Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig. Today, the Doctrine of God,

Part 16. For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

In our last time together, we looked at God's knowledge of so-called subjunctive conditionals or counterfactuals,

which is known as middle knowledge.

And I argued that although this is a controversial subject that not all Christians agree on,

nevertheless, there are considerable theological reasons for believing that God does have

middle knowledge, namely it is the only way to give or provide a robust doctrine of divine

providence and sovereignty that is compatible with human libertarian freedom.

And for that reason, I think that this is an aspect of divine omniscience that is important

and well worth affirming.

Let's go then to the application section of the lesson.

I want to draw three practical applications of this attribute of divine omniscience

to our lives today. First of all, God's omniscience serves as a basis for total trust in God's

guidance in your life. Because God is omniscient, he never makes a mistake, he never changes

his mind due to a lack of foresight, he never overlooks anything, nothing ever catches

him by surprise. And therefore we can confidently trust him as he guides us through life.

And this is especially true if we affirm the doctrine of middle knowledge, because then

it means that everything that happens in your life happens either by God's direct will or at least his permission

with respect to greater goods it might be achieved.

So no matter what you go through, no matter how difficult the suffering or the trial,

no matter how far away God may seem and you feel abandoned by God, nevertheless, on the basis of God's omniscience,

we can know that God is guiding you and leading you as you trust in Him.

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