Considering Election (Part 2)

If God is omniscient—and He is—then He not only knows the end state of things, but He also knows every possible middle state of things. To give an illustration we might better understand, suppose you are playing a video game where you must pass your character through some objects which are constantly changing state. You know the end state; your character standing beyond this obstacle, able to proceed to the next stage in this game. You know the current state; your character not yet passed through this obstacle, and unable to process to the next stage in this game.

But you also know something else: the state of the objects in the current obstacle. Examining the changing state, you can determine when and how to move your character to get from the “before obstacle” state to the “after obstacle” state. In other words, you are able to see time and motion in real time, and see how they reach certain points in time that you can take advantage of.

If God stands outside time, and is omniscient, then why would God be any different? Why wouldn’t God be able to see that if you are presented the Gospel by your Grandmother when you are five, you won’t accept it, but if you are presented the Gospel by your best friend, or through reading a book, or by meeting God face to face on the road to Damascus at some other age, you will? In fact, God can see these things, because God is omniscient, and stands outside of time.

If this is all true, then it’s possible to describe election as:

God’s knowledge of whether or not you will accept the Gospel. It might be useful to call this the “passive” side of election.
God’s insertion of the Gospel in a way that you will understand it at the right moment in your life for you to accept it, if it’s in accordance with His omniscience.

Nice theory, but can we support it through the Scriptures?

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Romans 7:22-24

In fact, I think this is precisely what Paul describes here in Romans 7. At some point in each of our lives, we realize something is wrong. We can’t put our finger on it, and we can’t describe how to “fix” it. Each of us may, in fact, run into this realization many times, perhaps even once a day. When we hit that moment, we have free will, within a defined scope, to react.