If God knows everything, do we have free will?
Question 02033
The question has a sharp edge to it. If God knew before the world was made exactly what every person would ever choose, in every circumstance, across all of time — then in what meaningful sense are those choices really free? When you sat down this morning and decided what to have for breakfast, had God already known ten thousand years ago what you would choose? If He had, could you actually have chosen differently? The apparent tension between divine omniscience and human freedom is one of the most persistent puzzles in theology, and it deserves a careful answer.
What Scripture Teaches About Both
The biblical testimony holds both positions simultaneously and without apology. God’s knowledge is exhaustive. Psalm 139:1-4 declares that God knows when we sit and when we rise, discerns our thoughts from afar, and knows our words before they reach our tongue. Isaiah 46:10 describes God “declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done.” Acts 2:23 speaks of Jesus being delivered up “according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God.” The foreknowledge is complete, specific, and certain.
At the same time, Scripture treats human choices as genuine and humans as genuinely responsible for them. Adam and Eve made a real choice in the garden. Pharaoh hardened his heart. Joshua called Israel to choose whom they would serve (Joshua 24:15). Jesus wept over Jerusalem and said “you were not willing” (Matthew 23:37), which makes no sense if Jerusalem’s refusal was not a genuine choice. The entire framework of biblical repentance, accountability, and judgement depends on human beings being real agents whose responses genuinely matter.
The Crucial Distinction
The resolution to this tension lies in distinguishing between foreknowledge and foreordination. God knowing what will happen is not the same as God causing what will happen. Consider a simple illustration: a historian reading an account of a battle that took place five centuries ago knows exactly what the soldiers chose to do. That knowledge does not cause their choices; it simply corresponds to them. Knowledge, even complete and certain knowledge, is not causation.
God’s foreknowledge is infinitely more comprehensive than any historian’s knowledge of past events, but the relationship between knowledge and causation is the same. When Romans 8:29 says “those whom he foreknew he also predestined,” the foreknowledge logically precedes the predestining. God’s knowing is not a reaction to our choices in a sequential sense — He exists outside of time in a way we cannot fully comprehend — but His knowing is not the cause of our choices either. He knows what we will freely choose without compelling us to choose it.
What We Must Reject
Open Theism attempts to resolve this tension by limiting God’s foreknowledge, arguing that He does not know free choices in advance because free choices do not exist until they are made. The motive is to preserve genuine human freedom, which is commendable. The problem is that it purchases human freedom at the cost of biblical truth. Isaiah 46:10, Acts 2:23, and the entirety of biblical prophecy depend on God knowing the future with certainty. A God who does not know what His creatures will do is not the God of Scripture, and Ian rejects this position firmly.
The Calvinist resolution moves in the opposite direction, effectively collapsing foreknowledge and foreordination into one another — God knows it because He ordains it. That solution purchases divine certainty at the cost of genuine human freedom. The biblical position holds both: exhaustive divine foreknowledge and genuine human freedom. The philosophical difficulty of holding them together is not a reason to abandon either one.
So, now what?
God’s complete foreknowledge does not make your choices less real. When you pray, something is genuinely happening. When you choose faithfulness or turn away, something that matters is genuinely at stake. The God who knows the outcome of every story is the same God who commands repentance, invites prayer, and holds us accountable — none of which makes any sense at all if our choices were merely predetermined performances. Hold both truths firmly, resist the temptation to resolve the tension by eliminating one of them, and trust the God who knows the end from the beginning.
“I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.” Job 42:2
