God knows the whole of history because he is the Lord of history, not just in the weak sense that he can cause good to come out of evil, but because he determined it all. History-past and future-is the outworking in time of his extra-temporal sovereign decree. This decree extends not only to every natural event (earthquakes, eclipses, electron orbits), but also to his own free actions and even to the morally culpable actions of moral agents.

The Bible consistently presents God as the sovereign Lord of all things, the one who accomplishes every last detail of his plan and does it without needing our help and without ever being thwarted by our resistance. His knowledge of the future is just one implication of his providential control of all things.The God who knew all my days when I was in my mother's womb superintends all those days in their every detail.

The God of the Bible is not dependent upon his creatures or anything outside of his own nature and free will. And although independent, he graciously chooses to act in time on our behalf and even at times to announce future events in advance. The most obvious reading of the Bible's many prophecies is that God knew the future while it was still future and made it known through his prophets. Any attempt to deny that God knows every detail of the future has vast stretches of biblical data to overcome.

It shouldn't be surprising that those not greatly concerned with biblical data have found it easy to deny God's knowledge of the future. Much more surprising, though, have been the recent objections to God's sovereign knowledge of the future which have arisen from evangelicals claiming to offer an account that is faithful to the Bible.

Their objections are numerous, and in many cases subtle and challenging, but they all spring from a common assumption about human freedom. This assumption about human freedom is seen in two popular current alternatives to the Sovereign Knowledge position.

The "Openness of God" alternative proposes to replace classical conceptions of God, bringing God into time to face the indeterminate future along with us. The "Simple Foreknowledge" alternative preserves God's knowledge of a determinate future by making that knowledge dependent upon persons or things outside of himself. I will explain and answer both of these alternatives to God's sovereign knowledge of the future after considering the assumption that drives them.