"I thought how I would set you among my children, and give you a pleasant land, the most beautiful heritage of all the nations. And I thought you would call me, My Father, and would not turn from following me.  Instead, as a faithless wife leaves her husband, so you have been faithless to me, O house of Israel."

The reader is encouraged to read Piper's essay to see all the points he brings up there, but here I'd like to focus on one of the primary charge of his work (against Boyd) that :

Since God thought Israel was going to be faithful, but she instead ended up being faithless, this necessarily means that God made a mistake.  Period.

Really?  Methinks not.  Let's look carefully:

By Piper's definition of a 'mistake', it would seem that the ONLY WAY for God not to make any 'mistakes' at all about the future is to know it exhaustively and with full certainty.  But the Bible teaches that God repents, and if God repents that it's obvious that even God's initial expectations and 'readings' of people's hearts can undergo modification due to the way they ACTUALLY behave.

This forces me to conclude that God has chosen to populate His world with agents who can genuinely create surprise (and - subsequently - shock and disappointment) for Him.  He has decided to NOT create predictive certainty for Himself about SOME events (is He obliged to?).

Furthermore, if the Bible says that God can (and does) change His mind about an initial decision AND that God is perfectly wise and 'All-knowing', then I would have to conclude that harboring future expectations contrary to what eventually occurs is NOT incompatible with being Perfectly Wise.

Piper rhetorically asks:

"What is the glory of a "perfectly accurate assessment of all probabilities" which yields judgments and decisions about the future that do not correspond to reality when it arrives?"

I would answer, based on Scripture, that Piper should look to the glory of the One who has (gloriously, I might add) brought to life self-determining agents with the power to either love or reject Him, and who has committed Himself to the loving risk of working with these loved-ones of His with all the uncertainty and pain and sorrow, seeking to transforming their lives.  This is a glory which no Omni-Controlling deity can hope to attain, for it demands more love, more wisdom, more boldness and a willingness to play by His own rules, even at terrible costs at times.

I might also ask:  What is the glory of an exhaustively controlled reality where your loved-ones do exactly as you've decided that they should, even the very evil which you told them you hated?!  What is the glory of a victory when your enemies can only do that which you've determined they should do?  Do we have a God so insecure that He has to exercise meticulous control over every teenie-weenie detail in His world?

(Go here for an elaborated critique of the Calvinist view of divine sovereignity, especially that of unconditional sovereignity).

Indeed, certain results and outcomes in the PERSONAL dimension (which is an entirely different thing than, say, the number of ants in a certain tree) turned out not as God expected.  But why should we expect God to be ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN about ALL of the future, without which we consider Him as having a diminished glory?  Doesn't God have the SOVEREIGN RIGHT to structure His creatures such that He can expect without 100% certainty a loving response to His blessings?

In short, I think I would say to John Piper:  "Correct, God expected something other than what actually happened.  So?"

We certainly have the semantic liberties to call that a 'mistake', but let's not call it 'unBiblical' (without better exegesis) and let's not assume to know what God can and cannot expect APART from what His Word teaches us.  Of course this raises legitimate questions about God's future actions and how He'll prevail without knowing everything - but that, alas, is a separate issue.

Let's not equate asking a concerned question with accusing people of heresy.
 

Regards,
AL
p.s.:  I'd like to note here that I think Greg Boyd didn't need to 'apologise' so much with his insistence that God cannot make mistakes. It's not that I disagree with him - it's just that, as Piper has done very well, it's easy to exploit an assumed definition of 'mistake' and ascribe it to an alternative theology's view of God WITHOUT understanding the entirety and logic of the worldview in question.  This is roughly similar to Bruce Ware's equation of 'non-exhaustive' foreknowledge with 'diminished' glory, to which Boyd has already responded to.