I often wonder about things I have been taught as I grew up using the standard Baptist theology. One area is God’s omniscience, His knowing everything, even before it happens. I wonder if that is a general statement with some wiggle room or absolute in every detail. An example is God’s command to Abraham to offer his son Issac as an offering.
Genesis 22:12 God said, “Do not stretch out your hand against the lad, and do nothing to him; for now I know that you fear God since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.”
Did God not know for sure what Abraham would do? I have read all the explanations on what it must really mean in light of God’s omniscience, but they all seem like educated guesses shaped by the firm belief that God is totally omniscient. I do believe that He is all-knowing, and I feel a bit heretical, even wondering about it. But I hate to push that phrase,”now I know that you fear God,” into meaning something that it doesn’t say with a literal reading of the passage.
But another example close to Christmas is Jesus becoming flesh in every way. Hebrews 4:15 says, “ we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin.” That verse seems to be saying Jesus can now sympathize with us because He has experienced all that we have experienced, but He couldn’t quite understand us until He experienced it. It seems perfectly logical that even God would not fully understand what a human feels or needs until He experiences what we experience. It makes Jesus emptying Himself of all He was as God and being made in the likeness of man even more amazing. But it certainly infringes on the doctrine of God’s omniscience. Again, I have read all the explanations of Hebrews 4:15 to make it line up with the standard doctrinal view of who God is and His attributes, and again they seem more like logical reasoning than solid Biblical proof.
My favorite Theology professor when I was in Seminary would often say, “Sometimes you have to hold one truth in one hand, and an opposing truth in the other hand, and hold them both in tension without messing up either one.” I will try and hold them both gently until I get to heaven and see how they fit together.