Maybe God Doesn't Know Everything

Interesting tangent in my men's group last night.  We're studying Romans, but got sidetracked into discussing Adam and Eve.  One question that came up was whether free will inevitably led to sin.  And the idea that followed was that perhaps it was all part of God's plan for us to sin and then to redeem us later.  Because, after all, if God knows everything, surely He knew that Adam and Eve would sin.  Right?

I'm not so sure.  Maybe God doesn't know everything.  Maybe God knows everything that it is possible to know, but there are things that can't be known, because they haven't happened yet.

I mean, are we saying that God, before anyone had sinned, had already imagined mass murder and violent rape and shooting up heroin and every other ugly thing you can think of?

I think maybe God knew that with free will there was the possibility of sin.  But God, being holy, may not have known what that would look like until people actually did the bad things.  So many times God comes across sin and seems genuinely surprised by it.  After Adam and Eve sin, God seems perplexed.  When Cain kills Abel, God seems shocked at the discovery.  So many times with the Israelites, God feels like he's tearing His hair out, trying to figure out how these people can keep doing these awful things.

So maybe He didn't know what sin would look like.  Maybe it took sinful people to create sin first.

Some may respond that God is outside of time and therefore knows everything.  Yeah, well, that's a trendy, fairly new way to look at how God operates, but I'm not convinced that God hasn't maybe confined himself in some way to operating within time.  But that's a debate for another day.