the one hand take heed of conceiving God ignorant, and on the hand of imagining the creature necessitated: the one will render God imperfectm and the other will seem to render him unjust, in punishing man that sin which he could not avoid, but was brought into by a fatal necessity. God is sufficient to render a reason of his own proceedings and clear all at the day of judgment; it is a part of man's curiosity, since the fall, to be prying into God's secrets, things too high for him, whereby he singes his own wings, and confounds his own understanding. It is a cursed affectation that runs in the blood of Adam's posterity, to know as God, though our first father smarted, and ruined his posterity in that attempt; the ways and knowledge of God are as much 'above our thoughts and conceptions, as the heavens are above the earth,' Isa lv. 9, and so sublime, that we cannot comprehend them in their true and just greatness; his designs are so mysterious, and the ways of his conduct so profound, that it is not possible to dive into them. The force of our understandings is below his infinite wisdom, and therefore we should adore him with an humble astonishment, and cry out with the apostle; Rom. xi 33, 'Oh the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!' Whenever we meet with depths that we cannot fathom, let us remember that he is God, and we his creatures; and not be guilty of so great extravagance, as to think that a subject can pierce into all the secrets of a prince, or a work understand all the operations of the artificer. Let us only resolve not to fasten any thing on God that is unworthy of the perfection of his nature, and dishonourable to the glory of his majesty; nor imagine that we can ever step out of the rank of creatures to the glory of the Deity, to understand fully everything in his nature.
(pp. 219-220, The Existence and Attributes of God, Volume 7 of 50 Greatest Christian Classics, 2 Volumes in 1)

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