Pre-Emptive Perdition

As Christians, we believe in the Sovereignty and Omniscience of Christ. That means we believe God is indeed all-powerful and all-knowing. We also believe that He is Just. Some people run into a unique question then. If God already knows what we are going to do in the future, and He is all powerful, does that mean that He judges people before they sin? Can He punish people ahead of time?

Well, what is our view of God? Could He do that? Would He still be a Just God if He did? Does it even matter? What would change if He did? Well, the Pharisees asked Jesus a question similar to this. In John 9 the Pharisees assume that the man born blind must have been punished for his future sins or the sins of his parents. Jesus says both of these are not the case. So what can we extrapolate from this? Can we say that it is never the case then? Actually, Jesus does not say that this is never the case, but we cannot say that the opposite is true without reason either.

Lets look at this another way. It is completely true that God is not bound or bothered by time. He exists in a place outside of time entirely. So would it matter to Him if we were punished for things before we did them? Possibly not. But the real question we should consider is this, "If we were punished for sins before they happened, would we still do them?" If not, was the punishment even just, because then we would not have done anything to be punished. If we did still do it, was the punishment of any use, for we did not learn a lesson.

In the end, it may not matter to God, but it would to us. God takes great pains to show us His Glory in ways we can understand and make sense to our feeble human minds. Not only that, but if God did punish us ahead of sins' occurrence on our plane of existence, then God would in effect destroy the concept of faith and loyalty. God would reward the faithful before they were faithful and punish the bad before they were bad. That directly contradicts what God says in Matthew 5:45. He sends rain on the evil and the just. Another thing we can look at is the examples we have in the Bible itself. Adam and Eve were not punished before they sinned. Nor do we find record of any other punishment that precedes action. Therefore, with such a large amount of information available to us and not one bit of actual evidence to support that theory, we must conclude that we cannot support it. To support a theory without evidence because there is no evidence the the contrary would be like saying that my great-great-grandson will be an astronaut. Just because something  cannot be proven untrue does not make it true by default.

Conclusion

In the end, Paul tells us not to argue about vain and useless things that cannot be proven. He also tells us to stay way from endless debate and quarrel. Things of this nature that cannot be proven and do not alter our Salvation or the requirement of our faithfulness and obedience should not get too much attention. We need to focus on what is truly important. We need to glorify God in all that we do. What is required of us is simple. We are to be faithful.