Prescience / Foreknowledge / Foresight

This view is correct in only one point, and that being.. that election took place in eternity. It is wrong in that it makes the ground of election to be something in the sinner rather than something in God. Please read Eph 1:4-6 where election and predestination are said to be "According to the good pleasure of His will" and "To the praise of the glory of His grace".

Eph 1:4-6 According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: 5 Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, 6 To the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved.

There are a few things in which many would object to this view.

1st ..this is not what the Bible teaches about mans nature. The Bible does not describe the natural man as having faith.

1 Cor 2:14 But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

John 3:3 Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Both repentance and faith are gifts of God, and God did not see these graces in any sinner apart from His purpose to give them. "Him hath God exalted with His right hand to be a Prince and a Saviour, for to give repentance to Israel, and forgiveness of sins", Acts 5:13 "When they heard these things they held their peace, and glorified God, saying, `Then hath God also to the Gentiles granted repentance unto life'", Acts 11:18. "In meekness instructing those that oppose themselves; if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledgement of the truth" 2Ti 2:25. See also:

Eph 2:8-10 For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: 9 Not of works, lest any man should boast. 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.

1 Cor 3:5 Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man?

Now please read this carefully. Election was not because of foreseen faith, but because of foreseen unbelief. It is not the election of God's faithful ones, but the faith of God's elect, if we are to keep Scriptural words

Titus 1:1 Paul, a servant of God, and an apostle of Jesus Christ, according to the faith of God's elect, and the acknowledging of the truth which is after godliness;

It makes the human race differ by nature, whereas, the Bible says, we are all by nature the children of wrath and all clay of the same lump.

Eph 2:3 Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.

Rom 9:21 Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?

Men are made to differ in the new birth.

John 3:6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.

It perverts the Scriptural meaning of the word "foreknowledge".

The word as used in the Bible means more than foreknowledge about persons, it is the foreknowledge of persons. In Rom 8:29,30, the foreknown are predestined to the image of Christ, and are called, justified and glorified.

Now...In 1Pe 1:2, the word for "foreknowledge" is the same as "foreordain" in the twentieth verse of the same chapter, where the meaning cannot be "foreknowledge" about Christ. God's foreknowledge about persons is without limitations... whereas, His foreknowledge of persons is limited to those who are actually saved and glorified.

It is open to the strongest objection that can be made against the Bible view.

It is often asked, "If certain men are elected and saved, then what is the use to preach to those who are not elected?" This is where it is seen the same as hyper-calvinism..... "If God knows who is going to repent and believe, then why preach to those who according to His foreknowledge, will not repent and believe?" Will some repent and believe whom He foreknew would not repent and believe? If so, He foreknew a lie.

This is a weakness found in many missions outreach. It is based upon sympathy for the lost rather than obedience to God's command. The inspiration of missions is made to rest upon the practical results of missionary endeavour rather than upon the delight of doing God's will. It is the principle of doing a thing because the results are satisfactory to us.

If we are faithful, God is as pleased with our efforts as when there are no results. Ponder

2 Cor 2:15-16 For we are unto God a sweet savour of Christ, in them that are saved, and in them that perish: 16 To the one we are the savour of death unto death; and to the other the savour of life unto life. And who is sufficient for these things?

The elect prior to their conversion are known only to God. We are to preach the gospel to every creature because He has commanded it. He will take care of the results. Compare with:

Isa 55:11 So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.

1 Cor 3:5-6 Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man? 6 I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.

John 6:37-45 All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out. 38 For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me. 39 And this is the Father's will which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day. 40 And this is the will of him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day. 41 The Jews then murmured at him, because he said, I am the bread which came down from heaven. 42 And they said, Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? how is it then that he saith, I came down from heaven? 43 Jesus therefore answered and said unto them, Murmur not among yourselves. 44 No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day. 45 It is written in the prophets,

And they shall be all taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto me.

It is ours to witness; it is His to make our witnessing effective.

 

The Bible tells us that God ‘knows’ His people. This not only means that He has knowledge about them but that He has chosen them and entered into personal relations with them. (The same word for ‘know’ (yada) was used in the Old Testament as a euphemism for sexual relations between a man and his wife (e.g. Genesis 4.1; 4.25 and often)).
For example, in the Bible God says of Abraham, ‘Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him. For I have known (yatha’) him, to the end that he may command his children and his household after him, that they may keep the way of the Lord, to do justice and judgment; to the end that the Lord may bring upon Abraham that which he has spoken of him (Genesis 18.18-19). Here God’s personal call to Abraham (Genesis 12.1) and His covenants with him are described in terms of ‘knowing’ him, and results in godly living and the fulfilment of His covenant.
This is why God can later rebuke Israel, saying, ‘You only have I known of all the families of the earth, therefore I will visit on you all your iniquities’ (Amos 3.2). Because the nation of Israel has been specially favoured by being chosen by Him, and has turned away from Him, it deserves the greater condemnation. And again He says ‘I knew you in the wilderness, in the land of great drought’ (Hosea 13.5). Then He says to the prophet, ‘according to their pasture, so were they filled; they were filled, and their heart was exalted, that is why they have forgotten me’ (Hosea 13.5-6). He had chosen the people of Israel and had entered into a covenant relationship with them in the wilderness, and later provided abundantly for them, but because of the abundance they received they became self-satisfied and forgot Him.
So when God ‘knows’ people, He does not just know about them, He chooses them and enters into personal relationship with them. But for that reason they are the more accountable. However, in the case of Israel it should be noted that it was Israel as a nation or ‘family’ that He had ‘known’. So His saving purpose did not fail. It continued in those of Israel who were faithful to Him (the remnant 1 Kings 19.18 with Romans 11.4; Isaiah 10.22; the holy seed - Isaiah 6.13). His choice of Israel was not in vain.
Thus when Paul agonises over the rejection of Israel, he has to ask himself, could God reject those whom He has ‘known’? He answers with a resounding No! For there is a remnant, including himself, who still respond to God and for this reason he declares ‘God has not cast away his people whom he foreknew’ (proginosko - Romans 11.2), for ‘there is a remnant according to the election of grace --- The elect obtained it and the rest were hardened’ (Romans 11.5, 7). So those whom He ‘foreknew’, those whom He has chosen by grace, are still faithful to Him. The verb means in this context ‘to choose and enter into relations with beforehand’.
This is extended to Christians in general in one of the great verses in the Bible. Speaking of those who are ‘called according to His purpose’ he says ‘For those whom he ‘foreknew ’ (proginosko), he also foreordained (proorizo) to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. And whom he foreordained, them he also called, and whom he called, them he also justified, and whom he justified, them he also glorified’ (Romans 8.28-30). So the process begins with God’s foreknowledge. But this is not just to be seen as intellectual knowledge beforehand, but as a deliberate choice in the past by which He, as it were, entered into personal relations with them. Then, because they have been chosen, the rest follows, they are predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, then called, then justified, and finally they are glorified. Their being chosen through God’s ‘foreknowing’ is the precursor of the whole.
The verb to know is used in the same sense in Galatians. ‘But now, after you have come to know God, or rather to be known of God, how do you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elements, in which you desire again to be in bondage?’ (Galatians 4.9). Here again to be ‘known’ by God is distinctly personal. God has ‘known’ them and entered into personal relations with them.
Peter teaches the same thing when he describes Christians as ‘elect according to the foreknowledge (prognosis) of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ’ (1 Peter 1.1-2). They are ‘elect’ because God has chosen them and entered into relations with them beforehand, and the purpose of their choosing is that they might be cleansed and obedient. He accomplishes this ‘through sanctification of the Spirit’. On the one side is God’s activity resulting from His pre-choice, the separating and purifying work of the Spirit, and this results on the other side in obedience and cleansing.
This significance of foreknowledge is illustrated when Peter could say of Jesus Himself that ‘Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge (prognosis) of God, you, by the hands of lawless men, did crucify and slay’ (Acts 2.23). Here the will of God is clearly in action in His ‘foreknowing’. He is not just ‘knowing about it beforehand’, but choosing for it to happen. It results from His determinate counsel. Peter tells us that this ‘foreknowing’ (proginosko) of the Lamb without blemish Who was slain occurred ‘before the foundation of the world’ (1 Peter 1.20). And again he prays to God, ‘For of a truth in this city against your holy Servant Jesus, whom you did anoint, both Herod, and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together, in order to do whatever your hand and your counsel pre-determined (proorizo) to come about’ (Acts:4:27-28). So both fore-knowing (proginosko) and pre-determination (proorizo) are part of the same action of God’s will in relation to Jesus as they were in relation to His people.
The will of God lies at the root of His foreknowing. For God ‘has made known to us the mystery of His will, in accordance with His good pleasure which He purposed beforehand (protithenai) in Himself, unto a dispensation of the fulness of times, to sum up all things in Christ, both things in Heaven and things on earth, in Him in Whom also we were made a heritage, having been foreordained (proorizo) according to the purpose of Him Who works all things after the counsel of His own will’ (Ephesians 1.9-11). Here Paul takes us right into the heart of ‘the mystery of the will of God’, and that is that His aim is finally, in His outworking in the fulness of times, ‘to sum up all things in Christ’. And he stresses that this is in accordance with God’s purpose and within His good pleasure. Then he brings out that through Christ we also have our part in this ‘having been foreordained according to the purpose of Him Who works all things after the counsel of His own will’ to become part of God’s inheritance. Here all that we have been speaking about of God’s foreknowing, is set within God’s eternal purposes.
As Paul puts it elsewhere. ‘He saved us and called us with a holy calling, --- according to His own pre-purpose (prothesis) and grace which was given us in Christ Jesus before times eternal and has now been fully made known by the appearing of our Saviour Christ Jesus’ (2 Timothy 1.9). So our calling was ‘before times eternal’. Or as Paul puts it in Ephesians 1.4-5, ‘He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blemish before Him in love, having foreordained (proorizo) us to being adopted as sons, according to the good pleasure of His will’. Here again His foreknowing us and choosing us is placed directly in eternity.
This explains the words of Jesus where He says, ‘All whom the Father gives to me will come to me’ (John 6.37). And ‘this is the will of Him Who sent me that of all that He has given me I should lose nothing’ (John 6.39). And ‘no man can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him’ (John 6.44). Here Jesus clearly teaches that there are those who have been given to Him by the Father, whom the Father will draw to Him.This is confirmed in John 17.6. ‘I have made your name fully known to the men whom you gave me out of the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word’. Note the order. They were the Father’s, then He gave them to the Son. The belonging comes before the outward response. Note further that it results in them keeping His word. Salvation is God’s gift, but there is no salvation without transformation. In most cases the work of election is imputed to the Father. It is God as Father Who calls, enters into relationship with His own, adopts them and gives them to the Son. This does not mean that the whole Godhead is not involved in the work. It is because the Son is the mediator of God’s saving purposes that the Father is shown as the source. Jesus makes clear that He and the Father work together in all aspects of God’s saving purposes.

Dr. Pete Pettingill http://www.geocities.com/athens/delphi/4027/aboutpredestination.html

 

Psalm 1

NOTE...Notice the parallelism in the shaping or sharpening of the subject. The person "Blessed"...walks...stands...and then sets. This is parallel..ungodly...sinners...scornful. Both "sticks" follow the same sharpening path. There is a shaping of the counsel given to a higher level in degree. A preson 1st walks by with only a small bit of counsel, a word of two from the ungodly. The 2nd step is to stop and stand in the way of the sinner as you listen to their words. Last you sit down and drink in all that the scorner has to say. But those that are blessed, do not follow this path.

Verse 1 is a negative way of saying those that are not blessed do follow this path.

"But" in verse 2 indicates a contradistinction to what we have just described in verse 1.

I think verse 5 is a great play on words pointing back to the words in verse one. The statement is still negative but is pointing toward the ungodly this time. The ungodly are driven away in verse 4. (Isa 40) Therefore the ungodly is not "known" in verse 6. Please notice the parallelism is that the LORD does not KNOW the ungodly. The ungodly is left to be driven away.

Young reads this way...
For Jehovah is knowing the way of the righteous, And the way of the wicked is lost!

This may give us the best picture of "knowing" we can find in the Bible. God knows His own, and the wicked are lost.


In Christ....James

 

Y'all...

Why don't you just take the text at hand and understand it??

Those who reside as "aliens" are Gentiles. They were "chosen," like Israel, to the pruposes of God. God knew that they would be 1) saved "by the sanctifying work of the Spirit" in their hearts. That is John 16, right -- "And when He comes, He will convict the world of sin... because they beleive not on Me..."

2) To "obey" Jesus command "Ye must be born again." Who obeyed Christ and were sprinkled with the blood of His forgiveness -- God or the "aliens??" No matter how you massage it, it was the "aliens" who had "obeyed" who were saved, right? so what was forknown? That God would give them salvation or that He would give it to those who respond in obedience?

3) By repentance, "sprinkled by His blood."

To make the OP point, does the text say God didn't know or that Peter was writing to any Gentiles that WEREN'T saved? No. He only foreknew them who would trust in Jesus. "Chosen" obviously refers to God's purposes, not to salvation.

skypair

 

Great Christmas, Gordon

And of course you are right! :thumbs:

Three verses I'd like to add to the discussion Gal 3:22 and Rom 3:22 and Rom 4:5.

"But the scripture hath concluded all under sin, that the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them that believe."

"Even the righteousness of God [salvation] which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference:"

See, faith IS GIVEN by God (as these others say) to those who believe. No argument. In fact, it is called a SPIRITUAL GIFT (1Cor 12:9).

But belief is NOT given and it is NOT a "work." It is something the HEARER of the Spirit has to do for himself -- as in Rom 4:5, "But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his [God-given] faith is counted for righteousness."

See, the "natural man," indeed "the whole world," can only hear one thing -- the conviction of the Holy Spirit "of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment." John 16:8

So God FOREKNEW who the believers would be and predestined THEM alone to be conformed to the image of His Son. (Rom 8:29-30). Did He "forelove" them? Sure! He "foreloved" everyone, "the world," John 3:16!! Did He have to choose salvation for the believers? Absolutely not! Can God not foreknow those who will choose Him instead?

skypair

 

I'll only respond to this one quote of Gordon's. This one makes him miss the mark by a mile.

God does not have to learn a thing from man or anything else. He is all knowing. If He had to learn what man would do, He would not be all knowing.

 

Wow, I agree with reformedbeliever!

You cannot separate God's omniscience with his omnipresence. If God knows all without being everywhere, He is bound by His present location and therefore time and space. These two (omnipresence/omnitemporalness and omniscience) coincide perfectly with election and predestination.

 

Don't get too excited webdog.... this is probably the only thing we agree on.... lol Actually we probably agree on most all the fundamentals.

 

...as do most cal's and non-cal's. Immutable truth is truth for all, but it is when either side claims their views on the mechanics of this immutable truth is unquestioned truth...we have no immutable truth at all, but only opinionated truth

 

Oh?? Then why did He "repent" of having made man, Gen 6:6?? I think you don't understand the sovereignty that God gives to man, eh?

skypair

 

Huh? God is present like the tree falling in the forest -- if no one hears it, did it really make a sound?

God is omnipresent wherever man is. But unless you are a "pantheist," God is not present where man isn't (unless you can show me the scripture ).

skypair

 

Then He's not omnipresent...therefore not God.

 

I think you have omnipresence and pantheism mixed up.

Omnipresence is that God cannot be contained and is everywhere in his creation (even where man isn't - of course he's in places where there are no men!).

Pantheism is God is in all creation (including man). In pantheism, God is not distinct from creation whereas as theistic omnipresence, God is present everywhere but is distinct from the creation.

 

Gordon.

Comes off a little "Clintonesque" ("That depends of what the meaning of 'is' is.") but alright.

It is clear to me that faith is given but belief is not. If one has to believe to be saved, then the issue is what connects belief to faith that is given by Someone else? And that would be repentance which is belief "that has legs." Baptists often call it "appropriating the promise of salvation to oneself" lest you "believe in vain."

I don't think Calvinists can argue with this. I was listening to John Mac on the way to work the other day bloviating on God's sovereignty saying "God rules everything." And that is true! BUT most often He choses NOT to exercise His power over Satan or over us so that we might come to reciprocate His love! :love2: -- or else suffer from the consequences of "cause and effect."

Same with salvation. He could just make us believe -- or make puppets out of us if he wanted to. He could just give us salvation without anything on our part (good example: through infant baptism). That's not the God any of us knows, is it?

skypair