last passage, Ephesians 2:10: "For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which
God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them [NASB]."
Scripture presents to us God's complete knowledge, including God's total foreknowledge.
However, in revealing Himself in Scripture, God at the same time is condescending to our human
weakness, since our finite human reason cannot fully comprehend the infinite, majestic Deity. Because
God employs our human language, with its limitations, He has also adopted our way of thinking and
accommodated Himself to the laws and ways of human thought processes.
1
For example, Scripture speaks of God in a twofold manner: 1) in His majesty as being above time
and space (cf. Psalm 90:4, "A thousand years in Your sight are but as yesterday"); and 2) in accordance
with our human views, as being in time and space. God is conforming to our mode of thinking in terms of
time and space, cause and effect. Only in this manner is God comprehensible to us.
2
In fact, when God
ascribes foreknowledge to Himself, as He does in Isaiah 46:10, He who is outside of time is adapting to the
mode of thinking of His time-bound creatures.
3
The Deity enters into time and space without becoming
temporal or local in His essence.
4
Likewise, God in His Being is immutable. Yet we must so think of God, and Scripture portrays
Him, as varying from being angry to being merciful according to changes or variations in the object of His
affection. That is how our minds and Scripture handle a God who in His essence remains immutable, but
who is dealing with people who are mutable.
5
Calvin states: " . . . since we cannot comprehend him [God] as he is, it is necessary that, for our
sake, he should, in a certain sense, transform himself."
6
Luther comments:
God in His essence is altogether unknowable; nor is it possible to define or put into words what
He is, though we burst in the effort. It is for this reason that God lowers Himself to the level of our
weak comprehension and presents Himself to us in images, in coverings, as it were, in simplicity
adapted to a child, that in some measure it may be possible for Him to be known by us . . .
7
Luther continues:
1
Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, Volume I (St. Louis: Concordia, 1950), pp. 428-429.
2
Pieper, p. 440.
3
Pieper, p. 451.
4
Pieper, p. 440.
5
Pieper, pp. 440-441.
6
John Calvin, Commentaries on The First Book of Moses Called Genesis, Volume First (trans. John King;
Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), p. 249.