When reformed theologians speak about the first cause and secondary causes, they do not mean sequences in time. They refer to two ORDERS of causality:
1. Divine (first cause);
2. Creaturely (second or contingent causes).
The reason why the first cause—logically prior, but of a different order than secondary causes—can concur with secondary causes is BECAUSE they are of a different order.
They CAN concur because they do not contradict each other, being of divine and human orders.
God is eternally present, before all things at once, and so he sees past, present, and future all at once. He does not cause something prior in time, but causes something in a way beyond our capacity to know.
Hence, our contingent choices can concur with God’s prior agency. If God in a way that transcends understanding can see all acts at once, he foreknows all things. That foreknowledge, in this sense predestination, means that God timelessly enacts his will.
His causation in such a way cannot be confused for ours! We think in sequence. We are contingent. We are ignorant of much. God is not. So our order of possible free choice exists in a different order of being—we can have genuinely free, contingent choice, without contradicting God’s freedom since our wills concur along different planes of being.
Totally agree and I have been puzzled for many years as to why this is so hard to understand,
Thanks, Wyatt
In all the hustle of living, this I believe is a sober perspective on the scope of God compared to His creation.
It is partially why I believe, for example, it stands to reason that if Jesus wept He wept before the creation of the world and mankind. He knows perfectly well how to expose mankind to the hideous side of himself, as it were, with glimpses of His light: 1 John 1:5
This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.
John 12:35: “The light is among you for a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you. The one who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going.”
God is generous with His solution for mankind to follow Him — “His causation in such a way cannot be confused for ours!” Absolutely. Since He is the Light, He does not need a lamp.
Yet only when we walk in the Light can our journey make sense which makes John 16 viable leadership.
1 John 1:7: “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another…” without which fellowship doesn’t appear to amount to spiritual growth.