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Correcting a Common Misconception
Quite commonly people will agree that God predestines some to be saved, but they will insist that this determination is made by God's looking into the future and seeing who will believe in Christ and who will not. If God sees that a person is going to come to saving faith, then He will predestine that person to be saved, based upon His foreknowledge of that person's faith. Conversely, if that person will not come to saving faith, then God does not predestine that person to be saved. In this way, it is argued, the ultimate reason why some are saved and some are not lies within the individuals themselves, and not within God. All that God does in His saving work, according to this approach, is to give confirmation to the decision that He already knows people will make on their own initiative. The verse commonly employed to support this view is Romans 8:29 - "For those whom He foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son."
But this verse can hardly be used to demonstrate that God based His predestination on foreknowledge of the bare act of belief itself in certain individuals. The passage speaks, rather, of the fact that God knew persons ("those whom He foreknew"), not He knew some fact about them, such as the fact that they would believe. Now God does know the end from the beginning and His knowledge of all things (including personal decisions) is exhaustive. But that is not the kind of knowledge that is being described in Romans 8:29. It is personal, relational knowledge that is spoken of there: God, looking into the future, thought of certain people in a saving relationship with them, set His love upon them, and in that profoundly intimate sense He knew them long ago. This is the manner in which Paul can speak of God's "knowing" someone, for example, in 1 Corinthians 8:3 - "But if one loves God, one is known by Him." Similarly, Paul writes, "but now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God..." (Galatians 4:9). When the Bible speaks of an individual knowing God, or vice versa, it is a personal knowledge that involves a saving relationship. Therefore, in Romans 8:29, "those whom He foreknew" is best understood to mean, "those whom He long ago thought of in a saving relationship to Himself." The text actually says nothing about God foreknowing or foreseeing that certain people would believe, nor is the idea mentioned in any other text of Scripture.
