To Know Beforehand or to Lovingly Choose?
Romans 8:28–29
I want to start this evening by going back to the topic I ended with last time. We're in Romans 8: 28 and 29 and this is one of the key passages that Calvinists go to for election, predestination, and their view of foreknowledge and also it's related to efficacious grace because of the word "calling" that is used here. So I want to go back to look at this particular passage in Romans 8:28. We're talking about who are the "called". Last time I ended looking at the key passages for the doctrine of the efficacious call, efficacious grace, or irresistible grace.
This is a Calvinist doctrine whereby they understand that all human beings are spiritually dead. Spiritual death is a penalty for sin. It means separation from God. It does not mean what Calvinists interpret it to mean as total inability. We believe in total depravity, that every aspect of man's being is corrupt and has been corrupted by sin and is affected by sin and does not function in the way God designed. Man is not sick. He is spiritually dead which is separation from God. In Calvinist understanding man is totally unable. He is unable to do anything. He's like a dead person. A dead person can't respond in any way, shape, or form. They are completely inoperative.
When they hear the external call of the gospel, the call falls on unable, incapable ears which cannot hear and cannot respond apart from a work that they call irresistible grace whereby God the Holy Spirit, in high Calvinism, first regenerates the elect individual. Then they can hear the gospel. Then they respond in faith which is a gift given to them by God. In their system they view faith as something that man does, therefore it, itself, can be meritorious.
In contrast, I believe that faith is non-meritorious. It's not the act of belief that has merit; it's the object of faith that has merit. In salvation, it is the work of Christ on the Cross that has merit. Not our faith. I'm not saying because of faith. Ephesians 2: 8 and 9 says, "For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not as a result of works, so that no one may boast." "Through faith" in the Greek is the preposition dia which is a genitive object. A genitive object indicates means or instrumentality. If it were in the accusative case, it would be translated "because of faith." We are not saved because of faith. That would indicate that faith was the cause or merit for our salvation. But because it is through faith, faith is seen as simply a channel through which the merit of Christ comes in terms of providing righteousness for the individual.
Now in their view, the Holy Spirit is going to irresistibly draw the individual. He is going to enter into the individual's spiritual life, regenerate him and then draw them in a way that cannot be resisted. That doesn't mean it's instantaneous. It may take time. It may take a period of years but that person can ultimately not resist this draw of the Holy Spirit. So I looked at three verses in John 6 last time that are the focal point for understanding this Calvinistic doctrine of the efficacious call or irresistible grace.
The key verse is John 6:44, "No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him." Now, just simple grammar; just simple observation. Who does the drawing here? Is it the Holy Spirit or is it the Father? It's the Father. He's the subject of the verb. The Father does the drawing, not the Holy Spirit. But they'll go to this verse because in their theology, they'll say that the Father draws through the Holy Spirit as His agent. That's fine but it also points up one of the problems we have, not just with the theology of Calvinism, but with a lot of people. It is that they don't understand, no matter how much I try to beat it into their head, that you don't interpret Scripture on the basis of your theological system. That's like trying to put the cart before the horse. You let your exegesis develop your theological system but then you don't go read your theological system into every passage that sounds similar just because it sounds similar. There are many people who do this. Probably ninety percent of Christians operate on that basis. They interpret the Bible on the basis of their presupposed theology rather than the other way around. We have to let the text govern our conclusions, not impose our conclusions upon the text.
We have to look at this particular verse in terms of its context and what is being said. The other verse is also one which is important to understand because it impacts our interpretation of this entire passage. It's coming out of the episode of Jesus feeding the five thousand and then identifying Himself as the Bread of Life. He's using a metaphor to describe the fact that he is the source of life, the source of spiritual nourishment. In the course of that explanation, in verse 37, He says, "All that the Father gives Me will come to Me." Now that's a definitive statement that everyone the Father gives to Him will come to Him. That has been taken, not just by Calvinists, but by many others to apply over a broad spectrum to anyone who believes in Christ from that time period all the way to the present and into the future.
The interpretation is that all that the Father gives to me refers to anyone who believes in Jesus Christ. If you're Calvinist that is a term that would be equated to the elect. What I showed you last time by going to other passages is that where that phrase is used is it does not refer to anyone across a broad spectrum of history who believes in Christ. It was a term used specifically by Jesus to refer to those who God gave Him, specifically the apostles but also others, during that unique historical period. So this isn't a broad spectrum term for all the saved of the church age. It is a narrow spectrum reference to those who the Father gave to Jesus. It is primarily referring to those who were already classified as Old Testament believers.
When Jesus was born, if you remember, when His parents took Him to the temple, there were two people who came to His parents in the temple. They were anticipating the arrival of the Messiah and they knew immediately that this was the Messiah. They were already believers in an Old Testament sense and at that point they couldn't become church age believers because Jesus hadn't gone to the Cross. The church isn't born until Acts 2 but they're believers in an Old Testament sense. There were a number of people in Israel like that. Remember the apostles John, Andrew, Peter and James were already disciples of John the Baptist when Jesus came to call them. So they were already believers. What I'm saying is that this is a term referring to specifically apostles but in a little more general sense, I think there's some places where it could apply to a broader group of people of Old Testament believers. They were making that transition from the dispensation of Israel into eventually the church age. So we looked at that last time.
The other thing I pointed out that I want to drive in again was that the issue in salvation isn't whether or not you're elect, or whether or not you're drawn but the issue is whether or not you believe. It's never expressed in the Scripture in any way other than someone who believes in Jesus. Even if you hard press a Calvinist they have to admit that the only way you know if you're elect is if you believe in Jesus. That's the only issue. That's what's pointed out in John 6:29, 35, 40, 47, and 64. The issue again and again and again is stated. In fact, 96 times in the gospel of John the issue is belief. Believe. Believe. Believe. Believe. And after reading the gospel of John I still have trouble understanding why they want to insert repentance or anything else into what must be done in terms of a response.
I recently had a discussion with a seminary student about this. The gospel of John is written to clearly explain what a person must do to have eternal life. "These are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you will have life by His name." Not believing and repenting, not by believing and being baptized but just by believing. Ninety-five or ninety-six times, depending on the text, you have this one condition to acquire eternal life and that is to believe. A couple of other times it's expressed as receiving or accepting Christ, John 1:12, "But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name." That's a synonym for belief.
The first thing I looked at last time, rushing towards the end, was John 6:39. "This is the will of Him who sent Me, that of all that He has given Me I lose nothing, but raise it up on the last day." So the question is what does that refer to? The way to do Bible study is when you see words or phrases you look to see other places where those words or phrases are used. If it's not real clear in one place, then maybe there are some other places where it's clearer. Then you use the clear passages to interpret the ambiguous passages because there are some passages where certain things are ambiguous. But that's because there isn't enough information given in that verse or sentence to hang our definition of a word or a phrase. So we go from the known to the unknown.
We looked at some other passages and interestingly enough they're mostly used in John 17:1. John 17 is the true Lord's Prayer. Matthew 5 is not the Lord's Prayer. The Lord's Prayer is Jesus' High Priestly prayer, as it's usually referred to, when He prays the night before He went to the Cross. He prays for His disciples. Now it's always a little difficult in places to determine when He is praying for His disciples or giving them commands, whether that has a narrow application to only His eleven disciples now [Judas has already been removed] or whether he is speaking to the entire church through the disciples. But there are usually some really clear indications when he's talking only about the eleven. So let's look at these passages.
The prayer begins, "Father the hour has come; glorify Your Son that Your Son may also glorify You even as You have given Him authority over all flesh, that to all whom You have given Him He may give eternal life." Now there's our phrase again. The Son was given authority over all flesh so that He could give eternal life to a subset of that all flesh, that is, this group that God has given Him. Now that's all we're told in verse 2. Verse 6 uses the phrase a little more when it says, "I have manifested Your name to the men whom You gave Me out of the world, They were Yours. You gave them to Me and they have kept Your word."
So who are the men You have given Me? It just says the men you have given me. It doesn't say men and women. He's not including the Marys or many of the other women who were involved in His ministry. Here it's clear he's talking about the men God gave Him which would restrict this to the eleven disciples at this point who are His. Then in verse 9 He says, "I ask on their behalf [pray for them]; I do not ask on behalf of the world, but of those whom You have given Me; for they are Yours." Contextually He's still talking about the eleven disciples. Then in verse 12 He says, "While I was with them, I was keeping them in Your name which You have given Me, and I guarded them and not one of them perished except the son of perdition [Judas Iscariot] so the Scripture would be fulfilled." The word "perdition" is from the same root as the word "perish" in John 3:16 so it indicates unbelief. The whole point I'm making here is that that's not a phrase that talks about even all the believers of His time. It's talking about a set group.
Now let's go back to our passage in John 6:44. There Jesus said, "No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws Him." Now that looks like that's a universal statement. Unless there is an action of the Father drawing and attracting an individual to Jesus no one can come to Him. There has to be some sort of action on the part of God. What action is that? Here's the issue. Remember the Calvinist will say this is an irresistible grace calling of the Holy Spirit. It's internal. But is that what the verse is saying because the next verse contextually gives Jesus' support for this. "It is written in the prophets [Isaiah 55:14] and they shall all be taught by God. Therefore everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me." Hearing and learning from the Father is a response to the Word of God. That quotation [Isaiah 55:14] and John 6:44 is talking about an external call or invitation of the Word of God presenting the claim of the gospel to an individual. On the basis of that, God works in and through His Word to call people to Himself.
This is not talking about the inner call of the Holy Spirit. It's not talking about the irresistible grace of the Holy Spirit or the effectual call of the Holy Spirit. It is the external attraction of the Word of God, the external call. That's all that I covered last time. Now it brings us back to Romans 8:28 and 29. Romans 8:28 says, "We know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose." Now we covered that extensively in the last couple of lessons. In order to understand what he has just said, the apostle Paul is going to expand it a little bit because he's talking about facing difficult circumstances, facing adversity, facing suffering. And he says, "We know that all things work together for good." That's the suffering in context going all the way back to verse 17 of chapter 8. Then he explains it a little more. That's indicated by that first word "for," garin the Greek, that always introduces an explanation and often that explanation borders on expressing a cause or a reason for something that was just said. So that's happened here. He's made this universal principle that y'all know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. Why does that happen? Why is that important? He's challenged them that there are two groups of heirs, those who are heirs of God with no condition attached and those who are joint-heirs with Christ, if they suffer with Him.
Now that's the key issue because once he's said that back in Romans 8:17, then he goes off to explain the significance of suffering in the life of the believer in preparing them for the future ruling and reigning with Jesus Christ in the coming kingdom. Suffering with Christ will be used to bring them to maturity and the basis of how they grow mature and the basis of how they will be given rewards and responsibilities and privileges in the future Messianic kingdom. So he's going to explain all of this and he starts by giving us a chain of events from eternity past related to God's plan and purposes for the believer.
As I pointed out before, Paul is addressing his audience as if they're all highly motivated believers who are pursuing the greatest amount of spiritual maturity. I do this same thing. I address those in the congregation as if they want to go somewhere. Somebody said, "You're trying to move the movers." I'm not addressing the folks who are sitting on the sidelines. I'm trying to challenge those who are going somewhere to keep going there. It's not that I'm ignoring the ones who can't make up their minds but the train's already left the station but I'm trying to minister to those who are on the train and going somewhere, not those who are trying to figure out if they want to be on the train. They're going to figure they want to be on the train by hearing the Word of God as the Holy Spirit makes it clear in their lives. But the role of the pastor is to move with the movers and say, "Look, we need to go to spiritual maturity. I'm going to take you there. Let's go. Who wants to go with me?"
As for the ones who can't make up their minds, I'm not going to sit in the back with those who want to stay in their diapers and mess their diapers and forget about everybody who wants to grow to spiritual maturity. And that's how Paul is. He's addressing the ones who want to go somewhere. It's not that he's marginalizing, belittling, diminishing, or minimizing the ones who want to sit around in their diapers and figure out if they really want to grow up or not. They will eventually, hopefully, go forward. The ones who don't, well they're going to fall by the wayside, and they're going to end up with lives characterized only by wood, hay, and straw. They're going to be failures at the judgment seat of Christ. But Paul's focus is on those who want to go somewhere.
And so he's challenging them with this plan of God. God's got a plan! That plan is to conform you and me to the image of His Son and He uses suffering to do that. When we understand the role of suffering and adversity in our lives it changes how we respond to it in our lives because we understand it has a purpose and a dynamic. God is using that to change our character so that it reflects the character of Christ, the image of His Son. That's the first part of Romans 8:29, "For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined [set up the end game for us] to become conformed to the image of His Son that He [Christ] would be the firstborn among many brethren."
We'll get to the second half of the verse later. Before we get there we have to understand this word "foreknow" and we have to understand its relationship to the next word "predestination". Those are clearly two separate concepts. That's one of the first observations I have. When it comes to understanding foreknowledge, there's a problem. The problem is that many people when they read this at a surface reading, they think that this is talking about simply knowing something ahead of time. It's prescience, knowing something is going to happen before it happens. However, when you come to Calvinism they say, "No. No. No. It is not knowing something is going to happen because God can't know what is going to happen unless He's determined that it's going to happen." Understand that? In Calvinist thought God can't know something until first he determines it. So they connect this foreknowledge to predetermination and they connect it to election.
Now we don't have the word "election" anywhere in this passage. It's not a passage about election but because they define calling as choosing, then they define foreknowledge as choosing, or having an intimate relationship. They tie all these words together and they're talking about God choosing who will be saved and bringing about His plan for them. So I want to read to you just a couple of examples of some Calvinist commentary writers and how they explain this. The first is Douglas Moo, who is a highly respected commentator. He teaches theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School up in Chicago and has written numerous commentaries, including several on Romans. He writes about foreknowledge here. "In the six occurrences of these words in the New Testament, only two mean know beforehand." What he's talking about is the six occurrences of this word proginosko. Now the root word ginosko means to know. The prefixpro means "before" so it means to know beforehand. He looks at this verb and says there are six uses of this word. You have the verb and nouns as well but here he's looking primarily at the verb.
He continues, "Four have a different meaning. Acts 26:5 and 2 Peter 3:17. The three others besides the occurrence in this text, all of which have God as their subject, so the words going to change its meaning because God is the subject. That's a fallacy. That is a fallacious way to do a word study but it's very common among Calvinist theologians. He says, "All which have God as their subject mean not know before in the sense of intellectual knowledge or cognition [I would add "ahead of time"] but enter into relationship with before." He says that's what foreknow means, "to enter into a relationship with someone ahead of time." You knew that, didn't you? You look at the word "foreknowledge" in the dictionary and that's not what it means so they change the meaning. He continues, "It means enter into a relationship before or choose or determine before." Then he cites Romans11:2; 1 Peter 1:20; Acts 2:23; 1 Peter 1:2. "If then," he says, "the word means to know intimately for whom God knew intimately ahead of time." That's how he would translate Romans 8. "Since the word means know intimately or have regard for, this must be a knowledge or love that is unique to believers and leads to their being predestined." You got that, right? I just want you to experience and read how they argue.
Then we have another guy. Absolutely brilliant. I didn't have great warm-fuzzies about Thomas Schreiner because of his hyper-Calvinism. I heard him speak at ETS a couple of summer's ago. ETS means Evangelical Theological Society. I went to the conference in Atlanta because the focus was on a lot of really errant theology of this British Anglican priest by the name of N.T. Wright. N.T. Wright has negatively impacted several formerly solid congregations in this country and that's why this is an issue. We have people in this congregation who have family members who are in those congregations and this garbage that N.T. Wright has formulated… This guy is incredibly brilliant. Tom Schreiner is too. He really impressed me with his devastating critique of N.T. Wright at the ETS Conference so my respect for him really went up. These guys make anybody that we know that knows the languages pale in insignificance. N.T. Wright probably has forgotten more about Greek and Hebrew and has a prodigious memory, almost a photographic memory and can cite from memory sources throughout patristic writings and throughout any kind of secular writings. His arguments are so loaded with minutia data that it just overwhelms you with his argumentation. How in the world can you go through and analyze three or four thousand references that he's just thrown at you when you can just barely read Greek or Hebrew and he's quoting them all in the original language? So they're very overwhelming in terms of their intellectual academic accomplishments but it's not about the details. It really just down to some bottom-line issues.
Tom Schreiner is also a very strong high-Calvinist. He's written a massive commentary on Romans and he writes regarding our view, "Some have argued that the verb proegno [foreknow] here should be defined only in terms of God's foreknowledge." What he means about that is His prescient knowledge ahead of time. "That is, that God predestined to salvation those whom he saw in advance would choose to be part of His redeemed community. This fits with Acts 26:5 and 2 Peter 3:17 where the verb proginoskoclearly means to know beforehand. According to this understanding predestination is not ultimately based on God's decision to save some. Instead God has predestined to save those who He foresaw would choose him." In his thinking, choosing Him is a meritorious act. They think positive volition is meritorious. That's where they get hung up. "Such an interpretation is attractive in that it forestalls the impression that God arbitrarily saves some and not others. It is quite unlikely that it accurately represents the meaning of proginosko in reference to God's foreknowledge as it is Romans 8:29. The background of the term that is proginosko should be located in the Old Testament where for God to know referred to His covenantal love where He sets the affection on those He has chosen." What's the word he's talking about now? The Hebrew word yada, which means to know. Did he just shift terms on us? Yes, he did. He went from proginosko to yada as if they were related. This is typical of Calvinist argument. He went from proginosko to yada and those are not equivalent terms.
Here's the fundamental error. When you take a compound word, it does not mean what the root word means. You can't use the root word as your standard. When you take a prefix like "fore" and add it to the word "stalled" which he just did, the meaning of "forestall" cannot be arrived at by understanding the word "stall". It has a different set of meanings. That's why they generated the word. Word meanings come not from dictionaries but by usage and word meanings are not the sum of the parts. They're usage. Okay? Now he goes on to say, "The parallel terms "consecrate" and "appoint" are noteworthy for the text is not really saying that God foresaw." I'm not going to read any more of this.
Then there's Palmer. I quoted from that last week. This is a small book that a lot of people hand out on the Five Points of Calvinism. They state, "When the Bible speaks of God knowing particular individuals." Notice. Where is the word "fore"? It's not there. See, they slide back and forth. This is a slippery trait in a logical fallacy is to shift between different terms as if you haven't changed terms. You start off talking about apples and then suddenly you're talking about oranges but you never really told anyone that you changed the terms. "When the Bible speaks of God knowing particular individuals, it often means He has special regard for them, that they're the object of His affection and concern." So "knowing" in their view has to do with this intimate knowledge and affection. That's what "to know" means, they say.
Now, in some places it has an intimacy to it, such as "when Adam knew Eve", but that's an idiomatic expression and it's not saying that "know" always means or has as part of its meaning that intimate knowledge. All I've done so far is set up the problem for you so that you understand where Calvinists come from. Some of you talk to Calvinists so you're familiar with this but some of you may not. Bob Beaver reminded me we got into some good discussions with my good friend, Wayne House. Now Wayne is a sharp guy. He's a great theologian in many areas but Wayne is a five-point Calvinist. I've been cornered by him and a couple of others at conferences and we've had lengthy debates over these things. It was kind of fun on that first Israel trip some years ago because all of a sudden some of the folks from this church met a real live flesh-and-blood five-point Calvinist. They had a real teachable time. They learned some things trying to interact with someone as knowledgeable as Wayne and going through this stuff.
What does foreknowledge mean? Usually during a word study you don't start off by going to a dictionary. People who write dictionaries, the lexicographers, they're the ones who studied all the different ways in which a word was used and then they give you their categories, how they summarized and categorized the evidence. You don't look to their summaries first because if you're really good, and this is how we were trained at Dallas Seminary, we should be able to do the same work they do. If you've got a masters in theology from Dallas Seminary, I was told by a guy who got this from an accrediting agency, that a masters of theology from Dallas Seminary, at least in the 70s and 80s, was regarded more highly by accrediting agencies than a PhD from most schools. It's a four-year 130 hour training program. If you have a heavy emphasis on Greek or Hebrew, by your third year you ought to be equipped and trained enough to be able to do word studies almost as well as any of these lexicons. So you can check their evidence and their evidence needs to be checked at times. One of the primary lexicons, The Great or Large Lexicon, in the print version originally was known by its authors Liddell-Scott. It's a very old classical Greek dictionary that covers the whole span of Greek from Classical Greek in 4th and 5th century B.C. all the way up to the Koine period. It gives examples, even Scriptural usage, of different words.
Liddell-Scott was revised and expanded a little bit by a man named Jones so now it's referred to as Liddell-Scott-Jones. It says there's two meanings to proginosko. One is to "know, to perceive, to understand beforehand and to prognosticate, foreknow, and learn things in advance, to judge beforehand in the sense of evaluating something ahead of time." Now, did you see anywhere in there a definition relating to choice or election or loving relationships or predestination? No. They don't recognize any of those nuances as part of the meaning of this term. That dictionary covers from Classical Greek in the 5th and 6th century B.C. all the way up through the New Testament period.
Now Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich-Danker lists two meanings: "to know beforehand or in advance, that is to have knowledge of something" and then "to choose beforehand". They only focus on New Testament meanings. The only passages they use to cite the meaning of choosing beforehand are Romans 8:29, Romans 9-11, 1 Peter 1:20 and then they say Acts 6:25. Notice the passages we want to know the meaning for are the ones they list. Those are the passages in question. You can't define the term in a dubious question by going to a dictionary that says this is the only place this term is used in this way. This is the same kind of error that Arndt and Gingrich had in the meaning of "tongues". They say it means three things: the organ in your mouth, speaking in human languages, and it means ecstatic utterances. For ecstatic utterances it lists 1 Corinthians 13. Wait a minute. How do you know it means that in 1 Corinthians 13 if it doesn't mean that anywhere else? This is a linguistic fallacy. It's like defining a word by itself. You can't do that.
The point I'm making is that these dictionaries, including Moldin and Milligan which looks at all the usage of words in the Koine papyri, say that the word means to foreknow or to know previously. In other words, the dictionaries do not recognize any other meaning except to know something ahead of time. That's it. So where do these guys come up with the idea that in these three or four passages in the New Testament and only in the New Testament, and just because God is the subject, that it means election, choice, or to know something intimately? They have read their theology into the text. They've done a top-down study.
Now there's another lexicon out there that's more popular. If you've seen the Complete Word Study New Testament, this is edited by Spiros Zodhistas who is Greek and he's written quite a bit. His dictionary is geared more to laymen. In fact, one of the founding members of this congregation used to be on his board. In this book he says what is means is "to perceive, to recognize beforehand, to know previously, to take into account or consider something beforehand, to grant prior knowledge or recognition to someone beforehand. The first meaning is used of mere prescience. Then he gives a theological definition, not an evidence in terms of the lexicon data. It's read into the data.
Now the New International Dictionary of New Testament theology has a real concise statement in terms of all the usage prior to the New Testament. It says, "The corresponding noun, prognosis is a medical, technical term since Hippocrates." You go to the doctor and you get a prognosis, same word. "It denotes the foreknowledge which makes it possible to predict the future." That's how the word is used. That's the core meaning. It does not have this idea of intimate knowledge or choice or election.
What are some of the passages where the term is used? We'll look at these in detail. Acts 26:5, "Since they have known about me for a long time [or from the first]." This is not a debated passage. Everybody agrees that this is prescience or knowledge ahead of time. Then there's Romans 8:29, the passage we're studying. Romans 11:2, which is in the context of whether God has thrown away His people. Paul answers by saying "No, may it never be. God has not rejected His people, whom He foreknew." Who are His people? Israel. So here foreknowledge is used in relation to God's plan for Israel. 1 Peter 1:20, "For He [Jesus Christ] was foreknown before the foundation of the world." 2 Peter 3:17, "You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand." This is again not talking about a theologically relevant idea but in terms of everyday human experience you knew something ahead of time. So obviously, the primary meanings of the known passages are simply to know something ahead of time.
Then we ran into it in Acts 2:33 when Peter says that "Jesus Christ was delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God." Again it's talking about Jesus Christ. It's not talking about choosing people for salvation. Then 1 Peter 1:2 talking about that the recipients of Peter's letter that they were elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father. So that, as you'll see when we get there, election is based on foreknowledge. Not the other way around. Foreknowledge doesn't mean choice. There's a redundancy there.
Now let's go back and just kind of look at some of these passages. Turn to these passages. I'll take two or three minutes on each one and it might help you understand. You can make some notes in the margins so you can recover this later on. The question we're addressing is whether proginosko means to know beforehand only in the sense of prescience knowledge, that is, knowledge before the fact or does it mean to elect, to determine, or to lovingly choose beforehand? Those are the meanings that the Calvinist commentators tell us it means. The first thing we saw was that the only attested meaning outside the Bible and the meaning in several New Testament passages indicates that it means "to know beforehand" with the exception of these four verses. Therefore, since the meaning everywhere else is to know beforehand the burden of proof is on the Calvinist theologian to say that it means something it doesn't mean in any other location. Okay, they've got to prove that because they're going against a mountain of data. They're saying that in these four verses it doesn't mean what it means everywhere else. That's essentially their position.
The second problem we have to deal with is that in terms of basic word meanings and word studies. Words do not change their meaning just because God becomes the subject. When we read that a person loves, using agape and then God loves, the word love doesn't change its meaning. agape means agape whether God is the subject or man is the subject. Obviously the dimension of God's activity is going to be greater but it's not that love means one thing when it talks about men doing it and it means something completely different when God does it. That's a logical fallacy. That's a fallacious methodology.
So we look at Acts 26:5. The context here is that Paul is witnessing when he's been called before King Herod Agrippa, the Second, and he is giving a defense for his gospel. Paul had gone to Jerusalem. A riot had broken out and a Roman cohort had surrounded him, protected him, put him under arrest, taken him under house arrest to Caesarea and Paul claimed the right of a Roman citizen to appeal his trial to Rome. He's been under basic house arrest in Caesarea waiting for his transport to Rome. During this time he got this opportunity to talk to Agrippa. So talking about all the Jews that got mad at him in Jerusalem and he says, "They know me. I lived here. I was one of the top rabbinical students in Gamaliel's yeshiva. Everyone knows me." So in verse 5 he says, "They knew me before." Before this event occurred, they already knew Paul. Now there's a couple of important things to point out here. When Calvinist look at this term proginosko they want to define that as having an intimate relationship or else lovingly choosing someone ahead of time to have a relationship with. That's their idea. They will say, "It doesn't mean knowing about someone, it means knowing someone intimately.
In Romans 8:29 we read, "For whom God foreknew." Not who God knew about but who God knew. The problem is that when we look at the use of this term here, Paul is saying "They knew me." Did all those Jews in Jerusalem have a personal, intimate knowledge of Paul? No, they did not. They knew about him but they didn't know him in the sense that the Calvinists want to import this intimate knowledge into the term. So the idea of the term "about" doesn't have to be stated. It's embedded in the meaning of the Greek. I'm going to show you an example of that in Hebrews 6:9. The writer of Hebrews says, "But beloved, we are convinced of better things concerning you." Now in the Greek there's no "of" there. Better things is actually an accusative case. A genitive case would give you the right to include "of" but it's not a genitive case. Better things is the direct object of the verb. It's in the accusative case. The verb is "we are convinced" but "of" is embedded in the nuance of the verb itself. We know "of" better things. We know "about" better things.
So that idea of knowing about Paul means the "about" is included in the concept there. That's how the Greeks would say it. They just wouldn't add that preposition. It was embedded in the sense of the verb. So in Acts 26:5, it's simply stating that they knew "about me from the first". They'd heard all about him so the verb there just simply gives us a core meaning of knowing something beforehand.
The idea of knowing "about" is important to understand as we look at a couple of other passages. In 1 Peter 1:20, we have again the use of the word proginosko. However, unfortunately, the New King James Version and the NIV version have chosen to translate proginosko as foreordained. But foreordained translates another Greek word, proorizo. We'll talk about that later. proorizo is foreordained; proginosko is foreknown, completely different concepts. They muddied the water by translating proginosko as foreordained here and that's wrong. The NASB and the NET Bible have correctly translated this as foreknown and maybe some other Bibles as well. Now the context here is a statement about redemption. "Knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers but with precious blood, as a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ." Verse 20, "For He was foreknown before the foundation of the world." This is the participial form of proginosko and is a masculine singular genitive which means it has to refer back to a masculine singular genitive noun which is Christ. The foreordained here refers to Christ who was foreordained. So now we see that foreordained is used in relation to Israel and its also used in relationship to Christ.
The thing that you should notice here is there's a contrast in this verse. The second half of the verse says that He was manifest in these times for you. That's a time contrast with what? That He was known beforehand. See you have a beforehand and a now. It's a temporal contrast. If you take out the knowledge beforehand aspect and just say this means choice or election, then you lose the emphasis of Peter here that there's a contrast between God setting up His plan in eternity past beforehand and now it's come to pass. It's a "then" and "now" emphasis in this particular verse. Foreknowledge here simply means that God in His omniscience knew from eternity past what His plan would be in bringing about salvation in relation to Jesus Christ.
Then we have 2 Peter 3:17 which is pretty simple. It's just a very clear meaning of knowing something ahead of time, prescience. Paul reminds his readers that the Lord will come as promised and the earth and its elements will pass away. Since they know these things before or since they've been told what will happen ahead of time, they can prepare themselves for it, "You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, be on your guard." These passages clearly talk about the fact that foreknowledge, proginosko, means to know something ahead of time. So following the principle that the known helps us interpret the vague or the unclear, we've got to say those other passages make it pretty clear that the word means knowing something ahead of time.
Next time I want to come back and look at two other passages that are very important. One is Acts 2:23 where Peter says that Christ was delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God. Then we'll get into the Peter passage, which is really interesting. It talks about the "elect according to the foreknowledge of God." In the Greek it's a totally different word order. It means basically the same thing but when you look at the word order it says some interesting things because Peter is talking to a select group there. It's why he calls them elect but it's not what you think.