Islamic scholars say you cannot really understand the Quran until you read it in Arabic. The issue is not making your own internal translation from Arabic into your native tongue, but translating your mind into Arabic thought. Frankly, the Bible is no different. While I won’t advise you to learn the biblical languages, I will warn you that you must gain a Hebrew mind.
Scripture says that God knows the future. Many Westerners struggle with that because of how they think of the future. Our problem isn’t really a question of God, but of time. The overwhelming influence of bad Science Fiction and basic Western scientific conceptions of time have deeply stained our understanding of a fundamental truth of Scripture. While we understand instinctively that we are bound under the rule of time and space limitations, we are taught to reject the idea that there is anything else. We imagine all of Creation, even God Himself, must be bound under those limitations.
Time and space are an element of the Fall, not of existence itself. Plenty of writers before me have tried in vain to dispel the false notion from the Western Christian mind. I say it was in vain because when we survey the theological landscape, we see easily that no one seems to have absorbed the correct understanding. Perhaps it is because the writers who have tried to take away the false idea have done such a poor job of replacing it with something better, or perhaps the resistance has been too high. As with everything else in the study of Antiquities, it’s not as if the scholars can’t tell us how Hebrew people thought on such things, but no one listens.
Maybe I’ll fail, too, but I can’t avoid trying to correct this major hindrance to understanding our world.
Time is best understood as a living thing. It grows and develops and there are thousands of genetic and environmental permutations possible at each step along the way. But it’s a mistake to focus on the fruit alone nor what we might know of the development process. God knows the future because He designed the tree on which the future grows as a fruit. It’s not correct to think of God’s mind chasing to the end every thread of probability and possibility; that’s a false image. That’s how men can know something they didn’t make. God made it all, and so His knowledge is much more personal and intimate.
Even if we start discussing divine election — predestination — we get all confused because we imagine that God’s mind is constrained by time and space as our minds are.
Large elements of our future are predetermined. However, it is wrong to think of them in terms of outcomes as Western historians write such things. The finite individual facts of human existence are not a central consideration. Rather, it is the moral outcomes that matter with God. Here we encounter our single greatest barrier, because we cast the question of morality in terms of discrete actions and various human tendencies as expressed in discrete actions. It’s the same intellectual roadblock that keeps us from understanding all of revelation.
Moral intelligence is knowing the character of God, insofar as He can be known. God portrays Himself as an Eastern Potentate for a good reason: You are expected to study Him the way some ANE feudal servant would. You have to grasp Him as a Person. The future is the broad complex of interactions between God and His creation as a whole, not just those sentient creatures He placed into this time-space bubble. Sentience is not the key. Moral awareness is the key. It’s not just primitive thinking to view Creation is alive in its own right; that’s how God revealed it.
If you want to then cast God as somehow a primitive and inconsequential deity, that’s your problem. The primitive and barbaric deity is still God Almighty and your destiny is in His hands. You can choose to participate willingly and knowingly, or you can be a pawn along with most of the other creatures. The option to embrace this is not limited to those who receive spiritual birth. We who are spiritually aware have an easier time of navigating the necessary changes, but moral truth was always open to anyone from the very beginning. Old Testament Scripture implies that chasing His moral truth does reliably result in spiritual birth, but it’s never stated in legalistic terms. You can’t create in God a moral debt to give you spiritual birth, but you can claim what He has offered since the day humanity was expelled from the Garden of Eden.
That Flaming Sword is not where the story ends. You are supposed to impale yourself on it first before you can take it in your hands. You can’t use it in this life until after you pull it from your own breast. Without the first cut in your own human flesh, its power serves only to deny you entrance to the Truth of God. Once you absorb the demands of the Truth, you can use it. Of course, a sword only does what a sword can do, so you are constrained in how you use it. It’s not a get-what-you-desire kind of grant, but a get-the-right-desire issue.
God knows the future because it’s His creation. Humans relate to Him as either kin with a vested interest, or as slaves who are strangers. He invites us to participate, but there will most certainly be limits. When we become comfortable with those limits, we can experience things for which there are no words.
