Romans 8:29 “For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren.”
The final witness quoted above, is the apostle Paul. In this passage, Paul by inspiration of the Holy Spirit reveals to us two steps in the pattern that God follows in His creation of man, i.e. foreknowledge and predestination. But we see clearly from this passage, that the first step in that pattern is God’s foreknowledge of us. In other words, God bases His predestination of our lives on His foreknowledge of us. That foreknowledge is not a knowledge of our future (although God does know all our future), but rather it is the foreknowledge of everything about us, including what each of us will do with the free will that God gives to us. Clearly, from this passage, the apostle Paul confirms the truth to us that God knows everything about all of His creations before He ever creates them. And so, we have seen in this section that all four witnesses state the same truth, i.e. that God knows everything about each one of us before He ever creates us. That is what the scripture means, when it says that God foreknows us.
Michael E.B. Maher
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