Thoughts on 1 Samuel 23

Today's reading: 1 Samuel 23; 1 Corinthians 11

1 Samuel 23 includes a passage which has significantly changed my understanding of God's omniscience.

Before I get into this though, I feel like I need to make an important disclaimer. I have some friends who I have gone back and forth with on this in the past and who feel very strongly against where I have largely landed on this question. I deeply respect their thoughts on the Word and on the Lord, and so while I take a different perspective than them, I very much do not assume that my view is necessarily correct and theirs is wrong. What I am going to lay out may be wrong, but I think it fits best with the biblical data as I understand it, but it is not something that is made clear enough in Scripture that it is worth fighting about or dividing over. So while I'm always fine with people disagreeing with me in these posts, I just felt like I should make an active disclaimer on this one in case people feel more strongly about this subject than others.

Now onto my post...

1 Samuel 23 doesn't make me question God's omniscience in any way, only really the mechanics, and therefore the scope, of His omniscience. In saying that God is omniscient, we are saying that God knows everything it is possible to know. The view of omniscience that I was taught as a young Christian is that God stands outside of time, and therefore can see all things, past, present, or future, the same. One analogy for this perspective I have heard is someone watching a parade from on top of a skyscraper vs. someone watching the same parade down on the street. For the person on the street, they can only see whatever part of the parade is happening right in front of them at any given moment, but for the person on the skyscraper, they can see the whole thing, including what has already past the person on the street, what is in front of them now, and what is still 10 blocks away but is coming. So in a similar way, God, because He is not within time Himself, can see all of it at once and can therefore know with certainty exactly what will happen, exactly when it will happen, exactly how it will happen, etc. This means that God's omniscience does not simply include exhaustive knowledge of all that is (down even to the number of atoms in the spec of dust floating outside the most distant star from us in the Universe), but all that is and will be at any and every point of time unto eternity, simultaneously.

That perspective has a lot of explanatory power, including for issues like how God can know the future while also giving us free will, but part of 1 Samuel 23 makes me question it. This is the section in question:

Then David said, “O Lord, the God of Israel, your servant has surely heard that Saul seeks to come to Keilah, to destroy the city on my account. Will the men of Keilah surrender me into his hand? Will Saul come down, as your servant has heard? O Lord, the God of Israel, please tell your servant.” And the Lord said, “He will come down.” Then David said, “Will the men of Keilah surrender me and my men into the hand of Saul?” And the Lord said, “They will surrender you.” Then David and his men, who were about six hundred, arose and departed from Keilah, and they went wherever they could go. When Saul was told that David had escaped from Keilah, he gave up the expedition.

In short, David is in Keliah and asks the Lord if Saul will come to Keilah for him and God says that he will, and David asks if the men of Keilah will give him over to Saul, and God says that they will. David then leaves Keilah, with the result that Saul does not come down and the men of Keilah do not give David over. So was God wrong? Was He purposefully lying to David because He knew that David would only leave if He gave him those answers? Given that "parade-style" view of God's omniscience, it seems like God would have known that He was lying to David, and that seems problematic in itself.

As I have pondered over this issue, one thing I have realized is that we make a lot of assumptions about how time works from God's perspective. We know that God is eternal, and therefore existed before time, at least as we understand it, began, and that He created time, meaning He is necessarily not bound to it in the same way we are, but we know little to nothing past that in terms of what that looks like mechanically. To say that God can see all time, past, present, and future, all at once, is complete assumption on our part. Isn't it also possible that, the way God designed it, the future truly hasn't happened yet? Instead of a parade, the analogy I would give for this would be more like a Rube Goldberg machine. You set up the machine at the beginning and set it off, and then watch it all tumble from step to step. As marbles run down tracks, fall into buckets, spin pulleys, etc., you aren't part of the machine, but that doesn't mean you have already seen how it finishes. You can reach in and stop it or intervene in it at any point if you desire, and could theoretically reset part of it, but what has already happened is done and what is coming hasn't happened yet. In this scenario, omniscience wouldn't look exactly the same because the scope of all possible knowledge is different. It is possible to exhaustively know all that has happened, and all that is happening, and it is possible to know all that could theoretically or possibly happen, but not to know what actually will happen, except/unless you intend to intervene to make it happen.

So what I am suggesting is not that God's knowledge is more limited, but that the scope of what is possible to know is different. As I said at the beginning, omniscience is knowing all that is possible to know, and so if something truly has not happened yet, it would not be possible to know the outcome. It would be possible to know all theoretical outcomes, and possible to know the likelihoods of each of those outcomes, but until the thing takes place, it would not yet be possible to know it.

If this understanding is more accurate, then God is still omniscient, but it changes our understanding of some really important things. In a passage like 1 Samuel 23, when David asks, God gives him an honest and accurate answer, that yes, as things are now, Saul will come to Keilah and the men of the city will give David up to him. But then it is David's free choice to act on that information and change the course of events. God, knowing all things possible and probable, and knowing David fully, would likely have known that when David received that information he would make the choice he made, but it was still David's choice to make. In fact, we don't actually know if this was the "right" choice for him to make. God had promised David the kingdom, so for all we know, if David had chosen to stay, perhaps God had a plan to cause Saul to have an accident and die and have David take over the kingdom more smoothly and easily than it later went down. We have no idea because that is not the choice David made and so that is not the way things went.

But if we take this perspective, it also changes the nature of prophecy in what I think is a cool way (though, admittedly, coolness is not a reason to take a theological position...). If God's omniscience is based on perfectly knowing the future, then all He is doing is telling us exactly what He has already seen play out. But if God is instead declaring what He is going to bring about, and He then brings those things to pass by the exercise of His sovereignty in conjunction with our free will decisions, then it is an exhibition of his brilliance and power. This would also make more sense of why the rebellious divine powers (e.g. the devil and his angels, the demons, etc.) continue to fight. If God is just looking at the future and declaring what is going to happen before it happens, then they have no chance and there is no reason to fight. But if the future is not yet determined, then history is a cosmic chess match with God and his angels on one side working to bring about His purposes while those rebellious powers try to outmatch Him and thwart His purposes for the sake of their own. This would mean that the battle that has been raging in the supernatural world since the serpent made his move in the Garden is not just playing out some foregone conclusion like a cosmic play, but is a real battle, with real stakes, moving toward a conclusion that God tells us we can count on in faith, but Satan thinks he can thwart.

Now, like I said at the beginning, I don't think we are given enough to say with any kind of certainty how God interacts with time and therefore what the scope of all possible knowledge includes in regard to His omniscience. The more I think about this and the more I read the Bible with this question in mind, the more I lean toward this perspective that, while God is outside of time, that does not mean the future as already played out for Him. But that said, if I get to Heaven and find out I was wrong, I'm not going to be upset about it, we'll all be wrong about something.