To Know Beforehand or to Lovingly
Choose?
Romans 8:28–29
I want to start
this evening by going back to the topic I ended with last time. We’re in Romans
8: 28 and 29 and this is one of the key passages that Calvinists go to for
election, predestination, and their view of foreknowledge and also it’s related
to efficacious grace because of the word “calling” that is used here. So I want
to go back to look at this particular passage in Romans 8:28. We’re talking
about who are the “called”. Last time I ended looking at the key passages for
the doctrine of the efficacious call, efficacious grace, or irresistible grace.
This is a
Calvinist doctrine whereby they understand that all human beings are
spiritually dead. Spiritual death is a penalty for sin. It means separation
from God. It does not mean what Calvinists interpret it to mean as total
inability. We believe in total depravity, that every aspect of man’s being is
corrupt and has been corrupted by sin and is affected by sin and does not
function in the way God designed. Man is not sick. He is spiritually dead which
is separation from God. In Calvinist understanding man is totally unable. He is
unable to do anything. He’s like a dead person. A dead person can’t respond in
any way, shape, or form. They are completely inoperative.
When they hear
the external call of the gospel, the call falls on unable, incapable ears which
cannot hear and cannot respond apart from a work that they call irresistible
grace whereby God the Holy Spirit, in high Calvinism, first regenerates the
elect individual. Then they can hear the gospel. Then they respond in faith
which is a gift given to them by God. In their system they view faith as
something that man does, therefore it, itself, can be meritorious.
In contrast, I
believe that faith is non-meritorious. It’s not the act of belief that has
merit; it’s the object of faith that has merit. In salvation, it is the work of
Christ on the cross that has merit, not our faith. I’m not saying because of
faith. Ephesians 2: 8 and 9 says, “For by grace you have been saved through
faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not as a result of
works, so that no one may boast.” “Through faith” in the Greek is the
preposition dia which
is a genitive object. A genitive object indicates means or instrumentality. If
it were in the accusative case, it would be translated “because of faith.” We
are not saved because of faith. That would indicate that faith was the cause or
merit for our salvation. But because it is through faith, faith is seen as
simply a channel through which the merit of Christ comes in terms of providing
righteousness for the individual.
Now in their
view, the Holy Spirit is going to irresistibly draw the individual. He is going
to enter into the individual’s spiritual life, regenerate him and then draw
them in a way that cannot be resisted. That doesn’t mean it’s instantaneous. It
may take time. It may take a period of years but that person can ultimately not
resist this draw of the Holy Spirit. So I looked at three verses in John 6 last
time that are the focal point for understanding this
Calvinistic doctrine of the efficacious call or irresistible grace.
The key verse
is John 6:44, “No one can come to Me unless the Father
who sent Me draws him.” Now just a simple grammar, a simple observation.
Who does the drawing here? Is it the Holy Spirit or is it the Father? It’s
the Father. He’s the subject of the verb. The Father does the drawing, not the
Holy Spirit. But they’ll go to this verse because in their theology, they’ll
say that the Father draws through the Holy Spirit as His agent. That’s fine but
it also points up one of the problems we have, not just with the theology of
Calvinism, but with a lot of people. That is, they don’t understand, no matter
how much I try to beat it into their head, that you don’t interpret Scripture
on the basis of your theological system. That’s like trying to put the cart
before the horse. You let your exegesis develop your theological system, but
then you don’t go read your theological system into every passage that sounds
similar just because it sounds similar. There are many people who do this.
Probably ninety percent of Christians operate on that basis. They interpret the
Bible on the basis of their presupposed theology rather than the other way
around. We have to let the text govern our conclusions, not impose our
conclusions upon the text.
We have to look
at this particular verse in terms of its context and what is being said. The
other verse is also one which is important to understand
because it impacts our interpretation of this entire passage. It’s coming out
of the episode of Jesus feeding the five thousand and then identifying Himself
as the Bread of Life. He’s using a metaphor to describe the fact that he is the
source of life, the source of spiritual nourishment. In the course of that
explanation, in verse 37, He says, “All that the Father gives Me will come to Me.” Now that’s a definitive statement that
everyone the Father gives to Him will come to Him. That has been taken, not
just by Calvinists, but by many others to apply over a
broad spectrum to anyone who believes in Christ from that time period all the
way to the present and into the future.
The
interpretation is that all that the Father gives to me refers to anyone who
believes in Jesus Christ. A Calvinist would equate that term to the elect. What
I showed you last time by going to other passages is that where that phrase is
used is it does not refer to anyone across a broad spectrum of history that
believes in Christ. It was a term used specifically by Jesus to refer to those
who God gave Him, specifically the apostles but also others, during that unique
historical period. So this isn’t a broad-spectrum term for all the saved of the
church age. It is a narrow spectrum reference to those who the Father gave to
Jesus. It is primarily referring to those who were already classified as Old
Testament believers.
When Jesus was
born, if you remember, when His parents took Him to the temple, there were two
people who came to His parents in the temple. They were anticipating the
arrival of the Messiah and they knew immediately that this was the Messiah.
They were already believers in an Old Testament sense and at that point they
couldn’t become church age believers because Jesus hadn’t gone to the cross.
The church isn’t born until Acts 2 but they’re believers in an Old Testament
sense. There were a number of people in Israel like that. Remember the apostles
John, Andrew, Peter and James were already disciples of John the Baptist when
Jesus came to call them. So they were already believers. What I’m saying is
that this is a term referring to specifically apostles but in a little more
general sense, I think there’s some places where it could apply to a broader
group of people of Old Testament believers. They were making that transition
from the dispensation of Israel into eventually the church age. So we looked at
that last time.
The other thing
I pointed out that I want to drive in again was that the issue in salvation
isn’t whether or not you’re elect, or whether or not you’re drawn but the issue
is whether or not you believe. It’s never expressed in the Scripture in any way
other than someone who believes in Jesus. Even if you hard press a Calvinist
they have to admit that the only way you know if you’re elect is if you believe
in Jesus. That’s the only issue. That’s what’s pointed out in John 6:29, 35,
40, 47, and 64. The issue again and again and again is stated. In fact, 96
times in the gospel of John the issue is belief. Believe. Believe. Believe.
Believe. And after reading the gospel of John I still have trouble
understanding why they want to insert repentance or anything else into what
must be done in terms of a response.
I recently had
a discussion with a seminary student about this. The gospel of John is written
to clearly explain what a person must do to have eternal life. “These are
written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and
that by believing you will have life by His name.” Not believing and repenting,
not by believing and being baptized but just by believing. Ninety-five or
ninety-six times, depending on the text, you have this one condition to acquire
eternal life and that is to believe. A couple of other times it’s expressed as receiving
or accepting Christ, John 1:12, “But as many as received Him, to them He gave
the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name.”
That’s a synonym for belief.
The first thing
I looked at last time, rushing towards the end, was John 6:39. “This is the
will of Him who sent Me, that of all that He has given
Me I lose nothing, but raise it up on the last day.” So the question is what
does that refer to? The way to do Bible study is
when you see words or phrases you look to see other places where those words or
phrases are used. If it’s not real clear in one place, then maybe there
are some other places where it’s clearer. Then you use the clear passages to
interpret the ambiguous passages because there are some passages where certain
things are ambiguous. But that’s because there isn’t enough information given
in that verse or sentence to hang our definition of a word or a phrase. So we
go from the known to the unknown.
We looked at
some other passages and interestingly enough they’re mostly used in John 17:1.
John 17 is the true Lord’s Prayer. Matthew 5 is not the Lord’s Prayer. The
Lord’s Prayer is Jesus’ High Priestly prayer, as it’s usually referred to, when
He prays the night before He went to the Cross. He prays for His disciples. Now
it’s always a little difficult in places to determine when He is praying for
His disciples or giving them commands, whether that has a narrow application to
only His eleven disciples now [Judas has already been removed] or whether he is
speaking to the entire church through the disciples. But there are usually some
really clear indications when he’s talking only about the eleven. So let’s look
at these passages.
The prayer
begins, “Father the hour has come; glorify Your Son that Your Son may also
glorify You even as You have given Him authority over all flesh, that to all
whom You have given Him He may give eternal life.” Now there’s our phrase
again. The Son was given authority over all flesh so that He could give eternal
life to a subset of that all flesh, that is, this group that God has given Him.
Now that’s all we’re told in verse 2. Verse 6 uses the phrase a little more
when it says, “I have manifested Your name to the men
whom You gave Me out of the world, They were Yours. You gave them to Me and they have kept Your word.”
So who are the
men You have given Me? It just says the men you have
given me. It doesn’t say men and women. He’s not including the Marys or many of the other women who were involved in His
ministry. Here it’s clear he’s talking about the men God gave Him which would
restrict this to the eleven disciples at this point who are His. Then in verse
9 He says, “I ask on their behalf [pray for them]; I do not ask on behalf of
the world, but of those whom You have given Me; for
they are Yours.” Contextually He’s still talking about the eleven disciples.
Then in verse 12 He says, “While I was with them, I was keeping them in Your name which You have given Me, and I guarded them and
not one of them perished except the son of perdition [Judas Iscariot] so the
Scripture would be fulfilled.” The word “perdition” is from the same root as
the word “perish” in John 3:16 so it indicates unbelief. The whole point I’m
making here is that that’s not a phrase that talks about even all the believers
of His time. It’s talking about a set group.
Now let’s go
back to our passage in John 6:44. There Jesus said,
“No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws Him.” Now that looks
like that’s a universal statement. Unless there is an action of the Father
drawing and attracting an individual to Jesus no one can come to Him. There has
to be some sort of action on the part of God. What action is that? Here’s the
issue. Remember the Calvinist will say this is an irresistible grace calling of
the Holy Spirit. It’s internal. But is that what the verse is saying because
the next verse contextually gives Jesus’ support for this. “It is written in
the prophets [Isaiah 55:14] and they shall all be taught by God. Therefore
everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me.” Hearing
and learning from the Father is a response to the Word of God. That quotation
[Isaiah 55:14] and John 6:44 is talking about an external call or invitation of
the Word of God presenting the claim of the gospel to an individual. On the
basis of that, God works in and through His Word to call people to Himself.
This is not
talking about the inner call of the Holy Spirit. It’s not talking about the
irresistible grace of the Holy Spirit or the effectual call of the Holy Spirit.
It is the external attraction of the Word of God, the external call. That’s all
that I covered last time. Now it brings us back to Romans 8:28 and 29. Romans
8:28 says, “We know that all things work together for
good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His
purpose.” Now we covered that extensively in the last couple of lessons. In
order to understand what he has just said, the apostle Paul is going to expand
it a little bit because he’s talking about facing difficult circumstances,
facing adversity, facing suffering. And he says, “We know that all things work
together for good.” That’s the suffering in context going all the way back to
verse 17 of chapter 8. Then he explains it a little more. That’s indicated by
that first word “for,” gar in the Greek, that always introduces an
explanation and often that explanation borders on expressing a cause or a
reason for something that was just said. So that’s happened here. He’s made
this universal principle that y’all know that all things work together for good
to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.
Why does that happen? Why is that important? He’s challenged them that there
are two groups of heirs, those who are heirs of God with no condition attached
and those who are joint-heirs with Christ, if they suffer with Him.
Now that’s the
key issue because once he’s said that back in Romans 8:17, then he goes off to
explain the significance of suffering in the life of the believer in preparing
them for the future ruling and reigning with Jesus Christ in the coming
kingdom. Suffering with Christ will be used to bring them to maturity and the
basis of how they grow mature and the basis of how they will be given rewards
and responsibilities and privileges in the future Messianic kingdom. So he’s
going to explain all of this and he starts by giving us a chain of events from
eternity past related to God’s plan and purposes for the believer.
As I pointed
out before, Paul is addressing his audience as if they’re all highly motivated
believers who are pursuing the greatest amount of spiritual maturity. I do this
same thing. I address those in the congregation as if they want to go
somewhere. Somebody said, “You’re trying to move the movers.” I’m not
addressing the folks who are sitting on the sidelines. I’m trying to challenge
those who are going somewhere to keep going there. It’s not that I’m ignoring
the ones who can’t make up their minds but the train’s already left the station
but I’m trying to minister to those who are on the train and going somewhere,
not those who are trying to figure out if they want to be on the train. They’re
going to figure they want to be on the train by hearing the Word of God as the
Holy Spirit makes it clear in their lives. But the role of the pastor is to
move with the movers and say, “Look, we need to go to spiritual maturity. I’m
going to take you there. Let’s go. Who wants to go with me?”
As for the ones
who can’t make up their minds, I’m not going to sit in the back with those who
want to stay in their diapers and mess their diapers and forget about everybody
who wants to grow to spiritual maturity. And that’s how Paul is. He’s
addressing the ones who want to go somewhere. It’s not that he’s marginalizing,
belittling, diminishing, or minimizing the ones who want to sit around in their
diapers and figure out if they really want to grow up or not. They will
eventually, hopefully, go forward. The ones who don’t, well they’re going to
fall by the wayside, and they’re going to end up with lives characterized only
by wood, hay, and straw. They’re going to be failures at the judgment seat of
Christ. But Paul’s focus is on those who want to go somewhere.
And so he’s
challenging them with this plan of God. God’s got a plan! That plan is to
conform you and me to the image of His Son and He uses suffering to do
that. When we understand the role of suffering and adversity in our lives
it changes how we respond to it in our lives because we understand it has a
purpose and a dynamic. God is using that to change our character so that it
reflects the character of Christ, the image of His Son. That’s the first
part of Romans 8:29, “For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined [set up
the end game for us] to become conformed to the image of His Son that He
[Christ] would be the firstborn among many brethren.”
We’ll get to
the second half of the verse later. Before we get there we have to understand
this word “foreknow” and we have to understand its relationship to the next
word “predestination”. Those are clearly two separate concepts. That’s one of
the first observations I have. When it comes to understanding foreknowledge,
there’s a problem. The problem is that many people when they read this at a
surface reading, they think that this is talking about simply knowing something
ahead of time. It’s prescience, knowing something is going to happen before it
happens. However, when you come to Calvinism they say, “No. No. No. It is not
knowing something is going to happen because God can’t know what is going to
happen unless He’s determined that it’s going to happen.” Understand that? In
Calvinist thought God can’t know something until first he determines it. So
they connect this foreknowledge to predetermination and they connect it to
election.
Now we don’t
have the word “election” anywhere in this passage. It’s not a passage about
election but because they define calling as choosing, then they define
foreknowledge as choosing, or having an intimate relationship. They tie all
these words together and they’re talking about God choosing who will be saved
and bringing about His plan for them. So I want to read to you just a couple of
examples of some Calvinist commentary writers and how they explain this. The
first is Douglas Moo, who is a highly respected commentator. He teaches
theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School up in Chicago and has written
numerous commentaries, including several on Romans. He writes about
foreknowledge here. “In the six occurrences of these words in the New
Testament, only two mean know beforehand.” What he’s talking about is the six
occurrences of this word proginosko.
Now the root word ginosko means to
know. The prefix pro means “before” so it means to know
beforehand. He looks at this verb and says there are six uses of this word. You
have the verb and nouns as well but here he’s looking primarily at the verb.
He continues,
“Four have a different meaning. Acts 26:5 and 2 Peter 3:17. The three others
besides the occurrence in this text, all of which have God as their subject, so
the words going to change its meaning because God is the subject. That’s a
fallacy. That is a fallacious way to do a word study but it’s very common among
Calvinist theologians. He says, “All which have God as their subject mean not
know before in the sense of intellectual knowledge or cognition [I would add
“ahead of time”] but enter into relationship with before.” He says that’s what foreknow means, “to enter into a relationship with someone
ahead of time.” You knew that, didn’t you? You look at the word “foreknowledge”
in the dictionary and that’s not what it means so they change the meaning. He
continues, “It means enter into a relationship before or choose or determine
before.” Then he cites Romans11:2; 1 Peter 1:20; Acts
2:23; 1 Peter 1:2. “If then,” he says, “the word means to know intimately for
whom God knew intimately ahead of time.” That’s how he would translate Romans
8. “Since the word means know intimately or have regard for, this must be a
knowledge or love that is unique to believers and leads to their being
predestined.” You got that, right? I just want you to experience and read how
they argue.
Then we have
another guy who is absolutely brilliant. I didn’t have great warm-fuzzies about Thomas Schreiner because of his
hyper-Calvinism. I heard him speak at ETS a couple of summer’s ago. ETS means Evangelical Theological Society. I went to the
conference in Atlanta because the focus was on a lot of really errant theology
of this British Anglican priest by the name of N.T. Wright. N.T. Wright has
negatively impacted several formerly solid congregations in this country and
that’s why this is an issue. We have people in this congregation who have
family members who are in those congregations and this garbage that N.T. Wright has
formulated… This guy is incredibly brilliant. Tom Schreiner is too. He really
impressed me with his devastating critique of N.T. Wright at the
ETS Conference so
my respect for him really went up. These guys make anybody that we know that
knows the languages pale in insignificance. N.T. Wright
probably has forgotten more about Greek and Hebrew and has a prodigious memory,
almost a photographic memory and can cite from memory sources throughout
patristic writings and throughout any kind of secular writings. His arguments
are so loaded with minutia data that it just overwhelms you with his
argumentation. How in the world can you go through and analyze three or four
thousand references that he’s just thrown at you when you can just barely read
Greek or Hebrew and he’s quoting them all in the original language? So
they’re very overwhelming in terms of their intellectual academic
accomplishments but it’s not about the details. It really just down to some
bottom-line issues.
Tom Schreiner
is also a very strong high-Calvinist. He’s written a massive commentary on
Romans and he writes regarding our view, “Some have argued that the verb proegno [foreknow] here should be
defined only in terms of God’s foreknowledge.” What he means about that is His
prescient knowledge ahead of time. “That is, that God predestined to salvation
those whom he saw in advance would choose to be part of His redeemed community.
This fits with Acts 26:5 and 2 Peter 3:17 where the verb proginosko clearly means to know beforehand. According to this understanding
predestination is not ultimately based on God’s decision to save some. Instead
God has predestined to save those who He foresaw would choose him.” In his
thinking, choosing Him is a meritorious act. They think positive volition is
meritorious. That’s where they get hung up. “Such an interpretation is
attractive in that it forestalls the impression that God arbitrarily saves some
and not others. It is quite unlikely that it accurately represents the meaning
of proginosko in reference to
God’s foreknowledge as it is Romans 8:29. The background of the term that is proginosko should be located in the Old
Testament where for God to know referred to His covenantal love where He sets
the affection on those He has chosen.” What’s the word he’s talking about now? The Hebrew word yada, which means
to know. Did he just shift terms on us? Yes, he did. He went from proginosko to yada as if they were related. This is typical of Calvinist argument. He
went from proginosko to yada and those
are not equivalent terms.
Here’s the
fundamental error. When you take a compound word, it does not mean what the
root word means. You can’t use the root word as your standard. When you take a
prefix like “fore” and add it to the word “stalled”, which he just did, the
meaning of “forestall” cannot be arrived at by understanding the word “stall”;
it has a different set of meanings. That’s why they generated the word. Word
meanings come not from dictionaries but by usage and word meanings are not the
sum of the parts. They’re usage. Okay? Now he goes on to say, “The parallel
terms “consecrate” and “appoint” are noteworthy for the text is not really
saying that God foresaw.” I’m not going to read any more of this.
Then there’s
Palmer. I quoted from that last week. This is a small book that a lot of people
hand out on the Five Points of Calvinism. They state, “When the Bible speaks of
God knowing particular individuals.” Notice. Where is the word “fore”? It’s not
there. See, they slide back and forth. This is a slippery trait in a
logical fallacy is to shift between different terms as if you haven’t changed
terms. You start off talking about apples and then suddenly you’re talking
about oranges but you never really told anyone that you changed the terms.
“When the Bible speaks of God knowing particular individuals, it often means He
has special regard for them, that they’re the object of His affection and
concern.” So “knowing” in their view has to do with this intimate knowledge and
affection. That’s what “to know” means, they say.
Now, in some
places it has an intimacy to it, such as “when Adam knew Eve”, but that’s an
idiomatic expression and it’s not saying that “know” always means or has as
part of its meaning that intimate knowledge. All I’ve done so far is set up the
problem for you so that you understand where Calvinists come from. Some of you
talk to Calvinists so you’re familiar with this but some of you may not. Bob
Beaver reminded me we got into some good discussions with my good friend, Wayne
House. Now Wayne is a sharp guy. He’s a great theologian in many areas but
Wayne is a five-point Calvinist. He and a couple of others at conferences have
cornered me and we’ve had lengthy debates over these things. It was kind of fun
on that first Israel trip some years ago because all of a sudden some of the
folks from this church met a real live flesh-and-blood five-point Calvinist.
They had a real teachable time. They learned some things trying to interact
with someone as knowledgeable as Wayne and going through this stuff.
What does
foreknowledge mean? Usually during a word study you don’t start off by going to
a dictionary. People who write dictionaries, the lexicographers, they’re the
ones who studied all the different ways in which a word was used and then they give
you their categories, how they summarized and categorized the evidence. You
don’t look to their summaries first because if you’re really good, and this is
how we were trained at Dallas Seminary, we should be able to do the same work
they do. I was told by a guy who got this from an accrediting
agency that a masters of theology from Dallas Seminary—at least in
the 70s and 80s—was regarded more highly by accrediting agencies than a
PhD from most schools. It’s a four-year 130-hour training program. If you have
a heavy emphasis on Greek or Hebrew, by your third year you ought to be
equipped and trained enough to be able to do word studies almost as well as any
of these lexicons. So you can check their evidence and their evidence needs to
be checked at times. One of the primary lexicons, The Great
or Large Lexicon in the print version originally, was known by its authors
Liddell-Scott. It’s a very old classical Greek dictionary that covers
the whole span of Greek from Classical Greek in 4th and 5th
century B.C. all the way up to the Koine
period. It gives examples, even Scriptural usage, of different words.
Liddell-Scott
was revised and expanded a little bit by a man named Jones so now it’s referred
to as Liddell-Scott-Jones. It says there are two meanings to proginosko. One is to “know, to
perceive, to understand beforehand and to prognosticate, foreknow, and learn
things in advance, to judge beforehand in the sense of evaluating something
ahead of time.” Now, did you see anywhere in there a definition relating to
choice or election or loving relationships or predestination? No. They don’t
recognize any of those nuances as part of the meaning of this term. That
dictionary covers from Classical Greek in the 5th and 6th
century B.C. all the way up through the New Testament period.
Now
Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich-Danker lists two meanings: “to know beforehand or in
advance, that is to have knowledge of something” and then “to choose
beforehand”. They only focus on New Testament meanings. The only passages they
use to cite the meaning of choosing beforehand are Romans 8:29, Romans 9-11, 1
Peter 1:20 and then they say Acts 6:25. Notice the passages we want to know the
meaning for are the ones they list. Those are the passages in question. You
can’t define the term in a dubious question by going to a dictionary that says
this is the only place this term is used in this way. This is the same kind of
error that Arndt and Gingrich had in the meaning of “tongues”. They say it
means three things: the organ in your mouth, speaking in human languages, and
it means ecstatic utterances. For ecstatic utterances it lists 1 Corinthians
13. Wait a minute. How do you know it means that in 1 Corinthians 13 if it
doesn’t mean that anywhere else? This is a linguistic fallacy. It’s like defining
a word by itself. You can’t do that.
The point I’m
making is that these dictionaries, including Moldin
and Milligan which looks at all the usage of words in
the Koine papyri, say that the word means to foreknow
or to know previously. In other words, the dictionaries do not recognize any
other meaning except to know something ahead of time. That’s it. So where do
these guys come up with the idea that in these three or four passages in the
New Testament and only in the New Testament, and just because God is the
subject, that it means election, choice, or to know something intimately? They
have read their theology into the text. They’ve done a top-down study.
Now there’s
another lexicon out there that’s more popular. If you’ve seen the Complete Word
Study New Testament, this is edited by Spiros Zodhistas who is Greek and he’s written quite a bit. His
dictionary is geared more to laymen. In fact, one of the founding members of
this congregation used to be on his board. In this book he says what is means is
“to perceive, to recognize beforehand, to know previously, to take into account
or consider something beforehand, to grant prior knowledge or recognition to
someone beforehand. The first meaning is used of mere prescience. Then he gives
a theological definition (not an evidence) in terms of the lexicon data. It’s
read into the data.
Now the New
International Dictionary of New Testament theology has a real concise statement
in terms of all the usage prior to the New Testament. It says, “The
corresponding noun, prognosis is a
medical, technical term since Hippocrates.” You go to the doctor and you get a
prognosis, same word. “It denotes the foreknowledge which makes it possible to
predict the future.” That’s how the word is used. That’s the core meaning. It
does not have this idea of intimate knowledge or choice or election.
What are some
of the passages where the term is used? We’ll look at these in detail. Acts
26:5, “Since they have known about me for a long time [or from the first].”
This is not a debated passage. Everybody agrees that this is prescience or
knowledge ahead of time. Then there’s Romans 8:29, the passage we’re studying.
Romans 11:2, which is in the context of whether God has thrown away His people.
Paul answers by saying “No, may it never be. God has not rejected His people,
whom He foreknew.” Who are His people? Israel. So here foreknowledge is used in
relation to God’s plan for Israel. 1 Peter 1:20, “For He [Jesus Christ] was
foreknown before the foundation of the world.” 2 Peter 3:17, “You therefore,
beloved, knowing this beforehand.” This is again not talking about a
theologically relevant idea but in terms of everyday human experience you knew
something ahead of time. So obviously, the primary meanings of the known
passages are simply to know something ahead of time.
Then we ran
into it in Acts 2:33 when Peter says, “Jesus Christ was delivered by the
determined purpose and foreknowledge of God.” Again it’s talking about Jesus
Christ. It’s not talking about choosing people for salvation. Then 1 Peter 1:2
talking about that the recipients of Peter’s letter that they were elect
according to the foreknowledge of God the Father. So that, as you’ll see when
we get there, election is based on foreknowledge. Not the other way around. Foreknowledge
doesn’t mean choice. There’s a redundancy there.
Now let’s go
back and just kind of look at some of these passages. Turn to these passages.
I’ll take two or three minutes on each one and it might help you understand.
You can make some notes in the margins so you can recover this later on. The
question we’re addressing is whether proginosko
means to know beforehand only in the sense of prescience knowledge, that is,
knowledge before the fact or does it mean to elect, to determine, or to
lovingly choose beforehand? Those are the meanings that the Calvinist
commentators tell us it means. The first thing we saw was that the only
attested meaning outside the Bible and the meaning in several New Testament
passages indicates that it means “to know beforehand” with the exception of
these four verses. Therefore, since the meaning everywhere else is to know
beforehand the burden of proof is on the Calvinist theologian to say that it
means something it doesn’t mean in any other location. Okay, they’ve got to prove
that because they’re going against a mountain of data. They’re saying that in
these four verses it doesn’t mean what it means everywhere else. That’s
essentially their position.
The second
problem we have to deal with is that in terms of basic word meanings and word
studies. Words do not change their meaning just because God becomes the
subject. When we read that a person loves, using agape and then God loves, the word love doesn’t change its
meaning. agape means agape whether God is the subject or man
is the subject. Obviously the dimension of God’s activity is going to be
greater but it’s not that love means one thing when it talks about men doing it
and it means something completely different when God does it. That’s a logical
fallacy. That’s a fallacious methodology.
So we look at Acts 26:5. The context here is that Paul is witnessing when
he’s been called before King Herod Agrippa, the Second, and he is giving a
defense for his gospel. Paul had gone to Jerusalem. A riot had broken out and a
Roman cohort had surrounded him, protected him, put him under arrest, taken him
under house arrest to Caesarea and Paul claimed the right of a Roman citizen to
appeal his trial to Rome. He’s been under basic house arrest in Caesarea
waiting for his transport to Rome. During this time he got this opportunity to
talk to Agrippa. So talking about all the Jews that got mad at him in Jerusalem
and he says, “They know me. I lived here. I was one of the top rabbinical
students in Gamaliel’s yeshiva. Everyone knows me.” So in verse 5 he says, “They knew me
before.” Before this event occurred, they already knew Paul. Now there are a
couple of important things to point out here. When Calvinist look
at this term proginosko they want
to define that as having an intimate relationship or else lovingly choosing
someone ahead of time to have a relationship with. That’s their idea. They will
say, “It doesn’t mean knowing about someone, it means knowing someone
intimately.
In Romans 8:29
we read, “For whom God foreknew.” Not who God knew
about but who God knew. The problem is that when we look at the use of this
term here, Paul is saying, “They knew me.” Did all those Jews in Jerusalem have
a personal, intimate knowledge of Paul? No, they did not. They knew about him
but they didn’t know him in the sense that the Calvinists want to import this
intimate knowledge into the term. So the idea of the term “about” doesn’t have
to be stated. It’s embedded in the meaning of the Greek. I’m going to show you
an example of that in Hebrews 6:9. The writer of Hebrews says, “But beloved, we
are convinced of better things concerning you.” Now in the Greek there’s no
“of” there. "Better things" is actually an accusative case. A
genitive case would give you the right to include “of” but it’s not a genitive
case. "Better things" is the direct object of the verb. It’s in the
accusative case. The verb is “we are convinced” but “of” is embedded in the
nuance of the verb itself. We know “of” better things. We know “about” better
things.
So that idea of
knowing about Paul means the “about” is included in the concept there. That’s
how the Greeks would say it. They just wouldn’t add that preposition. It was
embedded in the sense of the verb. So in Acts 26:5,
it’s simply stating that they knew “about me from the first”. They’d heard all
about him so the verb there just simply gives us a core meaning of knowing
something beforehand.
The idea of
knowing “about” is important to understand as we look at a couple of other
passages. In 1 Peter 1:20, we have again the use of the word proginosko. However, unfortunately, the
New King James Version and the NIV version have
chosen to translate proginosko as
foreordained. But foreordained translates another Greek word, proorizo. We’ll talk about that later. proorizo is foreordained; proginosko is foreknown; completely different concepts. They muddied the water by
translating proginosko as
foreordained here and that’s wrong. The NASB and the NET Bible have correctly translated this as foreknown and
maybe some other Bibles as well. Now the context here is a statement about
redemption. “Knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like
silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers but
with precious blood, as a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ.”
Verse 20, “For He was foreknown before the foundation of the world.” This is
the participial form of proginosko and
is a masculine singular genitive, which means it has to refer back to a
masculine singular genitive noun, which is Christ. The foreordained here refers
to Christ who was foreordained. So now we see that foreordained is used in
relation to Israel and its also used in relationship to Christ.
The thing that
you should notice here is there’s a contrast in this verse. The second half of
the verse says that He was manifest in these times for you. That’s a time
contrast with what? That He was known beforehand. See you have a beforehand and
a now. It’s a temporal contrast. If you take out the knowledge beforehand
aspect and just say this means choice or election, then you lose the emphasis
of Peter here: that there’s a contrast between God setting up His plan in
eternity past beforehand and now it’s come to pass. It’s a “then” and “now”
emphasis in this particular verse. Foreknowledge here simply means that God in
His omniscience knew from eternity past what His plan would be in bringing
about salvation in relation to Jesus Christ.
Then we have 2
Peter 3:17 which is pretty simple. It’s just a very clear meaning of knowing
something ahead of time, prescience. Paul reminds his readers that the Lord
will come as promised and the earth and its elements will pass away. Since they
know these things before or since they’ve been told what will happen ahead of
time, they can prepare themselves for it, “You therefore, beloved, knowing this
beforehand, be on your guard.” These passages clearly talk about the fact that
foreknowledge, proginosko, means to know something ahead of time.
So following the principle that the known helps us interpret the vague or the
unclear, we’ve got to say those other passages make it pretty clear that the
word means knowing something ahead of time.
Next time I
want to come back and look at two other passages that are very important. One
is Acts 2:23 where Peter says that Christ was delivered by the determined
purpose and foreknowledge of God. Then we’ll get into the Peter passage, which
is really interesting. It talks about the “elect according to the foreknowledge
of God.” In the Greek it’s a totally different word order. It means basically
the same thing but when you look at the word order it says some interesting
things because Peter is talking to a select group there. It’s why he calls them
elect but it’s not what you think.