Greg and Amy explain why God’s “change of mind” in Exodus 32 does not imply that he learns new things or lacks omniscience. God’s response actually demonstrates his consistent nature and perfect knowledge.
Transcript
Question: I had someone tell me that if God changed his mind—for example, in Exodus 32—he was “learning” or “gaining knowledge,” which they contend equals not being all-knowing. How would you respond?
Greg: “So the Lord changed His mind about the harm which He said He would do to His people” (Exodus 32:14).
This was a judgment on the people and Aaron, who made the golden calf in the circumstance in Exodus where Moses had gone up the mountain. When he came back, this is what they saw, and God got mad. Moses contended for the people as a priest. He stood in between them and prayed that God wouldn’t destroy them. Now, God actually did destroy some, but he didn’t destroy the whole people. And he was going to. He changed his mind, as the text says.
Now, of course, God knows everything. I just read last night Psalm 139, which is an amazing psalm of God’s omniscience. Fore and aft, top to bottom, there’s nothing that catches him by surprise. So, how do we make sense of this?
Characteristically, you try to make a charitable reading. You look for a way to make sense of both. And here it’s pretty clear, not only from Scripture, but just upon reflection, that if God is God, one of his perfections is knowledge. There is nothing that he doesn’t know. He doesn’t discover stuff. He doesn’t learn stuff. So, it isn’t as if he changes his mind in light of new knowledge.
Sometimes, God can change his mind in light of new circumstances. So, he has a fixed disposition regarding one set of circumstances, and when the circumstances change, then he has a different disposition regarding that. Now, what’s the best way to describe that? The best way—humanly speaking, anthropomorphically, so to speak—is to say, “God changed his mind,” instead of God saying to Moses, “I knew you were going to do that, so now I’m going to do something else.” He did know Moses was going to intercede for the people, and he did make a claim, “I’m going to destroy these people and make my promise to you and raise up a nation out of you.” And Moses said, “You can’t do that. The reason you can’t do that is you already made a promise.” So, what Moses is doing is holding God to his word. He’s calling on God in his prayer to be God. It’s a very powerful prayer because he’s appealing to God himself. And then he says, “By the way, the other nations around are going to say you just dragged all these people out here just to destroy them. So, it’s not going to look good for you.”
What’s important here is the intercession that Moses is making as a priest before the people, and God responds to his prayer. Had Moses not prayed—of course, this is hypothetical—then God would have carried through with this thing. But God knew that Moses was going to intercede, and therefore he has a different disposition regarding the different circumstances.
Now, that’s a charitable reading of the text. Some people are going to insist, “God changed his mind.” Open theist Greg Boyd is going to really camp on verses like this and say, “God changed his mind, and so, God doesn’t really know the future.” Well, what he’s doing is he’s taking one reading of the text that makes sense of this text, but then it savages other texts and the character of God. It removes a divine perfection. I think a better way of doing it is to maintain the divine perfection and then try to understand the language in a text like this in light of the unchanging divine perfection.
Amy: You have to look at everything that’s involved, not just one single Bible verse. Never read a Bible verse.
Greg: Sometimes, the context is the larger context of Scripture.
I was talking to my brother yesterday about some particular theological point and how he was talking to some friends of his who had one view, and he thought that was a mistaken view. It was, and I gave the reasons why. But what I said to him was, what you want to do when you’re solving Bible problems is read the text charitably and try to find a way of reconciling, especially if you’re a Bible-believing Christian. You can’t just say, “Well, here’s my proof verse against my view, and you have yours against yours, but I’ve got my view.” Well, all that person has done at this point is affirmed a contradiction. The goal is to take all of the verses relevant to an issue and then try to come up with a solution that incorporates them and integrates them in a coherent fashion.
So, this is the point: You don’t want to leave a contradiction on the table if you can solve it. That’s what I’ve attempted to do.
Amy: Oftentimes, there will be one view that can make sense of all of it, whereas the other view can’t make sense of the other side.
Greg: Or most of it. I mean, sometimes there are going to be outliers.
Amy: But in this case, I think the view that you described can make sense of both sides. Whereas, if you say God doesn’t know everything, or he doesn’t know the future, now you’ve got so many problems in the Bible that contradict it that you can’t make sense of both.