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FREEWILL AND THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD
There are three great words: “omnipotence,” “omnipresence” and “omniscience.” God is all powerful, everywhere present and all knowing. Omniscience (pronounced ohm NISH shuns) means that God knows everything past, present and future. The word that has to do with God's knowledge of the future is called by theologians “prescience” (pronounced PREE shuns). The following are only a few Scriptures which prove God's omniscience (which includes His prescience as well). “He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names. Great is our Lord, and of great power: his understanding is infinite,” (Psalm 147:4-5). “O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether,” (Psalm 139:1-4). And in Matthew 10:30 the Lord Jesus teaches that God's knowledge includes the most minute details: “But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.” Now let us reason together a bit. The fact that God knows what is going to happen in the future is not what determines things to happen: fore-ordination and predestination do that and both are taught in the Bible. But think about this, please. If God knows that it is going to snow at a certain place tomorrow at 6:00 AM, will you not agree that it is going to snow at that precise place and time? Is that not logical? If there is a God and if He is all knowing and if He knows something is going to happen then that thing will and must happen otherwise God is not all knowing. Logically it must be so. So what happened to the theory of human freewill? If God knows a man is going to do a certain thing, reject Bible truth, for instance, can that man do otherwise? Or does his will acting in accord with his fallen nature cause him to commit such a sin? Logically and biblically it is absolutely certain that all events that God knows are going to happen will happen. So the man will sin. He will act according to his depraved or fallen human nature that he got from his father Adam. And that man, because his nature loves sin thinks when he sins that it is his freewill that enabled him to do it when it was his fallen nature that caused him to do it – that made him want to do it. So where is freewill? It is a myth! It existed only in Adam and Eve who were created in a state of untested holiness. But all of their posterity inherited their fallen sinful nature which loves to sin. Adam was tempted by someone external to himself, but we are tempted by our own internal sin nature. “But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed,” (James 1:14).
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