QuĖ Ser, Ser?
Exercise your mind on this: from Adam Clarke, comments on Acts 2:47.
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God is omniscient, and can know all things; but does it follow from this that he must know all things? Is he not as free in the volition of his wisdom, as he is in the volition of his power? God has ordained some things as absolutely certain these he knows as absolutely certain. He has ordained other things as contingent; these he knows as contingent By contingent, I mean such things as the infinite wisdom of God thought proper to poise on the possibility of being or not being, leaving it to the will of intelligent beings to turn the scale.
If there be no such things as contingencies in the world, then every thing is fixed and determined by an unalterable decree and purpose of God; and not only all free agency is destroyed, but all agency of every kind, except that of the Creator himself; for on this ground God is the only operator either in time or eternity: all created beings are only instruments, and do nothing but as impelled and acted upon by this almighty and sole Agent.
Consequently, every act is his own; for if he have purposed them all as absolutely certain, having nothing contingent in them, then he has ordained them to be so; and if no contingency, then no free agency, and God alone is the sole actor. Hence the blasphemous, though, from the premise, fair conclusion, that God is the author of all the evil and sin that are in the world; and hence follows that absurdity, that, as God can do nothing that is wrong, whatever IS, is RIGHT.
Sin is no more sin; a vicious human action is no crime, if God have decreed it, and by his foreknowledge and will impelled the creature to act it. On this ground there can be no punishment for delinquencies; for if every thing be done as God has predetermined, and his determinations must necessarily be all right, then neither the instrument nor the agent has done wrong. Thus all vice and virtue, praise and blame, merit and demerit, guilt and innocence, are at once confounded, and all distinctions of this kind confounded with them.
Now, allowing the doctrine of the contingency of human actions, (and it must be allowed in order to shun the above absurdities and blasphemies,) then we see every intelligent creature accountable for its own works, and for the use it makes of the power with which God has endued it; and, to grant all this consistently, we must also grant that God foresees nothing as absolute and inevitably certain which He has made contingent; and, because He has designed it to be contingent, therefore He cannot know it as absolutely and inevitably certain. I conclude that God, although omniscient, is not obliged, in consequence of this, to know all that He can know; no more than he is obliged, because he is omnipotent, to do all that he can do.
Its basic, for sure; but dont make a talk on it just any ol day.