“Now David knew that Saul was plotting evil against him; so he said to Abiathar the priest, ‘Bring the ephod here.’ Then David said, ‘O LORD God of Israel, Your servant has heard for certain that Saul is seeking to come to Keilah to destroy the city on my account. Will the men of Keilah surrender me into his hand? Will Saul come down just as Your servant has heard? O LORD God of Israel, I pray, tell Your servant.’ And the LORD said, ‘He will come down.’ Then David said, ‘Will the men of Keilah surrender me and my men into the hand of Saul?’ And the LORD said, ‘They will surrender you.’ Then David and his men, about six hundred, arose and departed from Keilah, and they went wherever they could go. When it was told Saul that David had escaped from Keilah, he gave up the pursuit.”
God claimed to know something with absolute certainty but which never actually happened, though would have occurred had David stayed.679 This begs the question: How could God infallibly know what never actually happened? Did God know it because (a) He is an extremely good estimator, or (b) because God determined all things and thus knows all possibilities to the extent that He knows all that He fixed and determined, or (c) did God know it because He searches the hearts of men and knows what is in them? Jeremiah 17:10 states: “‘I, the LORD, search the heart, I test the mind, even to give to each man according to his ways, according to the results of his deeds.’”
What do Calvinists believe?
R.C. Sproul: “He knows all things that will happen because he ordains everything that does happen. This is crucial to our understanding of God’s omniscience. He does not know what will happen by virtue of exceedingly good guesswork about future events. He knows it with certainty because he has decreed it.”680
Our reply:
So, then, from the Calvinist’s perspective, should David have more precisely asked: “Did you counterfactually decree that the men of Keilah would surrender me into the hand of Saul?”
What do Calvinists believe?
God could no more infallibly know an undetermined event than to make a square circle. It’s a logical fallacy. So if man really was free, as autonomous, libertarian free-will implies, then man’s choices would be undetermined, and if undetermined, they would be logically unknowable. This is why those who consistently believe in such libertarian free-will must become Open Theists.681 Nevertheless, God does infallibly know contingencies, that is, that which would have otherwise occurred, simply as a function of all that which has been meticulously decreed.
Our reply:
To say that God can only infallibly know what He determines really lowers the bar on divine omniscience, and if that really was the case, then why even speak of divine foreknowledge at all? Why not just speak of foreordination instead?
The difficulty in this matter is that although we believe that God knows everything, we don’t exactly know how God knows anything, and which is not necessarily due to a logical conundrum, but simply due to the fact that God is a complex Being, in which we do not yet have all of the answers. For instance, we believe that God is eternal, though we cannot explain how. God exists and yet is uncreated. How? It’s not necessarily a logical conundrum, but rather a mystery that simply awaits the revelation of God’s nature.
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679 For a similar discussion on God’s “Middle Knowledge,” see also Jeremiah 38:17-24, Matthew 11:20-24 and Matthew 26:34.
680 What is Reformed Theology? (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1997), 172.
681 See the quotes provided in the following article:
http://www.examiningcalvinism.com/files/Articles/Omniscience.html.
[This post has been excerpted with permission from Richard Coords, Calvinism Answered Verse by Verse and Subject by Subject, © 2024.]
