Revelation 22:13 English Standard Version (ESV) I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.

Rather than studying what everyone else has learned and said about foreknowledge, please allow me to boil it down to the most simple terms that makes it easy to digest.

Who do we trust to know everything that has ever happened and that will happen in time?

Time is our realm. We report what we have seen, to be believed or ignored. Man cannot be trusted to report much of anything beyond his perceptions and beliefs. We are finite creatures and in that our experiences, knowledge, and methods of communicating are limited.

Foreknowledge covers the span of all time or it cannot be a knowledge of what is true. No man can stand before us and state with any confidence that they know everything that ever happened and will happen in the future.

God who stands outside time and can be said to have one foot on the beginning of time and the other on the end of time. Time is the realm we live in. We are bound to it with limits. Those are called birth and death.

Who could we trust with all knowledge? Surely not mankind. So who we believe has foreknowledge is the key to our understanding and acceptance.

Do we believe that God is the Alpha and Omega?

If we do then look at foreknowledge in these terms. Our time is not present in eternity. 

Perhaps God spoke all time into being and clapped His hands together to define the limits of time, His left hand being Alpha and His right hand being Omega.

Titus 1:1-3 English Standard Version

1 Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the sake of the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness, 2 in hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began 3 and at the proper time manifested in his word through the preaching with which I have been entrusted by the command of God our Savior;

He knew the outcome before He even created time.

Numbers 16:28-30 English Standard Version

28 And Moses said, “Hereby you shall know that the Lord has sent me to do all these works, and that it has not been of my own accord. 29 If these men die as all men die, or if they are visited by the fate of all mankind, then the Lord has not sent me. 30 But if the Lord creates something new, and the ground opens its mouth and swallows them up with all that belongs to them, and they go down alive into Sheol, then you shall know that these men have despised the Lord.”

Fatalism according to the Oxford dictionary is a belief system. That system says that all things are predetermined and therefore inevitable.

Because it is a belief system it is up to us to share in these beliefs or to choose not to share in them. There are only two choices in that scenario. In Numbers above there are more than two choices.

First choice is fatalism. The fate of those people were sealed and nothing could change fate, not even the will of God.

Second choice is that there are consequences for choices. Those who were about to be swallowed up by a great chasm and sent to Sheol were only suffering the consequences of their choices.

A third choice is fiction. It never happened.

This third choice, one of fiction, leaves us with mystery that can be explained to our own satisfaction or ignored because we choose not to get involved.

We are responsible for our own decisions. If we believe that our choices do not matter then we do not believe that choices have consequences. If we live our lives in that manner life itself will teach us that gravity works and we will fall if we jump off a cliff. Choosing to jump with the intention of falling says we believe in gravity. Life teaches us there are consequences for choices.

Some choose to believe that the odds are against them and their fate is sealed. Those choices are rebellion in the face of fatalism. This is why a class of people join groups of like minded fatalists that says, “Take it while you can.” Their choices have led them to the consequences of their choices.

If we knew with perfect understanding what the outcome for our choices would lead us, then we would be entering into the realm of foreknowledge. 

Is foreknowledge fatalism by another name?