24
All of these problems arise from the assertion that the God to whom we pray does
not and indeed cannot infallibly foreknow actual or possible free human decisions or any element
of the future causally dependent on those free decisions. But when we go back to the teaching of
Jesus in Matthew 6, we find that he did not teach such a view. He told his praying disciples that
"your Father knows what you need before you ask him." In so doing, as we have seen, he
appeals to God's knowledge of all of our needs, present and future, and of all the free decisions
that would be involved in meeting those needs. And he does so precisely to encourage his
disciples (and us) to pray and to keep on praying. He intentionally grounds our confidence in
prayer in God's exhaustive knowledge of the future. Thus if we are to pray in the way Jesus
would have us to pray, we too must be confident that our God does in fact know what we need
before we ask him. And equally so, if our view of God's foreknowledge is to function in our
lives in the way it does in Scripture, it must lead us to the kind of confidence in prayer that is
hard to come by in open theism.