i.  God repented of His decision - 1Sam 15:11, "(God says) I repent that I have made Saul king, because he has turned away from me and has not carried out my instructions"),

...followed by:

ii. God does not repent of His decisions - 1Sam 15:29, "God who is the Glory of Israel does not lie or change His mind; for He is not a man, that He should change His mind",

...and ends with:

iii. God repented of His decision - 1Sam 15:35, "And the Lord repented that He had made Saul king over Israel".

DH writes:

"God foreknows the grievous and sorrowful effects of some of his own choices e.g., to make Saul king. These effects are genuinely grievous to God as he sees them in themselves. Yet he does not regard his choices as mistakes that he would do differently if only he foreknew what was coming. Rather he wills to do some things which he then genuinely grieves over in part when the grievous effect comes to pass.

"...Samuel means something like this: when I say "[God] repented that he made Saul king" I do not mean that God experiences repentance precisely the way ordinary humans do. He is not a man to experience "repentance" this way. He experiences it his way - the way one experiences "repentance" when one is all-wise and foreknows the entire future perfectly. The experience is real, but it is not like finite man experiences it (an anthropomorphism).  It is presumptous to insist that the way God grieves/loves/relates must be exactly the way we finite creatures do.  Our finite relationships are horizontal while His relationship with us is vertical."

My paraphrase cum summary of his interpretation would be:

"God foreknew all along (from eternity) that Saul would fail as king.  Passages stating that God repented of His ordaining of Saul's kingship do NOT mean to suggest that God didn't foreknow the event.  Instead we must not understand 'repentance' as applied to God in the same way as we see it applied to humans.  1Sam 15:29 underscores this by stating that because God is 'not a Man', genuine mind-changing/repentance and thus less-than-total foreknowledge of the future are unfit terms to be used of God (making God in the image of Man).

"In short, we can say that God 'repents' but the primary meaning of this is 'grieves' and does NOT in any way denote a 'change of mind'.  Another approach is to remain humbly agnostic about what divine repentance can mean yet to continually affirm that He knows everything and knows everything perfectly."
 

Before addressing the passage, there are two bullet-points I wish to bring up:

• The word repentance, put as simply as possible, is 'the process of changing one's mind' (The New International Dictionary of the Bible, '87).  Taken in a straight-forward, plain and literal way, it would be a contradiction to say BOTH that "God changed His mind" AND that "God knows the future exhaustively".
• There are more than thirty verses in the Old Testament teaching the repentance of God, and only two denying it.

I will argue below that attempts to deny the genuine repentance of God (like the one presented by our brother above) can only be done by illegitimately modifying the Biblical text and imposing onto it a preconceived understanding of exhaustive foreknowledge, and hence should be rejected.  More responses to classical harmonisations of texts like these can be found in my examination of John Piper's essays on the topic.

This piece will be divided into:
Part 1:  The Open View Reading of 1Sam 15
Part 2:  Does 1Sam 15:29 teach that divinity precludes changing one's mind ("for God is not a man, that He should change His mind")?
Part 3:  Problems with the classical interpretation of 1Sam 15
 

On to the first instalment...
 

AL