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 Exercise
your mind on this: from Adam Clarke, comments on Acts 2:47.
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“God
is omniscient, and can know all things; but does it follow from
this that he must know all things? Is he not as free in the
volition of his wisdom, as he is in the volition of his power?
God has ordained some things as absolutely certain these
he knows as absolutely certain. He has ordained other things as contingent;
these he knows as contingent… By contingent, I mean such
things as the infinite wisdom of God thought proper to poise on
the possibility of being or not being, leaving it to the will of
intelligent beings to turn the scale.
If
there be no such things as contingencies in the world, then
every thing is fixed and determined by an unalterable decree and
purpose of God; and not only all free agency is destroyed, but
all agency of every kind, except that of the Creator himself;
for on this ground God is the only operator either in time or
eternity: all created beings are only instruments, and do
nothing but as impelled and acted upon by this almighty and sole
Agent.
Consequently,
every act is his own; for if he have purposed them all as
absolutely certain, having nothing contingent in them, then he
has ordained them to be so; and if no contingency, then no free
agency, and God alone is the sole actor. Hence the blasphemous,
though, from the premise, fair conclusion, that God is the
author of all the evil and sin that are in the world; and hence
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follows that absurdity, that, as God can do nothing
that is wrong, whatever IS, is RIGHT.
Sin
is no more sin; a vicious human action is no crime, if God have
decreed it, and by his foreknowledge and will impelled the
creature to act it. On this ground there can be no punishment
for delinquencies; for if every thing be done as God has
predetermined, and his determinations must necessarily be all
right, then neither the instrument nor the agent has done wrong.
Thus all vice and virtue, praise and blame, merit and demerit,
guilt and innocence, are at once confounded, and all
distinctions of this kind confounded with them.
Now,
allowing the doctrine of the contingency of human actions, (and
it must be allowed in order to shun the above absurdities and
blasphemies,) then we see every intelligent creature accountable
for its own works, and for the use it makes of the power with
which God has endued it; and, to grant all this consistently, we
must also grant that God foresees nothing as absolute and
inevitably certain which He has made contingent; and, because He
has designed it to be contingent, therefore He cannot know it as
absolutely and inevitably certain. I conclude that God, although
omniscient, is not obliged, in consequence of this, to know all
that He can know; no more than he is obliged, because he is
omnipotent, to do all that he can do.”
It’s
basic, for sure; but don’t “make a talk” on it just any ol’
day.
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