Chapter 20: The Prophets and Divine Foreknowledge — God Knows the Future Without Determining It

We have now arrived at one of the most important chapters in this book. In the prophetic literature of the Old Testament, we find something remarkable — a God who not only claims to know the future but stakes His very identity on that claim. "I am God, and there is no other," the Lord declares through Isaiah. "I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done" (Isa. 46:9–10 ESV). This is an extraordinary assertion. God says that what makes Him different from every pretender to deity, every idol and false god, is precisely this: He knows what is going to happen before it happens.

The prophetic literature gives us a window into how God relates to time that is absolutely essential for our investigation. It reveals two things at once — and holding both of them together is the key to understanding God's relationship to time correctly. First, the prophets show us a God who has exhaustive knowledge of the future. He names kings before they are born. He predicts the rise and fall of empires centuries in advance. He foretells the details of the Messiah's life, death, and mission hundreds of years before Jesus walked the earth. This is not vague guesswork. It is not general trend-spotting. It is specific, detailed, personal knowledge of events that have not yet happened.

Second — and this is just as important — the very same prophetic literature shows us a God who genuinely responds to human choices in real time. The same prophets who record God's exhaustive foreknowledge also record God relenting from judgment, changing His course of action, responding to repentance, and interacting with His people as genuine events unfold. As we explored in Chapter 18, the nacham passages present a God whose temporal engagement with His creatures is real and responsive, not scripted or predetermined.

The thesis of this chapter is this: the prophetic literature provides powerful evidence that God has exhaustive knowledge of future events — He declares "the end from the beginning" — while also demonstrating that this foreknowledge does not entail determinism, because God also responds genuinely to human choices within the flow of history. God knows the future without causing the future. He sees tomorrow without scripting tomorrow. And this is precisely what we would expect on the model I have been defending throughout this book — dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access.

In this chapter, we will do four things. We will exegete the major prophetic foreknowledge passages in depth — Isaiah 46:9–10, Isaiah 41:21–24, Isaiah 44:6–8, Isaiah 45:21, and Isaiah 48:3–5. We will examine specific fulfilled prophecies that demonstrate the remarkable specificity of God's foreknowledge. We will engage with the open theist reading of these passages and show why it is inadequate. And we will connect this biblical evidence to the author's model of simple foreknowledge through transcendent temporal access, previewing the fuller philosophical treatment that comes in Chapter 25.

Isaiah 46:9–10 — "Declaring the End from the Beginning"

We begin with what is arguably the single most important passage in all of Scripture on the topic of divine foreknowledge. Isaiah 46:9–10 is the mountain peak of the biblical teaching on God's knowledge of the future, and every serious treatment of this subject must reckon with it carefully. The passage reads:

The context here is absolutely crucial. Isaiah is writing during a time when Israel is surrounded by nations that worship idols — gods made of wood and gold, carried on the backs of animals, unable to speak, unable to act, unable to know anything at all. In the preceding verses (46:1–7), Isaiah has just described how the Babylonian gods Bel and Nebo are being loaded onto carts, hauled away by weary animals. These so-called gods cannot save themselves, let alone anyone else. They are burdens, not saviors.

Against this backdrop, God speaks. And what He says is stunning. He draws a line between Himself and every other claimant to deity, and the line He draws is foreknowledge. What makes God different from idols? What sets the living God of Israel apart from dead statues? It is this: He declares the end from the beginning.

Let us look at the key Hebrew phrase closely. The word translated "declaring" is maggid (מַגִּיד), a hiphil participle of the verb nagad (נגד), which means "to make known" or "to announce." This is not the language of causation. God is not saying, "I decree the end from the beginning" or "I determine the end from the beginning." The verb is about revelation — about making known, about announcing. Isaiah is making a claim about God's knowledge, not about God's causal determination of events.¹

The phrase "the end from the beginning" (me-reshit acharit, מֵרֵאשִׁית אַחֲרִית) could hardly be clearer. God knows the acharit — the end, the final outcome, the latter things — from the reshit — the beginning, the starting point. He sees where things are going from where they started. And the parallel phrase "from ancient times things not yet done" (mi-qedem asher lo na'asu, מִקֶּדֶם אֲשֶׁר לֹא־נַעֲשׂוּ) reinforces the point. From ancient times — from the far distant past — God announces things that have not yet been accomplished. The Hebrew na'asu (from asah, עשׂה, "to do" or "to make") is in the niphal perfect: these are things that have not yet been done. They are genuinely future. They have not yet happened. And God knows them.

This is not ambiguous language. It is a direct, emphatic claim that God knows the future — not just His own intentions, not just what He Himself plans to do, but "things not yet done." The passage presents God's foreknowledge as the distinguishing mark of His deity. If God did not know the future, He would be, by His own stated criterion, no different from an idol.

The second half of verse 10 adds an important additional layer: "My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose." The Hebrew word for "counsel" is etsah (עֵצָה), referring to God's plan or purpose, and for "purpose" it is chephets (חֵפֶץ), meaning His delight or good pleasure. God is saying that His plans will not be thwarted, that what He intends to accomplish will be accomplished. But notice — even here, the language is about God's own purposes and intentions. It is not about God causing every single event in history. There is a crucial difference between saying "God's purposes will stand" and saying "God has predetermined every event that will ever happen." The former is what Isaiah says. The latter is what theological determinism says. They are not the same thing.²

As Luis Scott rightly observes, the distinction Isaiah is making between God and idols is not a distinction of power alone. Idols cannot do anything at all — of course they lack power. But Isaiah's point is deeper than that. What separates God from idols is that God can make the future known. He reveals it. He announces it. He knows it. This is a cognitive claim, a claim about God's knowledge, and not merely a claim about what God can cause to happen.³ As Scott puts it, "God is different from idols precisely because he knows the future and is able to make the future known to people through prophecy."⁴

I want to press this point further, because it matters enormously for our question about God and time. If God knows the future — genuinely, exhaustively, with certainty — then this knowledge tells us something profound about how God relates to time. A being who is locked into the present moment in the same way creatures are would not be able to declare the end from the beginning. A being who was genuinely ignorant of future free choices could not make the kind of specific predictions we find throughout the prophetic literature. God's foreknowledge implies that He has access to future events in some way that transcends the creaturely limitation of being confined to the present. This is exactly what I mean by "transcendent temporal access," and we will develop this concept fully in Chapter 25.

Isaiah 41:21–24 — The Challenge to the False Gods

If Isaiah 46:9–10 is God's positive declaration of His foreknowledge, then Isaiah 41:21–24 is the negative counterpart — God's challenge to the false gods to match His knowledge if they can. This passage is one of the most dramatic in all of Scripture. God essentially puts the idols on trial and dares them to prove their deity by predicting the future:

The courtroom imagery here is vivid. God is the judge, and the idols are the defendants. God challenges them to present their case — literally, to "bring their proofs" (Hebrew: atsumot, עֲצֻמוֹת, meaning "strong arguments" or "evidences"). And the test God proposes is breathtaking in its simplicity: tell us what is going to happen. Predict the future. If you can do that, then you have a legitimate claim to deity. If you cannot, you are nothing.

Notice the two-part challenge. First, God says, "Tell us the former things, what they are, that we may consider them, that we may know their outcome." This is a challenge to explain the past in a way that yields genuine understanding of the future. Second, God says, "Declare to us the things to come. Tell us what is to come hereafter, that we may know that you are gods." This is a direct challenge to predict the future. God makes knowledge of the future the decisive criterion for authentic deity.

William Lane Craig highlights the significance of this passage powerfully. He cites the great Puritan theologian Stephen Charnock, who commented on this text: "Such a foreknowledge of things to come is here ascribed to God by God himself, as a distinction of him from all false gods."⁵ As Charnock noted, if God does not know future contingencies — events that depend on the free choices of creatures — then God's deity cannot be distinguished from the powerlessness of idols by this criterion. The false gods cannot know the future. The true God can and does. That is the whole point of Isaiah's argument.

Charnock pressed the point even further, and his reasoning is worth following carefully. If God's knowledge of the future were merely conjectural — merely a good guess based on present trends — then the difference between God and the heathen oracles would be one of degree, not of kind. The pagan oracles sometimes made predictions too, based on their limited knowledge of causes and circumstances. If God's foreknowledge is nothing more than very sophisticated conjecture, then God would be, as Charnock put it, no more a God than angels and devils who can sometimes predict outcomes from known causes.⁶ But Isaiah's point is that God's knowledge is fundamentally different. It extends to future contingencies — events that depend on the free choices of people who have not yet been born, living in circumstances that have not yet arisen, making decisions that have not yet been made.

This passage has devastating implications for any theology that denies God's exhaustive foreknowledge. If God does not know future free choices, then the challenge He issues to the false gods in Isaiah 41 is a bluff. He cannot do what He dares them to do. He cannot predict the future with certainty any more than they can — at least not regarding events that depend on the free choices of creatures. The only difference would be that God is more powerful and more knowledgeable about the present, which would make His predictions better guesses, but not genuine foreknowledge. As we will see below, this is precisely the problem with the open theist reading of these passages.

Isaiah 44:6–8 — "Is There a God Besides Me?"

The third major foreknowledge passage in Isaiah reinforces and extends the argument of the previous two:

This passage adds several important elements to our understanding. First, God identifies Himself as "the first and the last" (rishon and acharon, רִאשׁוֹן and אַחֲרוֹן). This is temporal language. God was there at the beginning (rishon — the first) and He will be there at the end (acharon — the last). He spans all of time. He endures through all of history. This language is naturally temporal — it describes a God who exists through the entire sweep of time, from beginning to end. It does not describe a God who exists outside of time in a single, undifferentiated eternal moment. A timeless God would not be "first" and "last" in any meaningful temporal sense; He would simply be "outside."⁷

Second, God once again issues the challenge: "Who is like me? Let him proclaim it." And the test, again, is foreknowledge: "Let them declare what is to come, and what will happen." The Hebrew here is vivid. The phrase "what is to come" uses the word otiyyot (אֹתִיּוֹת, from atah, "to come"), referring to things that are approaching, things on their way, things still in the future. And "what will happen" uses the root yiqre'u (from qara, "to befall" or "to happen"). God is challenging any rival to declare what is still in the process of arriving, what has not yet befallen, what lies ahead in the unfolding stream of history.

Third, God reassures His people on the basis of His foreknowledge: "Have I not told you from of old and declared it? And you are my witnesses!" God's people are witnesses to the fact that God has repeatedly announced future events in advance, and those events have come to pass exactly as He declared. Israel's entire history is a witness stand, and the testimony is clear: God knows the future.

The verb "declared" here is again nagad (נגד) in the hiphil — the same verb we saw in Isaiah 46:10. God makes known, announces, reveals. His foreknowledge is expressed through revelation, through telling His people what is going to happen before it happens. And the reason God tells them is so that when the events unfold, they will know that He is God and there is no other. Foreknowledge, in other words, serves a pastoral and revelatory purpose. It is not abstract omniscience for its own sake. It is knowledge shared with God's people for their comfort, assurance, and trust.⁸

Isaiah 45:21 — "Who Told This Long Ago?"

Isaiah 45 contains one of the most remarkable prophecies in all of Scripture — the naming of Cyrus, the Persian king, more than a century before his birth. We will discuss the Cyrus prophecy in detail below. But first, let us look at the foreknowledge statement in verse 21:

The phrase "who told this long ago" uses the Hebrew mi-higgid zot mi-qedem (מִי־הִגִּיד זֹאת מִקֶּדֶם) — literally, "who made this known from ancient times?" And "who declared it of old" uses mi-az (מֵאָז), meaning "from then" or "from that time." God is pointing to the gap between His prediction and the event, emphasizing that He announced these things long before they happened. The longer the gap between prediction and fulfillment, the more impressive and undeniable the foreknowledge.

This temporal gap is crucial for understanding God's relationship to time. On a timelessness model, God does not really "predict" anything at all. A timeless God has no "before" and "after" in His experience. He does not announce something at one point and then watch it be fulfilled at another point. Everything — prediction and fulfillment alike — is grasped in a single, undifferentiated eternal moment. But that is not how Isaiah presents it. Isaiah presents God as one who told this "long ago" (mi-qedem) and then saw it come to pass at a later time. The language is inherently temporal. God announced, then the event happened. This is the language of a temporal God who acts within the flow of history, not a timeless God who grasps all things in an eternal now.⁹

Isaiah 48:3–5 — "I Declared Them to You from of Old"

The last of our five major foreknowledge passages adds a fascinating dimension to the discussion — God explains why He reveals the future to His people:

This passage is extraordinary for what it tells us about God's reason for sharing His foreknowledge. God knows His people are stubborn (the Hebrew qasheh, קָשֶׁה, means hard, difficult, obstinate). He knows their necks are like iron and their foreheads like bronze — they are stiff-necked and hard-headed. And because He knows how stubborn they are, He reveals the future to them in advance so that when the events come to pass, they cannot credit their idols. If God had not announced these things beforehand, Israel might have attributed the events to the power of their carved images. But because God told them what would happen before it happened, they cannot deny that it was God who did it.

The practical implications of this passage are profound. God's foreknowledge is not a cold, abstract attribute. It is relational and pastoral. God reveals the future to His people because He loves them and wants them to know Him — to trust Him, to worship Him, and to reject the idols that would lead them astray. Foreknowledge, in this passage, serves the relationship between God and His people. It is a tool of revelation, a gift of assurance, and a weapon against idolatry.

Notice too the temporal language: "I declared long ago" (me-az higgadti, מֵאָז הִגַּדְתִּי), "they went out from my mouth" (mi-pi yatse'u, מִפִּי יָצָאוּ), "then suddenly I did them" (pit'om asiti, פִּתְאֹם עָשִׂיתִי), "and they came to pass" (vattavo'nah, וַתָּבֹאנָה). The sequence is unmistakable: God declared, then He acted, then the events came to pass. This is temporal sequence — a before, a then, a finally. It is the language of a God who acts within time, who announces at one point and acts at another point, who moves through history with purpose and direction.¹⁰

Gregory Boyd, the open theist, has interpreted this passage as being about God's sovereign ability to bring about events, not about His foreknowledge of future contingencies. Boyd argues that God is not claiming to possess information about what will happen, but rather declaring His intention and power to make things happen.¹¹ But this interpretation is strained. The text does not say "I determined these things" or "I caused these things." It says "I declared them to you from of old, before they came to pass I announced them to you." The emphasis is on God's knowledge and revelation, not on His causal power. Of course God has the power to act — that is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether God knew what would happen, and the text is clear: He did. He announced it before it came to pass. He declared it from of old. He foretold it.¹²

Prophetic Predictions Fulfilled: The Specificity of God's Foreknowledge

The prophetic foreknowledge passages we have examined are not abstract theological claims. They are backed up by a stunning record of specific, detailed predictions that were fulfilled — sometimes centuries after they were made. Let us examine several of the most striking examples.

The Naming of Cyrus

Perhaps the most remarkable specific prophecy in all of the Old Testament is the naming of Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who conquered Babylon and decreed that the Jewish exiles could return to their homeland and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. Isaiah writes:

The significance of this prophecy is extraordinary. Isaiah was writing in the eighth century BC, during the reign of Hezekiah. At that time, Babylon had not yet conquered Jerusalem. The exile had not yet happened. The temple had not yet been destroyed. And yet God, through Isaiah, names the specific individual — Cyrus — who would decree the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the temple after the exile. Cyrus did not conquer Babylon and issue his famous decree until 539 BC, roughly 150 years after Isaiah's ministry.¹³

Think about what this prophecy requires. God must know not only His own intentions but also the entire chain of historical events that leads to Cyrus's rise to power. He must know the socio-political circumstances of the ancient Near East over the next century and a half. He must know the specific family into which Cyrus will be born, the circumstances that will bring him to the throne of Persia, his military campaigns, his decision to conquer Babylon, and his policy regarding conquered peoples. As Scott argues, God "must know the human conditions that would bring the family of the bird of prey to the throne of his country."¹⁴ This is not a prediction that can be explained by God merely knowing His own intentions. It requires knowledge of thousands upon thousands of free human choices that have not yet been made.

Similarly, Isaiah also mentions the calling of a "bird of prey from the east" (Isaiah 46:11), widely understood as a reference to Cyrus. God says, "I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass; I have purposed, and I will do it." But notice: God bringing it to pass does not mean God scripted every detail. God works through human beings, through their free choices and actions. He navigates history, as Scott puts it, "not working against it" but working within and through it.¹⁵ This is precisely the balance I am arguing for: God knows the future exhaustively, and God works within history to accomplish His purposes, but God does not override human free will to get there.

The Naming of Josiah

An equally remarkable prophecy involves King Josiah. In 1 Kings 13:2, a man of God prophesies against the altar at Bethel during the reign of Jeroboam I (roughly 930 BC):

Josiah did not become king until approximately 640 BC — nearly three centuries later. And he fulfilled this prophecy precisely, as recorded in 2 Kings 23:15–16. The naming of a specific individual centuries before his birth, along with a description of specific actions he would take, is extremely difficult to explain without genuine exhaustive foreknowledge. God knew not only that a king named Josiah would arise but what he would do, where he would do it, and that it would fulfill the ancient prophecy. This requires knowledge of an immensely complex web of human decisions, births, deaths, marriages, political events, and cultural developments stretching across nearly three hundred years.¹⁶

The Exile and Return

The prophets predicted not only specific individuals but the large-scale movements of nations and empires. Jeremiah predicted that the Babylonian exile would last seventy years (Jer. 25:11–12; 29:10), and it did. Isaiah predicted that Jerusalem would be rebuilt (Isa. 44:28), and it was. Daniel predicted the succession of empires — Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome — with remarkable accuracy (Dan. 2; 7). These predictions involved the free choices of kings, generals, and entire populations over centuries of history.

The prophetic predictions of the exile and return are particularly important because they involve both God's sovereign purposes and human free choices. The exile happened because Israel sinned — they freely chose to worship idols, to oppress the poor, to break the covenant. God did not force them to sin. But God knew they would sin, and He predicted the consequences. And the return happened because Cyrus freely chose to issue his decree — but God knew he would choose this, and He predicted it through Isaiah.

Messianic Prophecies

The messianic prophecies of the Old Testament provide perhaps the most comprehensive case for divine foreknowledge. Consider the range of details predicted centuries before the birth of Jesus: He would be born of a virgin (Isa. 7:14), in the town of Bethlehem (Mic. 5:2), from the line of David (Isa. 11:1), that He would enter Jerusalem on a donkey (Zech. 9:9), that He would be betrayed for thirty pieces of silver (Zech. 11:12–13), that His hands and feet would be pierced (Ps. 22:16), that lots would be cast for His garments (Ps. 22:18), that He would be buried with the rich (Isa. 53:9), and that He would rise from the dead (Ps. 16:10).¹⁷

The sheer specificity of these predictions is staggering. They do not describe vague trends or general possibilities. They describe particular events involving particular people making particular choices. The betrayal of Jesus required that Judas freely choose to betray Him. The crucifixion required that Pontius Pilate freely choose to condemn Him. The burial in a rich man's tomb required that Joseph of Arimathea freely choose to offer his own tomb. None of these events were forced. All of them were freely chosen. And all of them were predicted centuries in advance.

Michael Rea makes the important point that the Dead Sea Scrolls have confirmed the dating of the Old Testament prophecies. The complete scroll of Isaiah found at Qumran, for example, has been dated by radiocarbon testing to approximately 100 BC — well before the events of Jesus's life. This means that the prophetic predictions were not written after the fact. They were genuine predictions of events that had not yet occurred.¹⁸

The Crucial Balance: Foreknowledge and Genuine Responsiveness

Now we come to what I believe is the most important theological insight of this chapter. The prophetic literature does not only show us a God who knows the future. It also shows us — within the very same prophetic corpus — a God who genuinely responds to human choices in real time. And holding these two truths together is the key to understanding God's relationship to time correctly.

Consider the prophets themselves. Jeremiah, who predicted the seventy-year exile with precision, also records God saying:

As we explored in depth in Chapter 18, this passage presents God as genuinely responsive. God's prophetic declarations about nations are conditioned by how those nations respond. If a nation repents, God relents. If a nation turns to evil, God changes His course. The Hebrew word nacham (נחם), which we examined at length in Chapter 18, describes genuine divine responsiveness — not play-acting, not the scripted unfolding of a predetermined plan, but real response to real human choices.

Jonah provides the classic example. God sent Jonah to preach judgment against Nineveh: "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" (Jonah 3:4). The Ninevites repented. And God relented: "When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it" (Jonah 3:10). God genuinely responded to the Ninevites' free choice to repent. This is not a timeless God for whom the repentance and the relenting are grasped simultaneously in an eternal now. This is a temporal God who issues a warning, sees the response, and adjusts His action accordingly.

William Lane Craig explains this balance helpfully. He suggests that prophetic warnings like the one given to Nineveh are best understood as conditional forecasts — pictures of what is going to happen "unless" something changes. They contain an implicit condition: "all things remaining the same, this is what will happen." When conditions change — as when Nineveh repents — the predicted outcome changes too. This is not a failure of foreknowledge. God always knew the Ninevites would repent. The prophetic warning was itself part of God's plan to bring about that repentance.¹⁹

But here is what I find most significant: this conditional character of prophetic warnings actually presupposes rather than undermines divine foreknowledge. God knew that Nineveh would repent. That is why He sent Jonah in the first place — not to destroy Nineveh, but to save it. The warning of judgment was the means God used to bring about the repentance He foreknew. God's foreknowledge and His genuine temporal responsiveness are not in competition. They work together. God knows how people will respond to His actions, and He acts in ways that take those responses into account — because He already sees them.²⁰

This is precisely the pattern we see throughout the prophetic literature. God knows the future exhaustively. He sees every human choice, every decision, every response. And He acts within history — warning, encouraging, judging, relenting, responding — in ways that are genuinely temporal, genuinely responsive, and genuinely dynamic. He is not a clockmaker who winds up the universe and walks away. He is not a chess master who determines every move for both sides. He is a living, personal, temporal God who knows the future and engages with the present — who sees tomorrow and acts today.

The Open Theist Reading: Generous but Inadequate

Before we proceed to connect these biblical findings to our model of God and time, we need to engage seriously with an alternative reading of the prophetic foreknowledge passages — the reading offered by open theism. Open theists like Gregory Boyd, William Hasker, Clark Pinnock, and John Sanders affirm that God is temporal and genuinely responsive, but they deny that God has exhaustive definite foreknowledge of future free choices. As we discussed in Chapter 9, open theism holds that the future is partly "open" even for God — He knows what He Himself intends to do, and He knows all necessary truths and present facts, but He does not know with certainty what free creatures will choose to do.²¹

I want to be generous here, because open theists get many things right. They are right that God is temporal. They are right that God genuinely responds to His creatures. They are right that God is emotionally engaged with the world. They are right that theological determinism is deeply problematic. I share all of these convictions, and I am grateful to open theists for recovering the biblical portrait of a genuinely responsive God against the static, distant deity of strict classical theism.

But on the question of foreknowledge, I believe open theism is seriously mistaken — and the prophetic literature is one of the main reasons why.

Boyd's Reading of Isaiah 46

Gregory Boyd, in his influential book God of the Possible, argues that the foreknowledge passages in Isaiah do not teach exhaustive definite foreknowledge of future free choices. Instead, Boyd contends that God is appealing to His own purposes and intentions. When God says "I declare the end from the beginning," Boyd interprets this as God saying, "I declare what I intend to do, and I have the power to carry out My intentions." On this reading, God knows the future only insofar as He has determined it — His own planned actions, His own sovereign decrees — but He does not know the free choices of creatures.²²

First, it does not account for the language of revelation and announcement. As we have seen, the Hebrew verb nagad (to make known) emphasizes God's knowledge and revelation, not merely His power. Isaiah is not saying God can cause the future. He is saying God can make the future known — which requires knowing it. As Scott points out, "Isaiah did not say 'decreeing the end from the beginning.' His specific statement is to reveal."²³

Second, it does not account for the specificity of the prophecies. The naming of Cyrus, the naming of Josiah, the detailed messianic predictions — these are not descriptions of what God intends to do unilaterally. They are descriptions of events that involve the free choices of many individuals. God cannot name Cyrus merely on the basis of His own intentions because Cyrus's rise to power depended on an immensely complex web of free human choices spanning more than a century. God cannot predict the betrayal of Jesus for thirty pieces of silver merely on the basis of His own intentions because that prediction requires knowledge of Judas's free choice to betray.²⁴

Third, Boyd's reading undermines the very argument Isaiah is making. Isaiah's entire point is that God's foreknowledge distinguishes Him from idols. If God's knowledge of the future is limited to His own intentions, then any sufficiently powerful being could claim the same. I know what I intend to do tomorrow. Does that make me like God? Of course not. What makes God unique is that He knows what others will freely do — events that are not determined by Him, events that depend on the free choices of creatures. That is why the idols cannot match Him. They do not know the future, but God does — genuinely, exhaustively, down to the specific names of kings who have not yet been born.

As Scott forcefully argues, the inconsistency of open theism on this point is glaring. Boyd acknowledges that God demonstrates "remarkable knowledge about the future of his chosen people" — but this admission sits awkwardly alongside Boyd's insistence that the future of free creatures cannot be known because it does not yet exist. If the future cannot be known, how can God exhibit "remarkable knowledge" of it? The open theist cannot have it both ways.²⁵

The Problem of Prophetic Specificity

Let me press this objection further. Open theists sometimes suggest that God can make specific predictions about the future without exhaustive foreknowledge by using His unlimited knowledge of the present, His understanding of human character, and His own sovereign ability to steer events. God, they argue, is like a grandmaster chess player who can anticipate moves far into the future based on superior knowledge of the current position.

But this analogy breaks down precisely where it matters most. A chess grandmaster can sometimes be surprised. A chess grandmaster cannot predict with certainty what his opponent will do a hundred moves from now. And a chess grandmaster playing against billions of free agents simultaneously, over centuries of history, with each agent's choices affecting every other agent's circumstances — such a grandmaster could not possibly predict the specific names and specific actions of particular individuals centuries in the future. The specificity of biblical prophecy overwhelms the chess grandmaster analogy.²⁶

Consider what it would take for God to predict the naming of Cyrus without exhaustive foreknowledge. God would need to know, with certainty, the identity of every person in the chain of ancestry leading to Cyrus. He would need to know, with certainty, every marriage, every birth, every political development, every military campaign, every cultural shift, every economic change, and every personal decision made by millions of people over a century and a half. Any single deviation — one different marriage, one different birth, one different political alliance — and the prediction fails. The open theist God, who does not know future free choices, cannot guarantee that this enormously complex chain of events will produce a king named Cyrus who will do precisely what Isaiah predicted.

The open theist response — that God can "determine" certain outcomes by steering events — simply pushes the problem back. How does God steer events without overriding free will? If God can guarantee that Cyrus will be born, be named Cyrus, rise to power, conquer Babylon, and decree the rebuilding of the temple — all without knowing the future free choices of the people involved — then God is essentially controlling those choices while claiming not to. This is determinism by another name. The only way to genuinely preserve human freedom and also account for the specificity of biblical prophecy is to affirm that God knows future free choices without causing them. That is exactly what simple foreknowledge claims.

Foreknowledge and Determinism: The Essential Distinction

If the prophetic literature establishes that God has exhaustive knowledge of the future, an important question immediately follows: Does foreknowledge make God a determinist? If God knows everything that will happen, does that mean everything is predetermined? Does foreknowledge entail fatalism?

The answer is no — and understanding why it is no is one of the most important intellectual tasks in this entire book.

I want to state this as clearly and simply as I can. There is a fundamental logical difference between two statements: (1) "God knows that event X will happen," and (2) "God causes event X to happen." These are not the same thing. Knowledge of an event is not the cause of that event. If I watch a friend choose vanilla ice cream at a shop, my watching does not cause her to choose vanilla. If a time traveler from the future knows that I will choose to wear a blue shirt tomorrow, the time traveler's knowledge does not cause me to wear the blue shirt. I would have worn it anyway. The knowledge tracks the event; the event does not track the knowledge.²⁷

The theological determinist (the Calvinist) claims that God knows the future because He has decreed every event. On this view, foreknowledge is grounded in God's sovereign decrees. God knows what will happen because He has determined what will happen. I reject this view, not because I deny God's sovereignty, but because I believe it makes God the author of sin, undermines genuine human responsibility, and contradicts the biblical portrait of a God who genuinely responds to human choices. If God has decreed every event — including every sin, every act of cruelty, every instance of suffering — then God is the ultimate cause of evil, and the entire moral framework of Scripture collapses.²⁸

The open theist, seeing the problems with determinism, concludes that foreknowledge must be abandoned to preserve human freedom. If God knows the future, they reason, then the future is fixed, and if the future is fixed, then we are not free. I understand why open theists reach this conclusion, but I believe they are making a logical error. The fixedness they worry about — the sense in which the future is "settled" if God knows it — is not causal fixedness. It is alethic fixedness. That is a technical term, but it means something simple: the future is "settled" in the sense that there are true propositions about it. It will either be true or false that it rains in Omaha tomorrow. If it is true, it was always true — even before the rain falls. But the truth of the proposition does not cause the rain. The rain causes the truth of the proposition.²⁹

God's foreknowledge works the same way. God knows that Cyrus will conquer Babylon not because God forces Cyrus to do it, but because God sees Cyrus freely doing it. God's knowledge is a reflection of what Cyrus will freely choose, not a cause of what Cyrus will freely choose. The direction of explanation runs from the event to the knowledge, not from the knowledge to the event. God knows because it happens; it does not happen because God knows.

This is what theologians call simple foreknowledge — God simply sees or knows what will happen, without His knowledge being the cause of it happening. And it is the model I believe is taught by the prophetic literature. God declares the end from the beginning not because He has scripted every detail, but because He can see every detail. He has what I call "transcendent temporal access" — the ability to access all of time, past, present, and future, without being locked into the creaturely present. We will develop this model fully in Chapter 25, but the biblical groundwork for it is laid right here in the prophets.³⁰

How Does God Know the Future? Transcendent Temporal Access

The prophetic literature tells us that God knows the future. But it does not give us a detailed philosophical explanation of how God knows the future. That question — the mechanism question — is one we will address at greater length in Chapter 25. But the prophetic texts do give us some important clues, and I want to lay them out here.

First, the prophetic texts describe God as having direct perceptual access to the future. When Isaiah says God "declares the end from the beginning," the natural reading is that God sees the end. He has access to it. It is present to His awareness in some way that it is not present to ours. The language of "making known" and "declaring" implies that God has something to reveal — actual knowledge of actual future events — and He shares that knowledge with His prophets.

Second, the prophetic texts describe God as existing across the full span of time. He is "the first and the last" (Isa. 44:6). He announces things "from of old" and "from ancient times" (Isa. 46:10; 48:3). He is the God who endures from everlasting to everlasting (Ps. 90:2, as we explored in Chapter 19). This language suggests a God who is not confined to the present moment but who spans — or transcends — the full temporal horizon.

Third, the prophetic texts never suggest that God's knowledge of the future eliminates or overrides human freedom. The very same prophetic corpus that affirms God's exhaustive foreknowledge also presents human beings as genuine agents who make real choices with real consequences. The Ninevites could repent, and their repentance mattered. Israel could obey or disobey, and their choice mattered. Judas could betray Jesus, and his betrayal was his own free choice, even though God foreknew it. Foreknowledge and freedom coexist in the prophetic literature without tension, because the prophets understood what many philosophers have forgotten: knowing what someone will do is not the same as making them do it.

On the model I am developing in this book — dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access — God is genuinely temporal. He experiences real sequence, real before-and-after, real engagement with the present moment. But He is not confined to the creaturely present. He can access all of time — past, present, and future — because He transcends the creaturely limitation of being locked into a single moment. Think of it this way: we are like people standing in a narrow valley, able to see only what is immediately around us. God is like someone standing on a mountaintop, able to see the entire landscape — the valley behind us, the valley where we stand, and the valley ahead. The person on the mountaintop sees further, but seeing further does not change the landscape. The future events God sees are the events that free creatures will freely choose. God's seeing them does not make them happen.³¹

This is an analogy, of course, and all analogies limp. But it captures something important about the prophetic picture of God. God sees what is coming. He knows the end from the beginning. And He shares this knowledge with His prophets — not to overwhelm us, not to demonstrate raw power, but to reassure us that He is trustworthy, that His purposes will stand, and that we can trust Him with our lives and our future.

Foreknowledge and the Prophets: Implications for God's Relationship to Time

What does the prophetic evidence, taken as a whole, tell us about God's relationship to time? I believe it supports every element of the position I have been developing throughout this book. Let me draw out the implications carefully.

First, the prophetic literature confirms that God is temporal. The prophets consistently describe God as acting in time — speaking, warning, predicting, relenting, judging, delivering. The temporal language is pervasive and relentless. God declared "long ago" and then acted "suddenly" (Isa. 48:3). God told things "from of old" and "before they came to pass" (Isa. 48:5). God is "the first" and "the last" — temporal categories that describe existence through time, not existence outside of time (Isa. 44:6). None of this language makes any sense if God exists in a single, undifferentiated, timeless "eternal now." A timeless God does not declare things "long ago" and then act "suddenly." A timeless God does not announce things "before they came to pass." These temporal markers presuppose a God who acts within the flow of time — a God for whom there is a genuine before, during, and after.

Second, the prophetic literature confirms that God is not locked into the creaturely present. A God who can declare the end from the beginning, who can name Cyrus a century and a half before his birth, who can predict the details of the Messiah's life hundreds of years in advance — such a God is clearly not limited to knowing only what is happening right now. God has access to the future in a way that creatures do not. This is what distinguishes dynamic divine temporality from creaturely temporality. Creatures are locked into the present, unable to see the future except through speculation and inference. God is genuinely temporal — He experiences real sequence — but He is not trapped in the present. He can access all of time.³²

Third, the prophetic literature confirms that God's foreknowledge does not entail determinism. The same God who declares the end from the beginning also relents, responds, and adjusts His course of action in response to human choices. God knew the Ninevites would repent, and He sent Jonah to warn them precisely because He foreknew their response. God knew Israel would go into exile, and He predicted the exile precisely because He foreknew the nation's persistent idolatry. But God did not cause the repentance of Nineveh or the idolatry of Israel. These were genuine human choices, freely made, and God's foreknowledge of them does not make Him the author of them.

Fourth, the prophetic literature confirms that foreknowledge serves relational and pastoral purposes. God does not hoard His knowledge of the future like a miser hoards gold. He shares it with His people — through the prophets, through Scripture, through the person and work of Jesus Christ. He shares it so that we will trust Him, worship Him, and reject the idols that would lead us astray. As Isaiah 48:5 puts it, God declared things in advance "lest you should say, 'My idol did them.'" Foreknowledge, in the prophets, is a gift of divine love. It is God saying to His people, "I see what is coming, and I want you to know that I am in control — not because I have scripted every detail of your life, but because I see every detail and I am working within it for your good."

Foreknowledge Across the Prophetic Canon

Although the Isaiah passages form the backbone of the biblical case for divine foreknowledge, they are not the only prophetic voices. Across the wider prophetic canon, we find the same pattern: God knows the future with specificity and acts within history with genuine responsiveness.

Daniel provides visions of successive world empires (Dan. 2, 7–8) with enough detail to trace them through Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome. The description of the Greek kingdom splitting into four parts after its founder's death (Dan. 8:8, 21–22; 11:3–4) matches the historical division of Alexander the Great's empire among his generals with remarkable precision. Ezekiel pronounces detailed judgments against Tyre (Ezek. 26–28), predicting the city's destruction by multiple nations, its stones and timber being thrown into the sea, and the site becoming a place for spreading fishing nets — all of which occurred when Nebuchadnezzar besieged the mainland city and, later, when Alexander the Great demolished the ruins to build a causeway to the island fortress.³³

Micah predicts that the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem Ephrathah (Mic. 5:2), a tiny, seemingly insignificant village. This prediction was made roughly seven centuries before the birth of Jesus — and it requires knowledge not only of God's own plan to send the Messiah but of the specific circumstances (the Roman census, the journey of Mary and Joseph from Nazareth to Bethlehem) that would place the birth in that particular location. Those circumstances depended on the free choices of a Roman emperor and the administrative decisions of governors — choices that God foreknew but did not determine.

Zechariah prophesies that the Messiah will enter Jerusalem riding on a donkey (Zech. 9:9), that He will be betrayed for thirty pieces of silver (Zech. 11:12–13), and that the shepherd will be struck and the sheep scattered (Zech. 13:7). Each of these predictions was fulfilled in the final days of Jesus's earthly ministry, involving the free choices of Jesus Himself, His disciples, Judas, and the religious leaders. The prophets did not describe a God who micromanaged these events into existence. They described a God who knew they were coming and announced them for the benefit of His people.

The Prophets and the Atemporalist Hermeneutic

We should also briefly address how the atemporalist — the defender of divine timelessness — handles the prophetic foreknowledge passages. On the classical timelessness view, God does not really "fore-know" anything, because God has no temporal "before." A timeless God grasps all events in a single eternal moment, including both the prediction and the fulfillment. When Isaiah records God "declaring the end from the beginning," the atemporalist would say that this is accommodative language — God speaking in temporal terms that human beings can understand, even though God's actual experience is timeless and without sequence.³⁴

As I argued in Chapter 16, this accommodationist strategy proves too much. If we say that all of the temporal language in the prophetic literature is merely accommodative — that God does not really declare things "long ago," does not really act "suddenly," does not really announce things "before they come to pass" — then we have emptied the prophetic language of its meaning. We are saying that the language means something fundamentally different from what it says. And if we apply this strategy consistently, it swallows virtually everything the Bible says about God. If God does not really act in sequence, respond in time, or declare things before they happen, then the entire biblical narrative of salvation history becomes a metaphor for something we cannot actually describe in human language. We lose contact with the God the Bible actually presents to us.

The prophetic literature, I believe, is most naturally and faithfully read as presenting a God who genuinely acts in time — who knows the future from His position within time (albeit with transcendent access to all of time), who shares that knowledge at particular moments in history, and who watches and responds as events unfold. This is not naive anthropomorphism. It is taking the Bible's own presentation of God seriously.

The Prophets and the Three Companion Books

Before we conclude, I want to briefly note how the prophetic evidence connects to the other works in this series.

In The Heart of God, my companion book on divine emotions, I argued that God has genuine emotional responses to what happens in the world — and that such responses require temporality. The prophetic literature confirms this. The same God who declares the end from the beginning also grieves over Israel's rebellion (Hos. 11:8), burns with anger at injustice (Amos 5:21–24), and rejoices over His people with singing (Zeph. 3:17). These emotional responses are intertwined with God's foreknowledge in a way that only makes sense on a temporalist reading. God knows that Israel will rebel, and He grieves over their rebellion when it happens. He knows Nineveh will repent, and He rejoices over their repentance when it arrives. Foreknowledge and emotional response exist side by side, reinforcing the picture of a temporal, responsive, personally engaged God.³⁵

In Beyond the Grave, my companion book on postmortem salvation and the intermediate state, I argued for substance dualism and a conscious intermediate state. The prophetic foreknowledge passages are relevant here because they demonstrate that God's knowledge extends across the full sweep of time — including the time between death and resurrection. If God knows the end from the beginning, then He knows what will happen to every soul after death, and He is actively engaged with every person in the intermediate state. This reinforces the argument that God's temporal engagement with His creatures does not stop at death.

And in The Word Made Flesh, my companion book on the Incarnation, I argued that divine timelessness is incompatible with the Incarnation. The prophetic literature anticipates the Incarnation — the messianic prophecies point forward to the moment when God the Son will enter human history. And the language is unambiguously temporal: the Messiah will be born, will live, will suffer, will die, will rise. The prophets see the Incarnation as a future temporal event, not as a timeless reality merely perceived under the guise of time.

Conclusion: The God Who Sees Tomorrow and Acts Today

The prophetic literature of the Old Testament gives us an extraordinary picture of God. Here is a God who knows the future with exhaustive certainty — who can name kings before they are born, predict the rise and fall of empires, and foretell the details of the Messiah's life centuries in advance. And here is a God who acts within history, who responds to His creatures, who relents when they repent and judges when they persist in sin. Foreknowledge and responsiveness. Sovereignty and freedom. Seeing tomorrow and acting today.

These are not contradictions. They are two sides of the same reality — the reality of a God who is genuinely temporal but not confined to the creaturely present. God experiences real sequence, real before-and-after, real engagement with the flow of history. But He also transcends the limitation that binds us creatures to the present moment. He can see the future without causing it. He can know what will happen without scripting it. And He can respond to events as they unfold, even though He already knows what is coming.

This is dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access — and the prophets are among its strongest witnesses. They testify to a God who declares the end from the beginning, who challenges false gods to match His knowledge, who reveals the future to His people for their comfort and assurance, and who engages with His creatures in the real-time flow of history. They testify to a God who knows tomorrow and acts today — not from outside of time, but from within it, transcending our limitations while sharing our temporal existence.

In the prophets, we meet the God beyond the clock — a God who is in time but not imprisoned by time, who sees the future but is not detached from the present, who knows the end from the beginning but walks with His people through every moment of the journey.

The full philosophical development of how this works — how God can know the future without causing it, and how this relates to the A-theory of time — will come in Chapter 25. But the biblical foundation has been laid right here, in the prophetic literature, where God Himself tells us who He is: "I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done."

Notes

¹ The hiphil of nagad (נגד) consistently carries the meaning of "telling," "declaring," or "making known" throughout the Hebrew Bible. See Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, trans. M. E. J. Richardson (Leiden: Brill, 2001), s.v. "נגד." The verb is informational, not causal. ↩

² Luis R. Scott, The God of Time: How God's Foreknowledge Protects Freewill (2018), chap. 3, "Prophecy and the Open View," under "God's Purpose Will Stand." Scott argues that Isaiah affirms God's purposes will stand because God knows the future, not because God has causally determined every event. ↩

³ Scott, The God of Time, chap. 3, "Prophecy and the Open View," under "God's Purpose Will Stand." ↩

⁴ Scott, The God of Time, chap. 3, "Prophecy and the Open View," under "God's Purpose Will Stand." ↩

⁵ Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, quoted in William Lane Craig, Time and Eternity: Exploring God's Relationship to Time (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001), 246. ↩

⁶ Craig, Time and Eternity, 246–47. Craig presents Charnock's extended argument that God's foreknowledge must include knowledge of future contingencies — events depending on human free will — because merely knowing necessary effects from their causes is something that even demons can do. ↩

⁷ The terms rishon (רִאשׁוֹן, "first") and acharon (אַחֲרוֹן, "last") are inherently sequential and temporal designations. See Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907), s.v. "רִאשׁוֹן" and "אַחֲרוֹן." ↩

⁸ John N. Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah: Chapters 40–66, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 178–82. Oswalt emphasizes that God's foreknowledge serves a covenantal and relational purpose: God reveals the future so that Israel will know He is God and trust Him. ↩

⁹ Craig, Time and Eternity, 245. Craig notes that biblical history and prophecy presuppose a God who knows the future and directs history toward His foreseen ends — language that is naturally temporal. ↩

¹⁰ Scott, The God of Time, chap. 3, "Prophecy and the Open View," under "God Has Foretold the Future Isaiah 48:3–6." ↩

¹¹ Gregory A. Boyd, God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), 30–31. Boyd argues that Isaiah 46 and 48 are about God's sovereign ability to bring about events, not about possessing exhaustive information about what will happen. ↩

¹² Scott, The God of Time, chap. 3, "Prophecy and the Open View," under "God Has Foretold the Future Isaiah 48:3–6." Scott points out that the emphasis in Isaiah 48:3–5 is on God's making known, not on God's determining. The prophet's point is that God can reveal the future — which requires knowing it. ↩

¹³ The dating of Isaiah's ministry to the reign of Hezekiah (roughly 740–700 BC) and Cyrus's conquest of Babylon in 539 BC is widely attested in standard histories of the ancient Near East. See John Bright, A History of Israel, 4th ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000), 352–60. Some critical scholars date Isaiah 40–55 to a later "Deutero-Isaiah" writing during or just before the exile, but even on this dating, the naming of Cyrus remains prophetic, as it occurs before his conquest of Babylon. ↩

¹⁴ Scott, The God of Time, chap. 3, "Prophecy and the Open View," under "God's Intentions—Isaiah 46." ↩

¹⁵ Scott, The God of Time, chap. 3, "Prophecy and the Open View," under "God's Purpose Will Stand." ↩

¹⁶ Scott, The God of Time, chap. 3, "Prophecy and the Open View." Scott argues that the naming of both Josiah and Cyrus centuries before their births is devastating to the open theist position, because the God of open theism has no mechanism for knowing individuals who have not yet been born. ↩

¹⁷ For a comprehensive treatment of messianic prophecy, see Walter C. Kaiser Jr., The Messiah in the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995). Kaiser catalogs the major messianic predictions and their fulfillment in the life of Jesus. ↩

¹⁸ Michael L. Rea, God Inside Time: Providence and Human Will (2019), chap. 8, "Time and Knowing—Purposeful Omniscience." Rea notes that the Dead Sea Scrolls, including the complete Isaiah scroll dated to approximately 100 BC, confirm that Old Testament prophecies were written well before the events they describe. ↩

¹⁹ Craig, Time and Eternity, 248. Craig argues that prophetic predictions of judgment often function as conditional forecasts — pictures of what will happen if present conditions continue — while other prophecies are unconditional predictions of what will certainly occur. ↩

²⁰ R. T. Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, Routledge Studies in Analytic and Systematic Theology (London: Routledge, 2025), chap. 7, "Divine Sovereignty and Providence." Mullins discusses how divine foreknowledge and divine providence work together, with God's knowledge of free creaturely choices informing His providential action in history. ↩

²¹ Clark Pinnock et al., The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1994). This foundational volume defines the open theist position: God is temporal, genuinely responsive, but does not exhaustively know the future free choices of creatures. ↩

²² Boyd, God of the Possible, 29–31. ↩

²³ Scott, The God of Time, chap. 3, "Prophecy and the Open View," under "God's Purpose Will Stand." ↩

²⁴ Scott, The God of Time, chap. 3, "Prophecy and the Open View." Scott argues that God's naming of Cyrus and Josiah requires knowledge not just of God's own intentions but of the entire web of human decisions leading to their births, reigns, and actions. ↩

²⁵ Scott, The God of Time, chap. 3, "Prophecy and the Open View," under "Open Theism and God's Limited Knowledge." Scott highlights the inconsistency in Boyd's acknowledgment that God exhibits "remarkable knowledge" of the future while simultaneously maintaining that the future cannot be known. ↩

²⁶ William Hasker, God, Time, and Knowledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 185–97. Hasker, himself an open theist, admits that God's predictive capacity on open theism is limited to inferences from present knowledge and God's own intentions. The chess grandmaster analogy is frequently used by open theists but, as I argue in the text, cannot account for the specificity of prophecies like the naming of Cyrus. ↩

²⁷ This point — that knowledge of an event does not cause the event — has a long philosophical pedigree. See Linda Zagzebski, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), chap. 3. Zagzebski argues that the direction of explanation runs from the event to God's knowledge, not from God's knowledge to the event. ↩

²⁸ For a sustained critique of theological determinism and its implications for the problem of evil, see Jerry L. Walls, Does God Love Everyone? The Heart of What's Wrong with Calvinism (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2016). ↩

²⁹ R. T. Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, chap. 7, "Divine Sovereignty and Providence." Mullins distinguishes between alethic settledness (there are true propositions about the future), epistemic settledness (God knows these truths), and causal settledness (events are causally determined). Affirming the first two does not require affirming the third. ↩

³⁰ The concept of "transcendent temporal access" — the idea that God can access all of time without being locked into the creaturely present — is the author's distinctive contribution, developed fully in Chapter 25. It draws on elements from Nicholas Wolterstorff's unqualified temporalism in "God Everlasting," in God and the Good: Essays in Honor of Henry Stob, ed. Clifton Orlebeke and Lewis Smedes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 181–203, and from R. T. Mullins's argument that time is an attribute of God's own being in The End of the Timeless God, Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), chap. 5. ↩

³¹ The mountaintop analogy is imperfect — all analogies for God's relationship to time are — but it captures the essential point: God's vantage point gives Him access to what we cannot see, without changing the events themselves. Craig uses a similar spatial analogy in Time and Eternity, 245–46. ↩

³² Garrett J. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, Routledge Philosophy of Religion Series (London: Routledge, 2004), chap. 10, "God's Relation to Creation." DeWeese argues that God's omnitemporality — His presence across all of time — allows for genuine foreknowledge without requiring timelessness. ↩

³³ For the fulfillment of Ezekiel's prophecy against Tyre, see Gleason L. Archer, A Survey of Old Testament Introduction, rev. ed. (Chicago: Moody, 2007), 383–86. ↩

³⁴ Paul Helm, Eternal God: A Study of God without Time, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chap. 2, "God and Time." Helm argues that biblical language about God acting in time is accommodative — God condescends to speak in temporal terms that creatures can understand, even though His actual mode of existence is timeless. ↩

³⁵ R. T. Mullins, God and Emotion, Elements in the Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), §5.2, "The Wrath of God." Mullins argues that genuine emotional responsiveness requires temporality — God must experience events and respond to them in sequence. A timeless God cannot genuinely respond because response requires a temporal ordering of event-then-reaction. ↩

Bibliography

Archer, Gleason L. A Survey of Old Testament Introduction. Rev. ed. Chicago: Moody, 2007.

Boyd, Gregory A. God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000.

Bright, John. A History of Israel. 4th ed. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000.

Brown, Francis, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs. A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament. Oxford: Clarendon, 1907.

Charnock, Stephen. The Existence and Attributes of God. Reprint, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996.

Craig, William Lane. Time and Eternity: Exploring God's Relationship to Time. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001.

DeWeese, Garrett J. God and the Nature of Time. Routledge Philosophy of Religion Series. London: Routledge, 2004.

Hasker, William. God, Time, and Knowledge. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.

Helm, Paul. Eternal God: A Study of God without Time. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Kaiser, Walter C., Jr. The Messiah in the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995.

Koehler, Ludwig, and Walter Baumgartner. The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament. Translated by M. E. J. Richardson. Leiden: Brill, 2001.

Mullins, R. T. The End of the Timeless God. Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

———. From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker. Routledge Studies in Analytic and Systematic Theology. London: Routledge, 2025.

———. God and Emotion. Elements in the Philosophy of Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Oswalt, John N. The Book of Isaiah: Chapters 40–66. New International Commentary on the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998.

Pinnock, Clark, et al. The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1994.

Scott, Luis R. The God of Time: How God's Foreknowledge Protects Freewill. 2018.

Walls, Jerry L. Does God Love Everyone? The Heart of What's Wrong with Calvinism. Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2016.

Wolterstorff, Nicholas. "God Everlasting." In God and the Good: Essays in Honor of Henry Stob, edited by Clifton Orlebeke and Lewis Smedes, 181–203. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975.

Zagzebski, Linda. The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.