surprise

• to God, no event comes as

2:1.5No thing is new to God, and no cos­mic event ever comes as a sur­prise; he in­hab­its the cir­cle of eter­nity. He is with­out be­gin­ning or end of days. To God there is no past, pres­ent, or fu­ture; all time is pres­ent at any given mo­ment. He is the great and only I AM.

• to God, no event comes as

3:2.6The Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther is not a tran­sient force, a shift­ing power, or a fluc­tu­at­ing en­ergy. The power and wis­dom of the Fa­ther are wholly ad­e­quate to cope with any and all uni­verse ex­i­gen­cies. As the emer­gen­cies of hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence arise, he has fore­seen them all, and there­fore he does not re­act to the af­fairs of the uni­verse in a de­tached way but rather in ac­cor­dance with the dic­tates of eter­nal wis­dom and in con­so­nance with the man­dates of in­fi­nite judg­ment. Re­gard­less of ap­pear­ances, the power of God is not func­tion­ing in the uni­verse as a blind force.

3:2.7Sit­u­a­tions do arise in which it ap­pears that emer­gency rul­ings have been made, that nat­u­ral laws have been sus­pended, that mis­adap­ta­tions have been rec­og­nized, and that an ef­fort is be­ing made to rec­tify the sit­u­a­tion; but such is not the case. Such con­cepts of God have their ori­gin in the lim­ited range of your view­point, in the finite­ness of your com­pre­hen­sion, and in the cir­cum­scribed scope of your sur­vey; such mis­un­der­stand­ing of God is due to the pro­found ig­no­rance you en­joy re­gard­ing the ex­is­tence of the higher laws of the realm, the mag­ni­tude of the Fa­ther’s char­ac­ter, the in­fin­ity of his at­tri­butes, and the fact of his free-will­ness.

• to God, no event comes as

3:3.4We are not wholly cer­tain as to whether or not God chooses to fore­know events of sin. But even if God should fore­know the free­will acts of his chil­dren, such fore­knowl­edge does not in the least ab­ro­gate their free­dom. One thing is cer­tain: God is never sub­jected to sur­prise.