Hello AMR and everyone else. I've only read the first two posts, but thought I'd say hello, and also add that, as you know AMR, there are not four persons of the godhead, but only three.
Everything that Jesus says He says as God the Son. Jesus was not a human being whom God the Son possessed. He is fully man and fully God. Fictitious Gods, like Allah, can speak out of two sides of their mouths. Jesus humanity didn't become flesh. The eternal God the Son became flesh. It was God the Son suffering in the garden. It was God the Son suffering on the cross. The Father was pouring His wrath out on God the Son.
But none of that seems significant to the Calvinists whom I speak to. Perhaps the reason is because, even when Jesus Himself makes it clear that He is talking as God the Son, Calvinists reject even His own firsthand testimony to that effect. They reject the Lord's direct statement of the knowledge of "the Son", and claim that it is Jesus' humanity talking, as though the godhead consists of God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, and that Human One. When Jesus said that no man knows the day or the hour of His second advent, and neither do the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father, He is specifically giving us a hierarchy, and telling us something that the Son does not know.
And of course, just as if you didn't know when the Europeans came to America, there would be an enormous flood of additional, dependent information that you also wouldn't know, likewise, if God the Son does not know the day or the hour of His own second coming -- because He has agreed that decision would be in the hands of the Father -- then there is an infinite amount of detailed future knowledge that is likewise unavailable to the Son. But so what: mindless bureaucrats, like the Nazis in WWI, may have a paperwork obsession to document every conceivable bit of useless information. But God is a person. And just like the most brilliant chess players who intuitively ignore millions of plies of moves, knowing that they are irrelevant, so too, because God is a person He can ignore infinite details. A deity who thought he had to track every molecule of toilet paper and trace its entire life cycle, and retain this information eternally, is the kind of deity imagined by the darkened minds of the pagan Greeks. Because the God of the Bible is a person, therefore He has a will. And because He has a will, which is the ability to decide, He can decide what information He wants to possess, and what to pass on. When it comes to base animal function, God seems more interested in privacy and modesty then in tracking every molecule. Exhaustive foreknowledge majors in the minors. God doesn't.
- Bob