Clete said:
Nothing here suggests that God knows more than is knowable. Nothing here suggest that God knows more than was suggested in docrob57's post.
Sure there is, you just don't want to believe "the suggestion," just take a look at your response below on how you try to refute what "is not being suggested." :chuckle:
Clete said:
You are reading into the text. It does not say this. It would not be difficult for God to know what you are going to say before you say it. I do that with my wife all the time and God knows her much better than I do. Even so, I only strongly suspect or am able to reliably predict what my wife will say because I know her so well, it is the same with God. Stop reading your theology into the text and simply read it for what it says.
This goes to the heart of your error, you think God is like you!
You have forgotten God's description of Himself when He said, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts."
Comparing God's perfect knowledge of the entire human race to your puny knowledge of your wife is simply ridiculous. I can't believe I actually have to spend time refuting this claim, children can refute this argument.
PSA 139:1 To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David. O LORD,
thou hast searched me, and known me.
You can't search and know your wife, at best you can only observe and talk to her. Even the Holy Spirit asks you, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" And then the Lord even gives you the answer, "I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings. (Jer 17:9-10)
PSA 139:2 Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising,
thou understandest my thought afar off.
Here is another clear revelation of how God is different than you and your wife. God knows our thoughts; "I know that thou canst do every thing, and that no thought can be withholden from thee." (Job 42:2)
PSA 139:4 Even before there is a word on my tongue, Behold, O Lord, You know it all.
David is revealing that the Lord knows
everything that we are going to say before we say one thing
and He is always right! This is not to even close to your puny ability to anticipate what your wife might say in isolated incidences, in which I'm sure you will even admit that you are sometimes right and sometimes
wrong.
That is why David says, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; It is too high, I cannot attain to it." (PSA 139:6)
The knowledge you have of your wife is
not "too wonderful or too high that you cannot attain to it." As a matter of fact it is a rather very common knowledge that we and David and all have/had for our spouses.
Your "brushing off" of these wonderfully revealing verses of God's high attributes and Omniscience, "that are all simply too high to attain to," by bringing them down to your common and ordinary knowledge of your wife only reveals the intent of your heart and theology. That intent seems to be to bring God down to your puny level of knowledge and understanding which is never "too high to attain," and to put Him in a nutshell so you can understand Him in your way. You are basically forming God into your image of what God should be like or rather what you want or hope Him to be like.
Clete said:
P.S. I want to thank you for actually engaging the debate! This is probably the most substance this issue has seen in six months on this site.
It is my pleasure, I started this thread almost 2 months ago hoping to see some substance and quite frankly I have been very disappointed. As a matter of fact no one has even refuted my rather basic opening point in post #71:
"I think on this very point Open Theism rises or falls, because if God did indeed predestine Christ to come and die before creation than of course He predestined the fall, etc. etc. and etc.
Thank God He revealed this to us:
1PE 1:19 But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot:
1PE 1:20
Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you,"
The point is why was Christ, God becoming man, foreordained before the foundation of the earth if He didn't know and plan that man was going to sin before He created him? Maybe you'd like to take a shot at it? Everyone else was quick to change the subject and get me chasing them down "the rabbit trails." I believe the heretical unorthodox teachings of Open Theism, that you believe and are teaching, falls on just these two simple verses.