Is Anything Genuinely New in God’s Experience?

Question 2069.

God’s experience is not static in the way a statue is static, even though His character never shifts an inch. Scripture is full of language describing God rejoicing, grieving, being moved with compassion and, at least on the face of it, responding to what creatures do, and I do not think we should explain that language away.

The honest answer to whether anything is genuinely new in God’s experience has to hold two things together: nothing surprises Him in the sense of catching Him unprepared, yet Scripture will not let us say He is emotionally inert while watching His world.

Nothing Escapes God’s Knowledge

God’s knowledge is complete. He knows every actual event and every possible outcome of choices that were never made, which means nothing surprises Him in the sense of information He did not already possess. This is not God controlling every outcome; it is God knowing every outcome with total clarity before it happens.

That settles one half of the question. Whatever happens in God’s experience when Scripture describes Him as grieved or delighted, it is not the shock of new data arriving. He is never caught off guard the way we are when a phone call brings news we did not see coming.

Yet Scripture Insists God Feels

Here is where I want to push back gently against a very old philosophical instinct to flatten God’s experience into pure, unmoved stillness. Genesis 6:6 says the LORD ‘regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart’ (Genesis 6:6). Zephaniah 3:17 says God ‘will rejoice over you with gladness’ and ‘exult over you with loud singing’ (Zephaniah 3:17). Hosea 11:8 shows God’s heart ‘recoiling’ within Him over Israel.

That is not thin, decorative language. It appears too often, in too many genres of Scripture, written by too many different hands across too many centuries, to treat as a mere figure of speech with no reality behind it. I take it that God’s experience genuinely includes something we would recognise as emotion, expressed in a manner fitting His nature rather than our limited one.

The Danger of Borrowing Greek Philosophy

A great deal of older theology imported the idea that a perfect being cannot be affected by anything outside itself, since being affected implies a kind of dependency unworthy of deity. That instinct comes more from Greek philosophy than from the Hebrew Scriptures, and I am wary of letting a philosophical starting point override what the text actually says about God’s experience.

I hold this honestly rather than tidily. There is a real tension between God’s unchanging character and the responsive, relational language Scripture uses of Him, and I would rather sit with that tension than resolve it by quietly editing out half the biblical evidence.

Delight and Grief in God’s Experience

Whatever God’s experience of delight or grief involves, it is not identical to ours in every respect. Our emotions are often reactive, unstable, coloured by ignorance and self-interest. God’s are not. When He grieves over sin, it is the grief of perfect love confronted by real evil, not the grief of someone learning a hard lesson about how the world works.

So when I say something can be ‘new’ in God’s experience, I mean new the way a father’s joy at his son’s wedding is new even though he has known for years the wedding was coming. The event still lands, still moves him, even though nothing about it surprises him in the sense of upending his plans.

Why This Matters for Prayer and Worship

If God’s experience genuinely includes delight and grief, then our prayers and our worship are not performances offered to an unmoved audience. They land somewhere. Zephaniah’s picture of God singing over His people is not poetic decoration; it describes something real about how God receives those He loves.

That should change how we come to Him. We are not managing a distant mechanism. We are addressing a Person who, in a manner suited to His own unchanging perfection, is genuinely moved by what we bring Him.

Holding the Tension Honestly

I will not pretend to have this fully worked out, and I do not think Scripture invites us to pretend either. God’s immutability tells us His character, purposes and promises never shift. His responsiveness tells us He is not a fixed monument but a living Person engaged with His creation. Both are true, and the honest path is to hold them together rather than sacrificing one for the sake of a tidier system.

Theologians sometimes call the older, more static picture divine impassibility, the idea that God cannot be affected by anything outside Himself. I understand why it developed and what it was trying to protect, namely God’s independence from His creatures. But taken too far it leaves us with a God who cannot really rejoice over us or grieve over our sin, and Scripture simply will not support that conclusion.

What Open Theism Gets Wrong About This

It is worth being clear about what I am not saying. Some have taken the language of God’s experience, His grief, His apparent surprise at Israel’s unfaithfulness, and built an entire system called open theism, which holds that God does not exhaustively know the future because the future is genuinely open even to Him. I reject that framework outright.

God’s foreknowledge is exhaustive. He knows every choice that will ever be made and every choice that will never be made, with perfect clarity, before any of it happens. What I am describing is not a God who learns as history unfolds, but a God whose perfect knowledge does not stop Him from being genuinely, relationally engaged with what He has always known was coming.

The difference matters. Open theism trades away God’s knowledge to preserve His emotional responsiveness. Scripture asks us to hold both without trading either one away, which is a harder position to maintain intellectually but a far more faithful one biblically.

I would also gently caution against the opposite error, a kind of theology that so emphasises God’s control over every outcome that His responsiveness becomes theatre, a performance of emotion with nothing genuine behind it. Scripture gives us neither a God discovering the future as it happens nor a God simply play-acting concern. It gives us a God whose perfect knowledge and genuine engagement sit together without contradiction, however hard that combination is for us to picture.

An Illustration From Ordinary Love

Think of a mother who has known for nine months that her child is coming, who has read every book, prepared the nursery, and can, in a sense, be said to expect the birth entirely. When the child finally arrives, nothing about it is informationally new to her. And yet the moment itself is not flat or anticlimactic. It is, if anything, more moving for having been so long anticipated.

I offer that not as a perfect analogy for God, who exists outside the limitations of time in a way no human parent does, but as a picture of how anticipation and genuine delight are not mutually exclusive. God’s experience of His world may work along similar lines: nothing about it takes Him by surprise, yet none of it leaves Him unmoved either.

I say all this cautiously, aware that I am describing the inner life of the infinite God with the borrowed vocabulary of finite creatures. But Scripture itself uses that borrowed vocabulary first, and I would rather follow its lead than invent a more philosophically comfortable God of my own, tidier for a textbook but less faithful to the actual text.

So, now what?

So, now what? Let this shape how you pray. You are not speaking into a void or informing a database. Something in God’s experience genuinely responds to your worship, your grief, your gratitude, even though nothing you bring Him ever catches Him unprepared. That combination, perfect foreknowledge alongside real relational engagement, is rare in human categories but entirely at home in Scripture’s picture of God.

It also changes how I read the emotional language of the psalms. When David sings of God’s delight, or Hosea pictures God’s heart recoiling within Him, I no longer feel the need to translate that into safer, colder philosophical terms. God’s experience, whatever its full nature, is real enough that Scripture keeps reaching for the language of feeling to describe it, and I think we honour the text more by taking that seriously than by explaining it away. It is a strange kind of comfort, knowing that the God who knows everything before it happens still, in His own way, delights in it when it does. Does it change anything about how honestly you pray, knowing your words land somewhere real?

The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.

Zephaniah 3:17, ESV