The Decrees of God are Eternal

That the decrees of God are eternal, necessarily follows from the perfection of the divine Being. He cannot be supposed to have at one time plans or purposes which He had not at another. He sees the end from the beginning; the distinctions of time have no reference to him who inhabits eternity. The Scriptures therefore always speak of events in time as revelations of a purpose formed in eternity. The salvation of men, for example, is said to be "according to the eternal purpose which He purposed in Christ Jesus." (Eph. iii. 11.) What is revealed in time was hidden for ages, i.e., from eternity in the mind of God. (Eph. iii. 9.) Believers were chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world. (Eph. i. 4.) "Who hath saved us, and called us . . . . according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus, pro chronon aionion, before eternal ages." (2 Tim. i. 9.) Christ as a sacrifice was "foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you, who by Him do believe in God." (1 Pet. i. 20, 21; Rom. xi. 33-36; Acts ii. 23.) This is the constant representation of Scripture. History in all its details, even the most minute, is but the evolution of the eternal purposes of God. It is no objection to this doctrine that the Scriptures often represent one purpose of God as consequent upon another, or that they speak of his purposes as determined by the conduct of men. The language of Scripture is founded on apparent truth; they speak, as men always do, as things appear, not as they themselves know or believe them to be. We speak of the concave heavens, or of the firm foundation of the heavens, although we know that it is not concave, and that it does not rest on any foundation. So the Bible speaks of the decrees of God as they appear to us in their successive revelation and in their mutual relations, and not as they exist from eternity in the divine mind. Neither is there any force in the objection that the agent must be before his acts. The sun is not before his brightness, nor the mind before thought, nor life before consciousness, nor God before his purposes. These objections are founded on the assumption that God is subject to the limitations of time. To Him there is neither past nor future, neither before nor after.

Hodge v 1 p 538

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Comment: These Hodge paragraphs on the decrees of God obliterate Open Theism!

We have the day off. My back hurts. We plan to take a drive later. I think to Lime Springs Iowa and back.