Notice that God tells David what would happen if he stayed, but he didn’t stay! God described a future that didn’t happen.
So, God looks down through all the possible futures of all of the possible worlds and creations He could create within whatever bounds He had chosen for Himself. I imagine that in some of them I accepted His free gift and in some of them I did not. In some of them I freely chose to accept His love for me and in others I freely rejected His goodness to me (heck, maybe there was only a few in which I freely accepted His love, or maybe even just one – yikes!). All of these possibilities existed in His mind. In the end (or rather “in the beginning”) He chose one.
In doing so, He knowingly, and foreknowingly and Sovereignly chose me.
I freely chose Him, but only in the world He chose to create.
I chose freely by His design; He chose sovereignly in His creation.
Now, this may not be accurate as to what happened when God created, but it shows that it is possible and even reasonable for God to choose me and for me to choose God without the two coming in contradiction to the other.
I want to express carefully that I do not believe it is because of any positive aspect of me that I 
would have chosen God. In my hopelessness and helplessness, He has given grace freely. If I can do anything, it is that I accept His free and perfect gift. I may not even do that, but I am certain that is the most that I do… perhaps that is part of being created in His image – which all humans are.
Salvation is a gift offered from the grace, kindness, love, goodness and identity of God. Me asking has nothing to do with Him offering and giving. The most that I believe a human can do is accept. It is probably not unlike a man hanging from a cliff accepting a hand even as he begins to fall, and possibly not even that.
Again, I am not an expert on these matters, though I am fascinated by them – and love when Christian thinkers break out of the mold of common but rut-based thinking. However, William Lane Craig IS an expert on them, and I will offer one link to some of his work.
Ok, and I also want to comment on another theological view that is often linked to Middle Knowledge… though it is not the same thing at all.
At different times in the past, an ancient heresy has re-risen. (Typically new theologies are just recycled old heresies). Recently, it has been called “Open Theism” or something similar.
“Open” is a reference to the theory that God does not know the actual future – but ONLY the possible futures. Make sense?
In other words, the idea is that God knows all possible futures, but He doesn’t know which one will actually happen.
This was based on many different passages , especially those that that reference God “regretting” something (Gen 6:6 and 1 Sam 15:35) and others, like the one I listed above about David. How can someone who knows the future regret something? (I will explain how in a second, I think).
The idea is that God knows all that is knowable (omniscient) but that the future isn’t knowable. It was largely brought back into vogue to make God less “responsible” for when bad things happen. (It actually fails in this regard, since it doesn’t limit God’s omnipotence or omnipresence and since
God would still be there and would still be powerful enough to act)…
However, passages like Isaiah 46:9-10 indicates that God knows the future and even reveals it sometimes. (the whole idea of prophecy challenges the thought that God doesn’t know the future)… Psalm 139:4 indicates that God knows words before I form them. Obviously, any passage that talks about God’s predestination and foreknowledge defies the idea that God doesn’t know the future.
Further, there is a much simpler explanation for the question of God “regretting” (and Middle Knowledge is a better explanation for the Samuel passage about David fleeing Saul). Consider: if I really want to eat a dozen donuts, but order a salad, I will regret not getting the donuts (donuts and the gospel) at an emotional level … even though I am choosing something different.
Any individual with emotions can experience the emotion of regret – even if they knew the outcome in advance! Imagine that you had come upon a train accident and dozens of people you hurt and in need of help. The problem is that you can only help one; but if you choose to help one, you will doom all of the others. You would choose one to help, knowing the consequence for the others… then you would still regret all of those who died.
God knew what He was doing in both cases… and still emotionally regretted what had happened.
Many of the passages that come up in the discussion can be understood this way – as either God expressing an emotion or just trying to communicate with us in our terms (just like any good parent, counselor, or teacher does)… or when God asks a question (like asking Adam and Eve where they were). Does a question require ignorance on the part of the asker? Of course not. Ask any attorney, counselor or parent whether it is common to ask a question you know the answer to.
This covers a lot of the questions that come up in regards to Calvinist theology in comparison to others. I, personally, do think that much of the reformer’s theology is accurate, but I do not think it necessarily cancels out other perspectives.
If the Bible teaches two ideas that seem contradictory to us, then we have a problem; God doesn’t have a problem. Why would we be so quick to give up? Why be so quick to draw lines in the sand and assume that our understanding in complete enough to alienate?
I assume the answer is that it makes us feel better to draw the width and breadth of an important issue like this and then just lean on our own understanding from that point forward… but in my experience in is the very tough issues that move me to a deeper walk with God – issues like prayer, grief, and others.
Pastor Legg: I love your articles. They are scholarly yet easy to understand. Please keep it up. Articles like yours have helped my walk with God. Calvinism was causing my love for God to grow cold. Now I have the love for God I has when I became a Christian. I can believe God is good, and does not cause evil. He truly wants all to be saved even though he knows all will not be. Thank you for your articles and your ministry.
wow, this is super encouraging! Thanks for fanning the flame of the Spirit in me.
By the way, I’m in total agreement with you that open theism is a heresy. Well said. It seems to mar the God of the Bible so badly that He is no longer recognizable.
In light of our brief conversations about Calvinism in the past, I’ve tried to think through your position a bit. It’s definitely an interesting perspective, and I’m still trying to process the implications of it, but it doesn’t seem that it reconciles sovereignty and free will. The reason it doesn’t seem to solve the problem is that if God used His middle knowledge to determine in which scenario you would choose Him, you may have had a hypothetical freedom within the realm of possible outcomes, but you never any actual freedom, since you have, from birth, been inescapably locked into the scenario God selected for you. In other words, because you can only make the choices God decided you would make, there is no true freedom.
Regarding the law of noncontradiction, I agree that sovereignty and human responsibility seem contradictory, but I relegate it to mystery, not to copout, but because I think that’s what we’re left with. The difficulty for me is not about whether people have total freedom of the will, but how sovereignty and human responsibility relate to the “problem” of evil, which, to me, is highlighted most clearly in Romans 9:19, which still perplexes me. What’s interesting is that it doesn’t seem that even Paul himself had an intellectually satisfying answer to that question, or, if he had one, he certainly did not communicate it. So, while this is certainly still mysterious to me, I’m thankful for C.S. Lewis’ comments on his struggle with the issue of evil, because I thought for a period of half a year or so, that this issue was going to shipwreck my faith, resulting in my becoming an atheist. They were rough days, but God provided C.S. Lewis, who, acknowledging his own prior struggle with evil, wrote:
“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust…? Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too—for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense. Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple” (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity).
For me, those words were as sweet as honey.
Regarding free will, I can’t find anywhere in Scripture that states or even necessarily implies that people have a truly free will. Rather, it seems that people are entirely enslaved to sin, so that, “no one seeks for God” (Rom. 3:11). Regarding love, I don’t buy the notion that truly loving God requires the completely free choice of man, since the point is not where my love for God originated (i.e., God’s choice or mine), but whether I genuinely love Him now. If I genuinely love God now, and that love originated with God, I don’t understand how that could mean that I don’t actually love Him now.
I’d love your thoughts if you have time. Thanks for posting. I think these can be great in-house conversations to have.
ok, no time to go into a lot of detail here – but, your first paragraph misses that God actually knows all the possible futures – within the options He ordains… including what I would do with true and real freedom in various situations. These are not hypothetical only – He knows the actuality of it. As humans, we cannot do this, but as close as we come is a “no brainer”…
If I offer you $1000 free and clear to do with whatever you want, I am pretty darn close to %100 sure that you, Chad, would take it. Being virtually certain of what you will do with your complete freedom doesn’t take away your freedom – nor would if I were actually 100% sure. Now, if, knowing that you would take it, I choose NOT to offer it to you, am I taking away your freedom? Not at all. You are still just as free – but you are not receiving the chance to take it.
If God knew that in the universe in which I was mistreated in a certain way, that it was the only universe in which I would freely accept Him, then Him choosing to create that universe is His sovereign choice, but it is the only way that I would freely (actually freely) choose Him.
Of course it is mystery, but that doesn’t mean there arent ways of understanding it coherently. It is unique, therefore it will always be a mystery, no matter how much we understand it.
And I totally agree with your problem of suffering issue – it is, by far, the toughest of all issues for a Theist… but since I grew up around professors, I know that it is very possible and likely that there are many areas where an expert understands things in ways that I do not and never will know. I think this is true of God and human suffering. He understands in ways that we do not… in fact, I think that is what is being explained at the end of Job… if we cannot do the easy things (hook crocodiles, create stars, etc) then we cannot hope to grasp the hard stuff, like the complexities of human suffering… so we either trust God that He knows what He is doing, or we don’t.
Hey brother. Thanks for the reply. It’s fun debating in-house stuff with a godly man. To make sure I understand your position, tell me if the following accurately reflects the case you’re making:
1) God is entirely sovereign.
2) People have an entirely free will.
3) God knows from eternity what choices people will make.
4) Using that knowledge, God mapped out from eternity the scenarios that would result in people using their freedom to make the decisions that would ultimately accord with God’s foreordained purposes.
If I worded something in a way that you didn’t intend, would you mind editing my list?
1. Yes
2. “entirely” is not the word I would use… “actual”is. Given God’s Omnipotence, man’s free will cannot be entire – it is given by God but not at the expense of His own, so it is still very reckoned and limited, not entire, just actual.
3. God knows from eternity all choices that a person might make, and all the possible consequences from that… and further, has, of all possible creations, selected this one to actually create and providentially embrace.
4. yes, except that might be thought of as 2.5 rather than 4… or even better as another part of 3. God didn’t learn these things sequentially, since He always knew all of them. He didn’t have to make one set of decisions based on the other. They are both eternal knowledge to Him.
Christsupreme: Good points. You do think deeply on these issues. Check out http://www.reasonablefaith.org. This site may help answer some of your questions. Regarding middle knowledge, God’s knowing you will do an act (before He decides to create you) is a truth independent of God’s will. He knows you will freely do the act IF He creates you. Now if He decides to create you anyway, sure you will certainly do the act, but you still don’t have to. You could do something else. You won’t, but you could. Just because God knows infallible what you will do, doesn’t mean you have to. It is certain, but not necessary. Knowledge is not causative. You are not “locked in” to doing the act. If you were to choose differently, then God, from all eternity, would have known something different. I hope that helps. So yes, God is sovereign. He knows all that will come to pass, and has determined what He will cause, but also what He will simply allow. That way God is not the Author of sin and evil.
Jeff, I am very aware of Dr. Craig and his brilliant work. He was the one who introduced me to Middle Knowledge. I think if you read all of these articles, you will actually see links to my articles on Middle Knowledge as well referencing Dr Craig!