Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of foreknowledge of God in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon.
Despite the title, I’m going to continue with some more biblical passages and then turn to the philosophical and theological issues tomorrow just because there are just too many of these, I think, to wrestle with and also because there are more books in the area that are dealing with the philosophical and theological things and not enough, in my view, that are dealing with the biblical texts.
I ended this morning by referring to a large antithesis that is often driving the discussion. Either God has a kind of sovereign, robotic control or you adopt the kind of absolute, libertarian freedom that makes God contingent, and if you work with that kind of antithesis, then because the moral consequences of robotic control (God being the author of evil immediately and directly) are so horrendous you can’t live with them, ultimately, you’re driven increasingly toward a libertarian view of freedom.
I was trying to argue it is not necessary to go down this route. There is more I will say philosophically about compatibilism tomorrow. I was merely trying to show this morning from biblical texts that some kind of compatibilism is presupposed again and again and again, and finally it’s not even possible to make sense of the cross without that sort of understanding.
Before I leave this topic entirely and come to one or two other issues, I want to say this business of arguing by antitheses is driving other parts of this issue as well. When you read Pinnock, for example, on what the Reformers thought or what Saint Augustine thought or when you read Sanders to some extent, likewise, in this vein, they choose passages from these theologians that make them sound as if what they really did hold to was some kind of sovereign robotics.
In other words, they make them sound silly, whereas, in point of fact, although they would say things that show how sweeping God’s sovereignty is, they would also say a whole lot of other things which they also held. For example, here’s Pinnock. “We may think of God primarily as an aloof monarch removed from the contingencies of the world, unchangeable in every aspect of being as an all-determining and irresistible power aware of everything that will ever happen and never taking risks, or …”
Do you see the antithesis? “… or we may understand God as a caring parent with qualities of love and responsiveness, generosity and sensitivity, openness and vulnerability, a person rather than a metaphysical principle who experiences the world, responds to what happens, relates to us, and interacts dynamically with humans.” If I were offered that antithesis by a first-year philosophy student, I’d flunk him. It’s not fair reasoning.
Or again, passage after passage that tries to make those in the broadly Reformed tradition believe in what Boyd calls the blueprint mentality, God controlling everything, but then somehow making them seem as if they don’t care about personal responsibility or there is no notion whatsoever of accountability or that God is immediately chargeable with sin.
Boyd cites Augustine, Calvin, and more recently Sproul in order to make the providential blueprint worldview as ugly as possible. See, for example, the closing paragraphs of his book, God at War. But although Calvin, for example, frequently speaks in absolute terms of the sovereignty of God, that is not all he says on the subject of good and evil.
To take a couple of examples among hundreds, in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin writes, “Moreover, though their perdition depends on the predestination of God, the cause and matter of it is in themselves. […] Whence then the depravity of man, which made him revolt from God? Lest it should be supposed that it was from his creation, God had expressly approved what proceeded from himself.”
That is, God said it was good, it was very good, it was very good, in the creation itself. “Therefore man’s own wickedness corrupted the pure nature which he had received from God, and his ruin brought with it the destruction of all his posterity. I think I have said enough not only to remove the ground, but also the pretext for throwing blame upon God.
The reprobate would excuse their sins by alleging that they are unable to escape the necessity of sinning, especially because a necessity of this nature is laid upon them by the ordination of God. We deny that they can thus be validly excused …” In other words, he’s presupposing compatibilism and the sin goes back to their charge. Thus, he denies exactly what it is he’s being charged with.
Again, speaking of Satan in various biblical texts, Calvin says, “This much, therefore, he has of himself, and his own iniquity, that he eagerly, and of set purpose, opposes God, aiming at those things which he deems most contrary to the will of God. But as God holds him bound and fettered by the curb of his power, he executes those things only for which permission has been given him, and thus, however unwilling, obeys his Creator, being forced, whenever he is required, to do Him service.”
It’s easy to find passages like that by the score, which gives a very different flavor to the debate. There are more I would have liked to have picked up, but I think I’ll press on now.
1. Passages and categories used in favor of the openness of God theology
I went through a number of them this morning, and now I want to group them in a variety of ways and see if these passages demand the conclusions that are being drawn from them.
A) Passages where God regrets how certain things turn out
The passages that were cited for that sort of thing were several. God shows remorse in the matter, for example, of Genesis 6. He regrets certain things take place because he made the people who are in his image, and yet, at the end of the day, it transpires they’re so evil, so he deeply regrets what has happened. Genesis 6:6.
In this connection, other passages are cited: Exodus 3:16 and following, Jeremiah 3:7. It is in this context, then, that Sanders goes so far as to say, “It may be the case that although human evil caused God great pain, the destruction of what he had made caused him even greater suffering. Although his judgment was righteous, God decides to try different courses of action in the future. That is, when God resolves not to send the flood again.”
What are we to make of all of this? Why not with the whole history of the Christian church see that God here regrets all the sin and in this sense regrets that he makes human beings, but all of this is still part of his foreseen, foreknown actions? He regrets it, but he knows in advance that he will regret it. It’s not as if his regretting takes him by surprise. It’s not as if he had expected something different and then, when it turned out this way, he regretted it and changed his mind.
What is it that is driving us toward the view that this regretting means an actual change of mind or the like? The open theology reading of Genesis 6:6 makes sense only if one has already bought into their view of God. If you’ve bought into their view of God, then that reading makes sense, but it is not mandated by the text.
It’s at this point, then, I want to go back to what I said this morning about Genesis 3. Genesis 3 finds God asking the question, “Adam, where are you?” Boyd is the first to insist, in that case when God says, “Where are you?” it’s not because he doesn’t know. It has to be understood rhetorically because, in Boyd’s view of God drawn from what he understands of Scripture elsewhere, God does know everything that is as it is right now. He knows the present thoroughly.
Because God knows the present thoroughly, which is not dictated by that passage but from what Boyd draws elsewhere, therefore, you must infer when God raises the question, “Adam, where are you?” he did know the answer, and therefore, the passage must be taken rhetorically. That’s when I raised the possibility, then, of someone coming from Mars who happened to know English or Hebrew and who didn’t know anything about theology and just got that little pericope out of its context.
Somehow, then, God raises the question, “Where are you?” and would not, then, that person infer, “God doesn’t know the answer to that question. God’s knowledge is limited. Even in the present, he doesn’t know where Adam is. He has to hunt for him.” Isn’t that what you would infer? The only reason Boyd does not infer that is because, in his view of God which he has derived from the rest of Scripture, he says that is not a necessary inference, in effect, but because God knows all things as they are, you have to take the question rhetorically.
But methodologically, that’s exactly the same thing as people in the classical tradition do when, from their understanding of Scripture elsewhere whereby they understand God knows not only the present but also the future, when he asks a question or when he expresses regret or something, they refuse to draw the inferences that are being drawn by the open God theologians because they don’t see they’re necessary and they’re against other things that already stand firmly in their minds as to the doctrine of God.
Methodologically, it’s exactly the same thing. At the end of the day, the inferences that are being drawn in a passage like Genesis 6:6 are not mandated by the passage. They’re only a possible option once you’ve already adopted a certain view of God from other passages in Scripture. Let me go one stage further.
This appeal to what other passages of the Scriptures teach is an important one on several other fronts. Walter Brueggemann is, perhaps, the most prolific of Old Testament scholars today. Extremely creative. He writes very well. He’s very interesting. It’s impossible for him to write a dull sentence, but I would want to argue his writings are amongst the most dangerous that are now on the market.
The reason why is because he’s writing from within a thoroughly postmodern framework, and amongst other things, what that means for him is in pericope after pericope after pericope in the Old Testament, he insists the only responsible way to interpret it is to rip it out of its context. So Genesis 3 must be understood not in the connection of all of Genesis or all of the Pentateuch or all of the Canon but just independently all by itself.
Within that kind of framework, therefore, he has a model of what goes on in Genesis 3. Because the story becomes more open-ended when it’s not contextually constrained, he has interpretations of Genesis 3 that would curl your hair. When he has other passages where God is venting his wrath on something, he’s quite prepared to stand in judgment of God (“God is bad-tempered here; this is a vile performance”) because it’s not put within a larger framework of what holiness is or creation or responsibility or anything of that.
It’s just an individual passage where he draws his nice, moralizing, little maxims, so he’s praised constantly in the reviews for his creativity, but his creativity is achieved by an open-ended imagination applied to pericopae that are taken out of their context. Not for a moment am I suggesting Sanders is doing that or that Boyd is doing that. That’s not my point.
My point, rather, is if you have any sort of canonical constraints whatsoever, then I don’t care whether you’re a Calvinist or an Arminian or if you’re an open God theologian. You are inevitably appealing to what you think the Bible allows or mandates or teaches elsewhere as you approach any particular pericope. That’s what Boyd is doing himself in Genesis 3.
But when you come to Genesis 6, he wants other inferences drawn that are not required. They’re not required by the context, and if instead, you have a larger classical view of God, they are actually forbidden by the larger canonical context. To argue in a passage like Genesis 6 God’s grief over what he sees human beings doing means God has a sort of change of heart (“Oops! This was a bad one; I made a mistake here”) is going way, way, way too far, whether it’s Sanders or anyone else.
The fact of the matter is the Bible presents God as genuinely grieving over human sin as an individual, a person, with genuine regret, but that’s quite a different matter from saying he didn’t foresee this, was surprised by it, got snookered by it, and had to change his mind over it.
B) Passages where God raises questions about the future confirming his own uncertainty
Passages cited included Numbers 14:11 and Hosea 8:5.
C) Passages where God confronts the unexpected
As in Isaiah 5, where God expects, in the vineyard ballad, good fruit and doesn’t get it so he responds with wrath.
D) Passages where God tests people in order to find out what their character really is
As in Genesis 22, the Akedah. He tests Abraham to see what was in his heart.
How shall we reply to these texts? Let’s pick up Numbers 14:10, the first of these I mentioned. “But the whole assembly talked about stoning the leaders. Then the glory of the Lord appeared at the tent of meeting to all the Israelites. The Lord said to Moses, ‘How long will these people treat me with contempt? How long will they refuse to believe in me, in spite of all the miraculous signs I have performed among them?’ ”
Is this passage really suggesting God doesn’t know? Is he speaking out of sheer frustration? Are these necessary inferences? Is it a necessary inference to conclude from this God’s uncertainty is self-evident? Do we adopt this sort of procedure for all questions in Scripture? Let’s take another example, this one suggested by Ware.
In Genesis 18, verses 20 and 21, God, speaking through the Angel of the Lord, raises these questions: “Then the Lord said, ‘The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know.’ ” What should you infer?
Do you infer God presently does not know the present? That is, whether or not the sin is great in the city? Isn’t that what it sounds like? He doesn’t know what’s going on right now, so he has to go down to find out. Do you infer God does not know the past of Sodom fully, so he must go to see if they have done according to the outcry, the report, of what they have done? Now it’s not a question of future contingency; the question is whether or not God knows the past.
Moreover, must he go down to find out because he’s not omnipresent? Presumably, isn’t that the inference that should be drawn? God is in heaven. He’s a little bit removed, but “I will go down and find out.” Are these all inferences you want to draw? “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know.” Do you really want to say all of that?
When you get to a passage like Genesis 22, then, which is, after all, only a chapter or so away, when it says God tests him to see what is in his heart, does this mean God doesn’t really know? Are these inferences you really want to draw? If you start drawing those inferences conclusively, you end up with a God a lot smaller even than the God of open theology. There’s no easy place to draw a line here.
E) Passages where God gets frustrated
Exodus 4:10–15, where he’s frustrated with Moses’ response or Ezekiel 22. “I sought for a man to stand in the gap before me, but I found none.” The inference was drawn that prayer, therefore, is extremely important, but does not that suggest we are wiser and less frustrated than God in those instances? Do you really want to draw that inference?
F) Passages where God speaks in terms of what may or may not happen
Again, there are inferences that don’t have to be drawn. God speaks in terms of what may or may not happen. Exodus 4:1–8 and, then, the Lord Jesus himself in the garden of Gethsemane. Exodus 4:1–8. This is in the passage where Moses is told to perform various miracles in the hope that the people will pay attention. Verse 8: “If they do not believe you or pay attention to the first miraculous sign, they may believe the second.” Then the Lord Jesus in Gethsemane, “If it be possible …”
The third passage that is often quoted is the passage of Jeremiah 18 and the flexible potter. The thing is broken up in his hands, and therefore, he decides to rebuild it again. The idea, therefore, is, if the people are wicked or evil then God will start over again. He responds to them rather than having any sort of deterministic pot.
What shall we make of these passages? First, it really is extremely important to recognize at least something of what nowadays is called speech act theory. Language can do a lot of things besides merely describe or merely talk in a one-to-one way about what is going on in reality. A passage I love to quote in this regard is Jeremiah 20.
Jeremiah 20, verse 14, finds Jeremiah saying in one of his profound depressions, “Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed! Cursed be the man who brought my father the news, who made him very glad, saying, ‘A child is born to you—a son!’ May that man be like the towns the Lord overthrew without pity. May he hear wailing in the morning, a battle cry at noon. For he did not kill me in the womb, with my mother as my grave, her womb enlarged forever. Why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame?”
How will you preach that? “Point number one: Jeremiah wishes his mother had been eternally pregnant. Point number two: Jeremiah wants the man who told his father Jeremiah was born to be overthrown like the towns the Lord overthrew without pity.” Is that what you make of it? This is a lament.
It’s a colorful, powerful way of saying, “I wish I had never been born. In fact, I’m not quite sure God is fair in having let me be born to see nothing but toil and trouble.” Isn’t that what he’s saying? It’s a lament. It’s the way the language functions, and to try to handle it as a sort of correspondence one-to-one with truth, with objective reality or something, misunderstands the very nature of the text. It misunderstands how texts function.
When Jesus says, “If it be possible, let this cup pass from me,” are we to begin with that passage by saying Jesus, thus, insists he doesn’t know how it’s going to end out? There is still an open-ended possibility he could escape the cross, so he asks his heavenly Father, if there is any way out, he would be permitted to find it. He doesn’t know.
Is that the right inference to draw from that sort of text? If that’s the inference you want to draw from that sort of text, what do you do with all of the passages where Jesus himself says the Messiah has to suffer? Five pre-cross predictions about the how the Messiah has to suffer and be taken to Jerusalem and on the third day rise again after he has been crucified. What do you do with those texts which are all explicit predictions?
Do you, then, come up to Gethsemane and say Jesus made the predictions but they weren’t all that explicit or they were all contingent or maybe God has another way out or they were only statistical probabilities? The cross in the mind of Jesus was only a statistical probability? When Jesus says, “Do you not know that even now I could call twelve legions of angels?” it is a reference, of course, to the fact the divine rights are his (they are his), but it misunderstands the biblical text completely to introduce, thereby, a note of contingency into the purposes of God.
Matthew writes with fine irony. When he pictures people standing in front of the cross, mocking Jesus, and saying, “He saved others; himself he cannot save,” do you know why it’s so ironic? Because they thought he couldn’t save himself physically. He couldn’t do it. He saved all the others in the broad Hebrew concept of salvation. “He brought them back from the dead. He forgave their sins. He healed their sick. He saved others, but himself? He’s too weak to do that. He can’t do that.”
The irony lies in the fact that, at one level in a way they hadn’t seen, they were right. They were right, not because he couldn’t do it ontologically; they were right because he couldn’t save himself and others. Morally, he was under such a constraint to do what his Father wanted that he was bound to go to the cross.
He understood that was the mission, and the mission was precisely to do what the Father gave him to do. His food and drink was to do what the Father gave him to do, and what the Father gave him to do was go to the cross. Within that framework, when Jesus, after all the passion predictions and all the fulfillment of the passages from the Old Testament and insisting elsewhere, “O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have written. Did not Christ have to suffer these things?”
In light of all of that, to come to the conclusion, therefore, in a passage like this, “If it be possible, take this from me,” that there really is genuine, ontological contingency and Christ himself doesn’t know how it’s going to turn out, it misunderstands the rhetoric. It is all part of a powerful way of saying, “Good God! This is awful. Help me! Not as I will, but as you will.” Isn’t that the point?
What about these other contingencies? It’s a failure of reading, I would want to argue, in too many of these passages. In Exodus 4:8, “If they do this, then you have this miracle. If they do that, then you have the other miracle. If they …” Does that mean God doesn’t know? Is that an inference to be drawn, or is it part of his instruction to Moses so Moses will know how to handle things?
How about Jeremiah 18? It is true in Jeremiah 18, this passage of the potter, there is a contingency to the way the pot turns out, but there are several things to be said about that. First of all, the potter-and-clay model in Scripture actually functions in several different ways in different contexts.
For instance, in Isaiah 45, verses 9 and 10, we read, “Woe to him who quarrels with his Maker, to him who is but a potsherd among the potsherds on the ground. Does the clay say to the potter, ‘What are you making?’ Does your work say, ‘He has no hands’? Woe to him who says to his father, ‘What have you begotten?’ or to his mother, ‘Why have you brought me to birth?’ This is what the Lord says—the Holy One of Israel, and its Maker …” about how God sovereignly controls the future and everything.
In that context, the potter-and-clay model is not used in terms of God having second thoughts or the like when the pot turns out bad. Rather, it’s used to show the pot has no right to shake its puny fist at the maker’s face. Isn’t that the way the thing functions there? When you turn to Romans 9, and ask how does it function in that passage? In that passage, it’s much more like Isaiah 45 than Jeremiah 18. “Shall the pot shake its puny fist against the one who has made it, and why have you made me thus?”
In Romans 9, it’s not a question at all of taking it in a Jeremiah 18 sense. In other words, any time you bring up a Romans 9 passage or a potter-clay passage in the discussion, without fail both Sanders and Boyd return to Jeremiah 18, as if the one usage of the potter-clay model you find in that passage explains all the others, but you cannot treat biblical metaphors that way.
In exactly the same way you must not take one particular description of the love of God and make that as the control for all other descriptions, you have to listen to what the various texts are saying. To take another very easy example, in the New Testament the Devil is a lion. “He’s a roaring lion going about seeking whom he may devour.”
In the New Testament and in the Old, Jesus is a lion. He’s the Lion of the tribe of Judah, and he’s the Lion, for example, in Revelation 5. Does this mean the Devil is Jesus? No one would make that sort of ghastly mistake, would they? Because we all recognize the lion metaphor can be used in a lot of ways.
Elsewhere, the lion can be used as a figure for God’s providential watch care, so that if the lion feeds it’s because God provides it with food. The lion can function in a lot of different ways in Scripture. There’s no univocal metaphorical control. You have to see how it’s functioning in passage after passage, don’t you? Likewise, you see, with the metaphor of the potter and the clay, you have to see what lesson is being taught in each passage.
With that sort of broader frame of reference, come back to this particular passage in Jeremiah 18. “This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: ‘Go down to the potter’s house, and there I will give you my message.’ So I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw him working at the wheel. But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him.
Then the word of the Lord came to me. ‘O, house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter does?’ declares the Lord. ‘Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned.
And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it. Now therefore say to the people of Judah and those living in Jerusalem, “This is what the Lord says: Look! I am preparing a disaster for you.”
What do we learn from this? First of all, one of the things to learn from this is any analogy is not an identity. It’s an analogy. By definition, an analogy has points of continuity and points of discontinuity with that to which it is analogous. If it’s exactly the same, it’s not an analogy; it’s an identity. It’s just talking about the same thing.
When you compare the potter and the clay Jeremiah sees down in the potter’s house with the conclusion that God himself draws from it, in fact, there are some obvious points of discontinuity. There, when the potter is pumping away on his treadle and the wheel is going around and he’s using his thumbs (you’ve watched them do it, I’m sure) to form this bowl or this dish, and then it’s malformed in his hand, whose fault is that?
Any wheel-turning potter will tell you, if he planned to do it one way and it came out another way, it’s his fault. He mixed the clay. He stuck his thumb in the wrong place. He had the thing going too fast or too slow. It was his fault, so he breaks it down again and starts over. But that’s not the lesson that is being drawn by God. God is certainly not saying here, “Here I am forming you, and … Whoops! I made a mistake, so I guess I’ll have to start over again.” That’s not the point that is being drawn. The analogy isn’t being tweaked in that direction, is it?
The only thing that is being inferred by God from this analogy in this passage is, when something does go wrong, for whatever reason, God may go this way or he may go that way depending on what people do. If God says, “I’m pronouncing judgment on you,” and then the people really repent, God does things another way. If, in fact, God says, “I will bless you,” and the people all turn evil, God may do something another way.
In exactly the same way when something goes wrong with the clay, the potter may do something a little differently, but even in that analogy, after all, the potter knows as he’s making this pot, if something goes disastrously wrong, he’ll do it over. It’s not as if the potter is saying, “Oh, I’m going to change my intentionality here. I had a change of mind.”
All along, the potter knows, after all, if something goes wrong he’ll do it again. You can do that with clay. Smash it all down again and start over to build it again. To draw the inference from this analogy that what God is really saying here is he does not know the future is going way beyond this potter-and-clay analogy. It’s going way beyond everything that is being said in the Prophets.
All it is saying is, from the point of view of the people who are listening to the blessings and cursings of God, they had better not listen to the blessings as if they’re all detached from questions of obedience, and they had better not hear the threats of judgment as if they’re detached from questions of repentance.
God all along has this contingency built into all that he does. It’s not that he doesn’t know what’s going to happen. It’s not that he doesn’t in any sense control what’s going to happen. He is saying the way he deals with people is, in this sense, profoundly principled. Therefore, when he pronounces judgment, the immediate, urgent need is for repentance because God is, in principle, slow to anger, plenteous in mercy. He does not easily come down hard in judgment.
Isn’t that what’s going on also in Jonah 4? It’s Jonah who wants the Ninevites to be crushed, but in principle, God’s threats of judgment always have over them, according to this sort of passage, a contingency factor built in. How often did God say to the southern kingdom, the Judaites, “I’m going to crush you”? Then along would come a Hezekiah or a Josiah and there would be a delay humanly speaking. Well, God had not said exactly when it would take place, but he now says, “It won’t take place in your life because you’ve been faithful to me in this respect.”
This is not because God suddenly woke up and changed his mind. “Oh, I was a bit hasty. I made a mistake there.” He’s not saying that. He knows the end. This is the principle he operates with all the time, and we need to understand it as well: God is a person interacting with us as persons. In other words, too much is being inferred from these passages to make them carry far more weight than they are capable of carrying. That’s the point to be observed in these passages, it seems to me.
G) Passages where God changes his mind
He repents. Not only a passage like Jeremiah 18:8 and 10, but all the passages that are rendered by repent in the Authorized Version. In fact, we saw some people go so far as to make a virtue of God’s repentance, as in Jonah, chapter 4, verse 2. What do we make of these passages?
Come, first of all, to the verb nacham. We need, first of all, to understand what some of the issues are. Nacham is regularly rendered in the Niphal (it’s not used in the Qal) by be sorry or repent or regret, and then in the Piel, and occasionally in the Niphal, by be comforted or to comfort. There is a longstanding debate about whether the focus is primarily on the sorrow that is felt or on a change of mind or the like.
I don’t think, in my view, it’s critical, but if you push me, I would say there is much more emphasis on the sorrow than on the change of mind. The word that is used far more commonly for human repentance is the verb shuv which is used hundreds of times and almost never of God. Almost never.
Usually, it’s used with respect to physical returning: returning to a city or returning to a place where they were before and that sort of thing. Metaphorically, it’s used of human beings turning away from sin and back to God, returning to God in some respect. That’s by far the most common, and in only one or two passages is shuv ever used of God in this respect.
Moreover, in the use of nacham, by contrast, the realm of possible meanings is very considerable once you break away from the Authorized Version. Almost all of them are rendered by to repent in the Authorized Version, but if you take, for example, the Revised Standard Version, then in Genesis 6:6–7, God says, “I am sorry that I have made them.” It’s the verb nacham. “I am sorry.”
Again, in Psalm 106:45, “God remembered for their sake his covenant and relented according to his abundance of his steadfast love.” He relented. It’s not so much that he was sorry, but he relented. This because he remembered his covenant. Does that mean he had forgotten it? Nobody in the open view would want to infer that.
God doesn’t forget stuff. You don’t want to draw that inference either. What it means when it says he remembered it is this was now operating to the fore of his modus operandi because of where the people were at this particular juncture. Isn’t that what it means?
Again, in Judges 2:18, there the Lord was moved to pity. He was moved to pity by their groaning because of those who afflicted and oppressed them. It certainly doesn’t mean he repented. Not even quite that he changed his mind. There is no indication of that, but there was an outpouring of his compassion because of all the sufferings he saw they were enduring.
In fact, there is one remarkable passage in Isaiah, chapter 1, verse 24. The King James Version has God saying, “I will ease me of my enemies.” The RSV has, “I will vent my wrath on my enemies.” It’s the same verb nacham. It does not mean, “I will repent of my enemies,” or “I will change my mind because of my enemies.”
Unless there is a change of mind that is actually becoming harsher, there’s sort of an explosion of emotion. “I will ease me of my enemies.” That’s the idea that the old King James Version had. The idea is an explosion of emotion here that is proceeding in principled wrath, “Because of mine enemies.”
When nacham, usually in the Niphal, is translated into the LXX, into the Septuagint (it’s translated 35 times) it is rendered either by metamelomai or metanoia. Metamelomai means a change of heart or changed feelings. Metanoia is the word we commonly render repentance. It’s more fundamental. It’s a change of mind, but it’s not merely a cerebral thing. It’s a change of mind whereby you turn to act in a slightly different way.
Over the centuries, people have wrestled with these passages. You must understand we are not the first to do this sort of thing. That’s one of the things that irked me so much when I read, I confess, Christianity Today’s review of some of these early debates, acting as if these things were being brought up for the first time. You can read these debates in Philo. He works through these passages and is trying to understand them.
Let’s come to some of them. What about this passage, 1 Samuel 15:35? “Samuel grieved over Saul.” In this passage, you have nacham in one of the rare instances where a human being is the subject. Samuel grieved over Saul. The focus is not Samuel repented of Saul. It is not as if Samuel even at this point has changed his mind over Saul. He’s grieving over him in exactly the same way God grieves over Saul, too, because at no point does classic theism picture a God who is sovereignly in control in a robotic way and emotionally distant.
That’s the vision of classic theism that is often erected as a straw man by the open theists, but that’s not what anybody believes. Whether you’re in the Wesleyan camp or in a Calvinist camp, it makes no difference. All sides say God is sovereignly in control, and yet, he is a person who interacts with emotions.
He loves, and he abhors, and he responds and interacts. In classic theism, the way this is usually put is, “On the one hand, the Bible speaks of God as sovereign and transcendent, and on the other hand, it speaks of God as a person. Because God is sovereign and transcendent, he really is in control. On the other hand, he’s a person, so he interacts with us.”
You have to believe both of those things at the same time or else you don’t have the God of the Bible. What the open theism picture is constantly trying to suggest is that classic theism only holds that God is sovereign and transcendent, but all along we’ve delighted in remembering that God grieved over Saul. It’s not as if we’ve overlooked this text, is it?
That’s a bit different from saying God, then, repented of what he had done, in this respect. You start arguing along those lines and what you’re really doing is using God’s personal relationships and his emotions to call in question the biblical evidence about his sovereignty and transcendence.
Let me press one stage further, then, in understanding compatibilism. This morning I defined compatibilism quickly by giving two propositions, both of which I said are true, and a compatibilist holds that both of those propositions are true, but there’s a further inference. Because a compatibilist holds that both of those propositions are true, that both of those propositions are taught unambiguously in Scripture, a compatibilist, therefore, will also say you must not draw an inference from either side so as to contradict the other side.
In other words, you want to believe all the Bible says but you don’t so draw inferences from texts that support one side so as to negate some of the evidence from the other side. You can’t do that. If there are passages that insist God is sovereign and that he’s transcendent and there are passages that show that God is a person and interacts with other people, you don’t draw inferences from this side to negate this side, and you don’t draw inferences from God’s sovereignty to negate his personal dealings.
Another way of putting it positively is an informed compatibilist will use the biblical texts that support either side of such a tension to function only as they function in Scripture. That’s very important. Wherever you’re approaching this sort of delicate subject, he will allow Scripture to function only as it functions in Scripture.
For example, according to Ephesians 1, God brings all things to pass according to the purpose of his will. Do we, therefore, infer from that God is the author of evil in the way he is the author of good? No. Do we infer from that, therefore, there is no point in praying because God has it all sussed up in advance? No. Because that would flatly contradict other biblical evidence that’s part of the given.
You mustn’t do that sort of thing. Some of more hyper-Calvinistic persuasion have been known to do that sort of thing in the past. It’s not part of the American tradition very much, but in the British tradition, there is a whole school of actual hyper-Calvinists, and they sometimes actually call themselves that.
They infer from God’s election, for example, therefore, it is wrong to do evangelism. The most you can do is sort of preach the law and preach the character of God and this sort of thing, and if you begin to see people beginning to writhe under an agony of guilt, then it may be you may properly infer that God is working in their lives, so you might begin perhaps to preach the gospel to them, but you cannot make any sort of general declaration of the gospel to all people because it’s only for the elect.
That’s not a big hotshot movement in the US at the moment, but in fact, it was probably the first major error Spurgeon confronted as a young man, and in some small parts of Britain at the moment it is beginning to raise its head again. Do you realize there are people who go around Britain who say, “Don Carson is a crypto-Arminian”? It’s shocking, isn’t it? Because I’m not in their particular brand of this hyper-Calvinistic tradition and because I do university missions where I offer the gospel freely to everybody.
What’s going on from my point of view is they are taking something that is taught in Scripture, something about election, and drawing some false inferences which actually negate some biblical material on the other side. In exactly the same way, I don’t want people who see these passages about God grieving and about God relenting and God’s sorrow, then, to draw inferences from such passages that suggest God didn’t know or couldn’t care.
This is tied, in fact, to another large question about God, his so-called impassability. I’ll come back to that one tomorrow when we deal with some of these larger philosophical or theological questions. Does God have emotions or passions at all? It’s important to understand that within a Christian heritage rather than simply in a formulaic sort of way.
The most interesting passages, it seems to me, regarding nacham are those in which there is clearly a built-in understanding that God will act in judgment if his people do not change their ways but will relent or repent if they do. Not least a passage like Jeremiah 18, to which I have referred. “If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken turns from its evil, then I will …”
“Repent? Nacham. I will relent? I will change my mind? I will do something differently?” What does that mean? “… relent of the evil I had intended to do to it.” The repenting of God here, the changing of God, the nacham of God in this case doesn’t say anything about the changing of his mind as if he is taken by surprise. It says everything about the changing of the behavior of his people and his principled commitments to what he will do in his personal response to them regardless of what they do.
It has to do with the retraction of a proposed course of action on God’s part, as someone has said, when his people have a change of mind, or it may mean the withholding of blessings when they do not, and God tells you in advance what he will do. In that sense, it’s a bit like an algorithm on a computer where you know in advance what’s going to happen.
It’s not as if the computer changes its mind. You know in advance what’s going to happen under certain conditions. If you have this condition, this is going to happen. If you have that condition, that’s going to happen. When God does relent, repent, because people have repented, it is not because God was confused and acted hastily but because of his unsurpassed goodness. That’s the truth.
The Ninevites repent, and God repents of the evil which he had said he would do to them (Jonah 3:10), but then Jonah laments that he knew this would happen because he knew the kind of God that God was, that he was merciful and compassionate (Jonah 4:2). “You are merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love. You repent of evil.” That’s not what Jonah wants.
In other words, Jonah understands a passage like Jeremiah 18 very well. This is the principled God. This is his character. It’s an immutable character. That’s precisely why the God of the Bible can say again and again and again, “The Glory of Israel will not lie or repent, for he is not a man that he should repent.” That’s 1 Samuel 15:29.
In the very same passage, the very same chapter (chapter 15, verse 11) where God has just finished saying, “I repent that I have made Saul king,” don’t you think readers were supposed to see that when they first had 1 Samuel in front of them? There God says, “I repent that I have made Saul king.” Fewer than 28 verses on, God says, “The Glory of Israel will not lie or repent, for he is not a man that he should repent.”
Doesn’t that language invite some reflection? To quote one as if it’s controlling the other and say, “Well, in that case, God isn’t going to change his mind, but in other cases he does. Clearly, he can get a bit confused.” It invites, instead, reflection on the numerous biblical passages, not fewer than nine in the Old Testament psalms, where God says things like, “The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind.”
In other words, the truth of the matter is we must not allow these biblical passages to function in ways that are inappropriate. When God says he invites people everywhere, he yearns to see people converted, he cries, “Turn, turn! Why will you die? For the Lord has no pleasure in the death of the wicked,” are we to infer from that there is no sense in which God chooses people? But if you say that, then you’re fighting against other parts of the given, the biblical material. “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.”
You must not infer that. What you must infer is simply what the text says. Namely, there is something profoundly embedded in the very character of God that makes him cry out for people to repent and turn to him. That is his nature. It must be understood that whatever you think of God’s sovereignty in all of its unlimited dimensions, he is still the God of compassion, the God of love, the God of yearning holiness, the God of invitation, and the God of mercy.
What me must not have is the kind of bifurcation that uses one set of texts to generate inferences that are, at best, merely possible, inferences which, then, have the effect of domesticating or rending nugatory or dismissing or marginalizing other parts of the given. You must allow each component of one of these built-in tensions to function only as it functions in Scripture and in no other way. Otherwise, there is no way out of this morass at all. None.
