The word foreknowledge is used seven times in various forms in the New Testament. It is applied to man in two instances, and to God in the remainder: and the significance of its application to God is illustrated by the former.
Paul, for example, in making his defence before Agrippa attributes foreknowledge to “all the Jews at Jerusalem” who knew him and his manner of life from the beginning. A span of approximately forty years separated the beginning of which he spoke and his defence. He himself explains what it was in him that they foreknew, namely, that after the most narrow sect of their religion he had lived a pharisee (Acts 26. 5).
Similarly Peter, addressing the brethren about the terrors of the last day and the salvation anticipated by them, admonished them that seeing they knew beforehand of these things they were fortified against possible declension from the faith (2 Pet. 3. 17).
The foreknowledge in one case was a practical experience, and in the other a course of instruction.
Concerning the foreknowledge of God, Paul asked, “Hath God cast away his people whom he foreknew?” (Rom. 11. 2). The context and the theme he is developing both require a negative by way of answer. God has not cast off, and the reason for this lies in the fact of God’s long-term experience, which reaches back beyond his call of Abraham and his choice of Abraham’s posterity as a “peculiar” nation, concerning whom he had declared that, in spite of their disobedience and infidelity, they must perforce bear witness to his Name. God’s foreknowledge therefore extends beyond the knowledge of their ancestry and humanity to include the manner in which they are to serve his purpose in them and to reach their destined end.
A finer sense of foreknowledge is expressed in 1 Pet. 1. 20: “Christ . . . verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world.” Foreordination is the beginning of foreknowledge, and deepens the appreciation of God’s prior intentions in the salvation which centres upon his people, and through whom Christ was ordained to be the means and the end. The foreordination was the determinate counsel which preceded the physical facts upon which practical experience could base a foreknowledge.
The second verse of this chapter runs to the same fine expression in speaking of the election of the saints to an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled and reserved in heaven for them through sanctification of the Spirit. Here again both means and end are incorporated. And the foreknowledge extends into a new sphere, beyond the nation of Divine choice to another people not of the Jewish fold, who because they have demonstrated a faith like that of Abraham are included in the family of God. The initiative is with God who, by his grace in giving his son to death according to his determinate counsel and by a foreknowledge of his willing obedience, prepared the way for his resurrection to become Prince of Life.
Of God’s foreknowledge of Jesus it can be said that it was personal and individual. He was the son who came as a result of long extended promises and prophecies, by which he was anticipated and foreknown also by men, such as those who looked for redemption in Israel (Luke 2. 38).
But of the saints generally, and so of ourselves, Paul wrote, “Whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son . . . whom he did predestinate, them he also called’.
(Rom. 8. 28-30). These are not named as individuals but as a class of individuals who have heard and responded to a call. These are the “many brethren” among whom the foreknown Jesus is the first. Being foreknown of God they are predestinated “to the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will . . . that in the dispensation of the fullness of times he might gather in one all things in Christ . . . according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his will- (Eph. 1. 5-11).
The foreknowledge of God rests on foundations that have been proved by revelation, by human experience and by faith.
Reflections on the Potter and the Clay