Foreknowledge means God knows what will happen before it happens. The Greek word is πρόγνωσις (prognōsis), “knowing ahead” (Acts 2:23; 1 Peter 1:2). This entry is Part 2 of Omniscience.

Acts 2:23 puts two things side by side. Jesus was handed over by God’s plan and “foreknowledge.” Yet the men who crucified Him did it “by wicked hands,” and Peter held them guilty. God knew, and the men chose. The Bible states both without apology. The question people ask is how both can be true.

The Question

If God already knows what I will choose tomorrow, can I really choose anything else?

Start with the easy part. Knowing something does not make it happen. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, put it this way in 1773: I know the sun is shining, but the sun does not shine because I know it. “In like manner, God knows that man sins,” he wrote. “Yet we do not sin because he knows it, but he knows it because we sin.”

The harder part is this. God is never wrong. If He already knows I will lie tomorrow, can tomorrow turn out any other way? Christians answer that in four main ways.

Four Answers

God sees all of time at once. Boethius, a Christian writer in Rome, worked this out in the year 524 while waiting in prison to be executed. God does not live inside time the way we do. He sees our past, present, and future as one clear view. So He does not really know our choices “ahead of time.” He sees them as they happen, and watching a man sit down does not force him to sit. Most Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Wesleyan teachers hold this view.

God knows because God decided. Reformed teachers, such as Presbyterians and Reformed Baptists, say God knows the future because He planned it. The Westminster Confession, written in the 1640s, says God did not decide anything because He first saw it coming. In this view you are free in the sense that you do what you want to do, but what happens was settled by God’s plan.

God knows what anyone would do. In the 1500s a Spanish teacher named Luis de Molina said God knows what every person would freely choose in every possible situation. God then decides which situations to bring about. Supporters point to Keilah, where God told David what the men of the city would do if he stayed (1 Samuel 23:10–13).

The future is open. In the 1990s a few evangelical teachers, among them Clark Pinnock, Gregory Boyd, and John Sanders, began teaching what is called “open theism.” They say the future choices of free people are not there yet to be known, so God knows them as possibilities. Most evangelicals reject this view. In 2001 the Evangelical Theological Society voted 253 to 66 that God knows all future choices. The problem for this view is Isaiah 46:10, along with prophecies of free choices, such as Jesus telling Peter he would deny Him three times (John 13:38).

Many Christians hold none of these exactly. They picture God looking ahead down a road and seeing what we will do. That picture shows that knowing is not causing, but it leaves the harder question unanswered. Each of the four answers above deals with that question in its own way.

A Chess Picture

Picture a 12-year-old who knows the rules of chess, but not much more, sitting down across the board from an international grandmaster. Nobody moves the boy’s pieces. He picks every move himself. Yet how the game ends is never in doubt.

God is far above any grandmaster, and we are far below that boy. Our choices are truly ours, and God never forces them. They are one part of a much larger plan, a part God allows, and His will is done.

The picture has one limit. A grandmaster has to wait to see the boy’s move before he answers it. God does not wait. He sees the whole game at once, from the first move to the last. The chess picture shows how God’s will is done while our choices stay free. Seeing all of time at once shows how He knows the moves before they are made.

Reformed readers would tell this story differently. They would say God planned every move, not only the outcome.

The Critical Problem: One Word, Three Meanings

When Paul writes, “whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate” (Romans 8:29), Christians do not agree on what “foreknow” means. The word is used in three ways, and people often switch between them without noticing.

Seeing ahead. God saw beforehand who would believe, and chose them. This is how Arminians read Romans 8:29.

Loving ahead. In the Bible, “know” can mean a close relationship, not just having facts. The Hebrew word is יָדַע (yada). God told Israel, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth” (Amos 3:2). He knew about the other nations, but He had chosen Israel. Reformed teachers read “foreknew” in Romans 8:29 to mean God set His love on those people beforehand.

No “before” at all. Wesley said that, strictly speaking, God has neither foreknowledge nor afterknowledge, because all time is present to Him at once.

So when someone says “God foreknew,” the first question is which of these three is meant. The argument over Romans 8:29 is the main argument between Calvinists and Arminians. See Arminianism.

In the end, the difficulty sits on our side, not God’s. We live one moment at a time, and we try to fit God’s knowledge into that same small frame. Paul did not solve the puzzle with a chart. He worshipped: “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!” (Romans 11:33).