"Nothing is too hard for you."

(Jer.32.17)

God is omniscient, so does He know everything about our future? It is difficult to discuss or reflect upon matters that concern Divine omnipotence because our human minds are finite and there are things outside our range of understanding. We can no more understand the nature and scope of Divine foreknowledge than visualise how the universe can be infinite in extent. No matter how far it extends there must be something beyond that. We cannot understand how time can be endless; or that God never had a beginning and was "always there". God says He knows "the end from the beginning and from ancient times the things that are not yet done" (Isa.46.10). Whether this refers to the general outcome of His creative plan or is to be extended to the individual fates of each creature to which He has given life we really have no of means knowing. Some thinkers have defined the eternity in which God dwells as an eternal 'NOW' in which past, present and future all exist together and God can see them all, but that is human speculation and we have no mandate to say that God is really like that. There is progression, development and free will in God's creation. It may be that in some manner, incomprehensible to us, God is able to take into account all the causes and effects and all the influences which impinge upon our lives and deduce from them all, how we are going to react. From that He may be able to perceive what the ultimate outcome will be. Yet it remains true that we ourselves are unconscious of all this and are still able to exercise our own free-will and choose our own course without any kind of ordained future to which we are compelled willy-nilly to conform. It is an undisputed fact that God has given us, as He gave Adam at the first, the free and unfettered choice of good or evil, and we are the masters of our destiny. Whether or not the infinite mind of God is such that He already knows which we shall choose does not in any degree affect our own freedom of choice. Nor does it affect any further development of our mind and will, in the ages of eternity which are to be ours beyond this life.

AOH