What is the Basis for God’s Eternal Decree?

After what seems like an eternity, we are returning to a mini-series in our overall series on Reformed Theology on the topic of the eternal decree of God. In our last post on this subject, we answered the question “What is God’s eternal decree?” The eternal decree of God is that by which God ordained everything that comes to pass — all past, present and future events are all part of God’s eternal decree, and they are unchangeably so.

In this post, we will be concerned with the question: What is the basis for God’s eternal decree? In other words, what grounds the eternal decree of God? This is an important question because when we say that God’s eternal decree covers every event — past , present and future — people begin trotting out the “F” word (“Fatalism“). That’s why some in the history of Christian doctrine developed a foreknowledge view of God’s knowledge of future events. God knows future events because, in his foreknowledge, he peers down the halls of time and sees the future. This is very different than saying that God foreordains future events, and the difference leads to radically different applications in Christian life and practice.

Here are two major problems I see with the foreknowledge view of God’s knowledge of future events:

1. It renders God as a passive observer of future events rather than as the One who sovereignly ordains their coming to pass
2. It depicts God as taking in knowledge rather than already possessing an exhaustive and complete knowledge of all things - Continue at Carl Gobelman