a Calvanist friend of mine brought up this question, and I wasn’t sure how to answer it. In fact, it seems there’s no way out of admitting his conclusion. The question is this:
If God created everyone, and knows everything that happens in their lives, he ultimately knows some will go to hell. So doesn’t this basically prove double predestination? Because why would God create someone when he knows they will end up in hell?
God knows everything from eternity. But it is strange, the way he knows it. From his own “always being” he knows of something that is “not always being”, and something that is “other” than God, meaning created. He knew (“knows” might be a more appropriate term) that the “other” would be just as he knew (knows) it. You might say he “inspired it” or, rather, “spirated” it - his word and his breath were always spoken and breathed, his breath was “abroad” always, and at the time he always knew (knows) that the “not always being” would be, it was, because his Word was there, his Spirit, was there, and just as he knew (knows), the “not always” and the “not God” was there. And here we are.
But how can he, knowing all, have a “contingent” and free “not God” creation?
It is in the way he knows us. The angels, in a way, had no choice - from the instant of their creation they knew everything about themselves, as much as God gave them insight or understanding at that instant to know. Some, loving the understanding of God they had, turned to see him and will never turn away. Others loving the understanding of themselves never turned to look at God, but only kept looking at themselves and will never turn to Him. He knew that would happen with angels. But he did not make them to be his true companions, his true love. They were known to be instruments for interacting with his true love, us, instruments for relating to us in a sort of contingency, where we do not know everything in an instant, but learn and reason through our human (animal, material) senses, and come to recognize and love what we experience, and then seek to unite to what we love. And rather than presenting himself to our sight as with the angels, who when they turned to him could not turn away (because of their full love for him, compelled by the glory of him), he presented himself to us in Jesus, one of us. He told us he was coming, with the prophets. There is this revelation, to be thought about by us. And with the revelation is a call to unite to this Jesus, and there is the sight of those who have united to him, all working at our intellect and will, to woo us, to court us into loving this Jesus and his Father.
One of the things God always knew (knows) is that he, himself, would interact with this “not always being”, this “other”, in contingency, as an “equal” of sorts. In a manner of speaking, he does know what will happen, because to him it has already happened; to him the last day was always with him. But in the world of the “not always” (here) he works not knowing, but “reasoning together” with us. He does know all he does on his part, and one of the things he knows and does on his part is to call us to believe in him (in Jesus). One of the things he does not do is tell us it is all decided. He is a lover, wooing his beloved. He is not a logician giving us a lecture on what is what, which we cannot deny.
Well, that is all I can think of right now; time for bed. Double predestination describes the reasoned God of philosophy, but not the Lover God of revelation, not the Persons of God.
