We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
What is the significance of 1 Samuel 15:10?
In light of Saul’s sin the Lord says, “I regret that I made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me.”
Common sense would suggest that one can only regret a decision one makes if the decision results in an outcome other than what was expected or hoped for. If God foreknows all that shall ever occur, however, he can never truly expect or hope for something to occur which doesn’t come to pass. Hence it rules out God experiencing bona fide regret over his own decisions. Could God genuinely confess “I regret that I made Saul king” if he could in the same breathe also proclaim “I was eternally certain of what would happen if I decided to make Saul king”?
Some may object that if God truly regretted a decision he made, he must not be perfectly wise. Two considerations alleviate this objection, however. First, it is better to allow Scripture to inform us regarding the nature of divine wisdom than it is to reinterpret the clear meaning of a passage of Scripture in order to make it square with our preconceptions of what divine wisdom must be like.
Second, once we consider that the future is partly open and humans are genuinely free, the paradox of how God could experience real regret over a decision he made disappears. God made a wise decision because it had the greatest possibility of yielding the best results. But God’s decision isn’t the only variable in this matter: there is also the variable of Saul’s will. Saul freely strayed from God’s plan, but that is not God’s fault. Nor does it make his decision unwise.
The God of the possible always makes the best decision: but because he is dealing with possibilities and not certainties—because he is dealing with free moral agents—he cannot guarantee that things will always go as he would wish. The God of the possible is, to a limited extent at least, a risk-taking God.
Many reject the notion that God takes risks of any sort. To them, it seems to undermine his sovereignty. Two further comments may be made about this, however. First, do we not normally regard someone who refuses to take risks as being insecure? Don’t we normally regard someone who is compelled to meticulously control everything as evidencing weakness, not strength? Of course we do. So why do we reverse all of our ordinary assumptions about this when we think about God, especially since Scripture depicts God as taking risks?
Second, the only way to deny that God takes risks is by maintaining that everything that occurs in world history is exactly what God wanted to occur. Sin, pain, child mutilations, eternal hell—all are exactly according to God’s will. Some Calvinists are willing to accept this, but most of us find the idea deplorable. And this means that we must accept the idea that God is a risk-taking God. His risks are always wise, but they are risks nonetheless, for some things may not turn out as he wishes. While some things about the future are settled according to God’s will, it was also God’s will to create a cosmos populated by free agents. This means that the outcome of some things will to some degree be uncertain.
Category: Q&A
Tags: Open Theism, Q&A
Topics: Open Theism
Verse: 1 Samuel 15
Related Reading
How do you respond to Ruth 1:13?
Because her husband and two sons had died, Naomi says to her two daughter-in-laws (Ruth and Orpah), “[I]t has been far more bitter for me than for you, because the hand of the Lord has turned against me” (1:13, cf. vs. 20). Some compatibilists cite this passage to support the conclusion that all misfortune is…
Does the Bible forbid interracial marriages?
Absolutely not! Racist Christians used to argue against interracial marriage by quoting Old Testament passages that prohibited Jews from marrying non-Jews. This prohibition had nothing to do with race, however. In fact, there was no concept of different “races” until white Europeans invented it during the Colonial period, partly to justify their enslavement of other…
What do you think of the classical view that God is impassible?
The classical view has historically held that God is impassible, meaning he is above pathos (passion or emotions). The main reason the church came to this view was that, following the Hellenistic philosophical tradition, they associated emotions with change while believing God was above all change (immutable). Moreover, experiencing emotions implies that one is affected…
Can Science Inform Our Theology?
Over the last century, we have witnessed a revolution in various areas of science that relate to how we see the world and even God. For example, the Platonic notion that time and change are less real than timeless stability is being abandoned in light of the fact that physicists work from the assumption that…
Are You a Church Misfit?
Romain Guy via Compfight Here’s a lovely reflection from Rachel Held Evans on the experience of finding that your questions are unwelcome in church. Evans is bumping up against this material as she reads Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior. I suspect this kind of experience is much more common that we’d like to admit. Can you…
Does your “dispositional” ontology avoid substantival categories?
Question: In Trinity and Process you argue against a “substantival” ontology and instead advocate a “relational,” “process” and/or “dispositional” ontology in which being, being-in-relation and being-in-process are one and the same. In your view, entity x is its relation to entity y (and all other relations) and is the disposition to interact with y (and…