One of the many things I love about studying the Bible in community is hearing excellent questions that spur me to turn to scholars for helpful answers. Thursday, the question was raised – did God know Adam and Eve would sin? This is a crucial question, and answering it shows even more of the glory of God. I really liked Charles Spurgeon’s sermon, God’s Foreknowledge of Sin and have pasted several paragraphs here. If you want to read the whole argument, click here.
“Let us here again recall to our minds the fact that all our sinfulness and the development of it, and all the thoughts and evil imagination that went with that development—and all and sundry the aggravations of our sin, whatever they may have been—must clearly have been known to God. Nothing has come out of us which God did not know would come out of us. We have never surprised the Most High! We have never brought Him to such a position that He could say, “I did not know this.” We have never gone into any sin of which it could be said concerning God that He did not know that it would so be worked by us.
Now I think I hear impatient minds enquiring clamorously, “what purpose is there in the preacher’s repeating to us this statement? He puts it over and over again in very simple terms. What is he aiming at? Where is the edification to the people of God?” In the first place, here is the edification. Seeing that this is most certain and sure, I want you to adore the amazing Grace of God! Do you see, then, that knowing and foreknowing, God nevertheless chose us, elected us— though He saw us covered from head to foot with sin! When election’s eye fell upon us we were regarded as the helpless infant in Ezekiel, cast out unwashed and unswaddled to perish in our filth! But then, viewing us as such, the Divine heart loved us! “His great love,” says the Apostle, “wherewith He loved us even when we were dead in trespasses and sins.” We were, as Kent puts it—
“Loved when a wretch defiled with sin, At war with Heaven, in league with Hell, A slave to every lust obscene,
Who, living, lived but to rebel.”
Do you not admire the marvelous Sovereign Grace which could have chosen you in the sight of all this? I can understand God’s choosing me if He had not known my sinfulness, or if He had known only a part of it. But that He should choose me when He had an infinitely clearer sense of my sin than I ever can have is, indeed, wonderful! I do know something of my sins at times, and am horrified at them. Yet I never have had such a clear estimate of my sinfulness as God has, for the least sin is hateful to God and He looks upon it as worthy of the eternal fires of Hell! Yet we, in whom there is not only to be found little sin, but multitudes of great iniquities were chosen from before the foundation of the world!”
“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 lin which you once walked, following the course of this world, following mthe prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in nthe sons of disobedience— 3 among whom we all once lived in othe passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and pwere by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. 4 ButGod, being rrich in mercy, sbecause of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even twhen we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8 For by grace you have been saved athrough faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. ” Ephesians 2:1-10
