The decisive corruption of divine foreknowledge is the Arminian construction that reduces it to bare prescience and then makes it the ground of election. On this view, God, looking down the corridors of time, foresees which individuals will of their own free will believe and persevere, and on the basis of that foreseen faith He chooses them. Foreknowledge becomes mere foresight, and predestination becomes God’s ratification of man’s anticipated decision. The effect is to ground salvation ultimately in the creature: God chooses because man chooses, and the decisive cause of election lies in the foreseen will of the sinner rather than the sovereign grace of God.

The Reformed answer attends to the biblical sense of the word. To “foreknow,” in the relevant texts, is not coldly to foresee a fact but warmly to fore-love a people—the Hebraic “know” that means to acknowledge, choose, and set one’s affection upon, as when God says of Israel, “you only have I known of all the families of the earth.” “Whom he did foreknow” means whom He fore-loved, fixed His covenant heart upon beforehand—and these He predestinated. Election therefore rests not on foreseen faith but on God’s prior, sovereign, gracious choice; faith is the fruit of election, not its cause. Moreover, even God’s prescience of future free acts is certain only because those acts fall within His decree—He foreknows the future infallibly because He has ordained it, not because He passively observes a future that unfolds apart from Him. To recover the doctrine is to recover both the full omniscience of God and the sovereignty of His saving grace, which set its love upon a people before they had done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand.