Today’s reading: Psalms 36-37; Revelation 6
I think this is probably one of my most controversial theological views, but if God doesn’t actually know the future, it definitely changes how I read Revelation.
I think I’ve mentioned this idea before, and to be clear, it’s not something I feel super strongly about, but I think I do lean more toward God not knowing the future than toward Him knowing it. In the past, I was always taught that, because God created time, He necessarily stands outside of it, and therefore necessarily known the future. The first part of that is obviously true, that God is not bound by time, but to say that that means He can see/interact with all of time (past, present, and future) as a result is a big assumption. I’ve heard people describe it like a parade, where we are at street level, only seeing what is passing us now, but God has the view from above, able to see what is passing us, but also what has passed us before and what will be passing us soon. But who is to say time works that way? Who is to say it’s not more like a Rube Goldberg machine where the person watching it isn’t part of it, and they could stop it, fiddle with it, interject themself into it, etc., but the past already happened, the future hasn’t happened yet, and the creator can only interact with it at the current point of it’s run?
No analogy will ever be perfect, but if time works more like this, then God, in His omniscience, would know perfectly all that has happened, all that is happening now, and all that could possibly happen in the future. In His infinite wisdom, He would also know what of the possible futures is most likely. On top of that, given that God decides when people are born, and He tells us throughout the Bible that He interacts with humanity to bring about His purposes, then His declarations of the future still hold. This would mean that when God declares the future, He is not simply telling us what He has already seen will happen, but is declaring what He will make happen. Such a declaration isn’t just saying, “I can see the future,” but is saying, “I am uniquely powerful and able, and no enemy plot or ploy will stand in the way of me accomplishing what I say I am going to accomplish. No power, national or angelic, can thwart my plans and purposes. What I say will come to pass will come to pass.”
Like I said, I don’t feel so confident in this perspective that I would declare it is necessarily true, but I do lean toward it being more likely (though if I get to heaven and find out I’m wrong, I won’t really be bothered by that).
But, as I’m reading through Revelation, I’m finding this does really help me think about it better.
One thing I have always struggled with in this book is what is figurative and what is John actually being shown glimpses of the future. People will point to some things as obviously symbolic, but other things as though John is just seeing the curtain pulled back and being shown directly the future. But if there is not yet a future world for God to pull the curtain back on for John to see, then it changes how these visions might be understood and interpreted. This all becomes a declaration of what God has done, and what He is going to bring about in the last days, but none of it is John being shown a scene of war from the year 2037 or something.
So in our chapter, for example, as the riders go forth, God is declaring judgements that will be brought upon the earth, but doesn’t mean there will be a day when we are going to be concerned about the prices of specifically wheat, barley, oil, and wine. Nor does it mean that there will be a literal earthquake where the sun is blocked out and the moon is red and everyone is hiding themselves in caves.
You could certainly argue that God is showing John the same things either way, and that none of what John is seeing is actually the curtain pulled back on the future, but if God has already “seen” the future, then it does make some aspects of that a little more difficult for me to accept. That obviously doesn’t make the view that God can’t see the future correct, it’s just that, if it is correct, it changes how I read and understand the book of Revelation, and, I think at least, makes it a lot easier to get my head around.
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