CS Lewis on obedience and what God foreknows
This is a little spooky. I've been reading the chapter on Human Pain in The Problem of Pain by CS Lewis rather slowly (and intermittently), because there is so much in it. And I read the quote posted today at Desiring God, the other day and very nearly posted it, with some of what comes before it under "the third operation of suffering" (though I suppose there's nothing that serendipitous in one of 8,152 subscribers - and that's only in google reader - reading the same book!). Since I am carrying the book around with me, I will add in a section that comes before, then snitch that bit from Desiring God:
It has sometimes been asked whether God commands certain things because they are right, or whether certain things are right because God commands them ... believe ... that 'they err who think that of the will of God to do this or that there is no reason besides His will' [quoted from Hooker, Laws of Eccl. Polity]. God's will is determined by His wisdom which always perceives, and His goodness which always embraces, the intrinsically good. But when we have said that God commands things only because they are good, we must add that one of the things intrinsically good is that rational creatures should freely surrender themselves to their Creator in obedience. The content of our obedience - the thing we are commanded to do - will always be something intrinsically good, something we ought to do even if (by an impossible supposition) God had not commanded it. But in addition to the content, the mere obeying is also intrinsically good, for, in obeying, a rational creature consciously enacts its creaturely role, reverses the act by which we fell, treads Adam's dance backwards, and returns. (Pp 99-100)
Then, reflecting on why God put Abraham's faith to the test by commanding him to offer his son, Lewis says,
If God then is omniscient, he must have known what Abraham would do, without any experiment. Why then this needless torture?" But as St. Augustine points out, whatever God knew, Abraham at any rate did not know that his obedience would endure such a command until the event taught him: and the obedience which he did not know that he would choose, he cannot be said to have chosen. The reality of Abraham's obedience was the act itself; and what God knew in knowing that Abraham "would obey" was Abraham's actual obedience on that mountain top a that moment. To say that God "need not have tried the experiment" is to say that because God knows, the thing known by God need not to exist. (The Problem of Pain, 101)