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 Exodus 13:17?
The Lord didn’t lead Israel along the shortest route to Canaan because Israel would have had to fight the Philistines. The Lord wanted to avoid this, “Lest the people change their minds when they see war, and they return to Egypt.” [NIV: “If they face war they might change their minds and return to Egypt”].
A God who faced an exhaustively settled future could not genuinely think in terms of what people might do. He would be eternally certain of exactly what everyone would do. The fact that the Bible records God thinking and speaking using terms like “if,” “perhaps” and “maybe” is evidence that God faces a partly open future. It should be noted that verses such as this one are impossible to explain as “phenomenological” or as “anthropomorphic,” for the author is reporting something we never would have known had he not told us—viz. God’s thought process.
Category: Q&A
Tags: Open Theism, Q&A
Topics: Open Theism
Verse: Exodus 13
Related Reading
Why We Can’t Know Why
Various fields of science have taught us that the slightest variation in a sufficiently complex process at one point may cause remarkable variations in that process at another point. The flap of a butterfly wing in one part of the globe can be, under the right conditions, the decisive variable that brings about a hurricane…
Support for Open Theism from Science and Experience
I have discussed the scriptural support that depicts the future as partially open and that God knows it as such. I do this in God of the Possible. If a position is true, every avenue of reflection ought to point in its direction, including science. What follows are two more “pointers” to the view that the…
What is the significance of Matthew 25:41?
The Lord teaches that on the judgment day he will say to the wicked, “Depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels…” Hell was expressly prepared for “the devil and his angels”; humans were never meant to go there. But if God eternally knew that certain persons would end…
Isn’t the World Unsafe If God Doesn’t Control Everything?
If God isn’t in control of everything, the world feels unsafe. If the future is open and if things can happen outside of God’s will, what guarantee is there that there is a point to a person’s suffering? Maybe it’s all just bad luck. My experience has been that many of those who honestly examine…
Dealing With Objections to Open Theism, Part I
There are four major objections to Open Theism. Today we will deal with the first two and then tomorrow the third and fourth. For a basic introduction to Open Theism, click here. Objection #1: The open view denies omniscience. It is often argued that the open view denies the omniscience of God, even saying things…
Does God Intervene?
Given the vast influence of angelic and human free will, what influence does God have in determining what comes to pass? While God has an important role to play in anticipating and creatively responding to decisions agents make, is God only a responder? Does he have anything to do with what’s going on in creation?…