The Road Not Taken

A decree of whatsoever comes to pass has no room for what never came to pass. Scripture has God naming those roads anyway.

I am not saying he does not know the end. I already wrote that essay. Knowing isn’t writing. This one is narrower. When the thing does not happen, he still tells you what would have happened, and he lays the miss on a response they did not give.

Two kinds of sentence

There is one kind of “if” a system can swallow. If my people humble themselves, then I will heal. A man can say God ordained the humbling and the healing, and the “if” only names the join between them. That answer is old, and it covers a great many verses. I am not going to spend the essay on those.

There is another kind it cannot swallow. O that my people had hearkened. I should soon have subdued their enemies. Peace would have been as a river. Tyre would have repented. That is not a promise waiting on its means. That is a good that did not arrive, spoken after the refusal, with the refusal named as the reason. There is no means-and-ends chain in a world that never happened. When God describes the road not taken, the standard answer runs out of road.

Two classes sit in this essay. The roads not taken, where God says what would have been. And the announced acts later reversed, where God says he will do a thing and then does not. The first is the load. The second sits under Jeremiah 18, which calls its own announcements revisable, so I will concede it before I use it.

The particle for the thing that didn’t happen

Hebrew has a word for the wish that stayed a wish: lu. If only. Would that. It is the particle you reach for when the thing you name did not come to pass. It occurs twenty-one times in the tagged text. Most are men wishing, Israel in the wilderness, Job, a servant. God speaks it four times. And in the two where the speaker cannot be argued, he is grieving a good that never arrived because his people would not hear.

Psalm 81. Read the refusal first, because it comes first. “But my people would not hearken to my voice; and Israel would none of me. So I gave them up unto their own hearts’ lust” (81:11-12). Then the lament, in the next breath: “Oh that my people had hearkened unto me, and Israel had walked in my ways! I should soon have subdued their enemies, and turned my hand against their adversaries” (81:13-14). Then more of it: he “should have fed them also with the finest of the wheat: and with honey out of the rock should I have satisfied thee” (81:16). Four things God names that he did not do. The hinge is already on the page, three verses up. Would not.

Isaiah 48. The speaker is named without ambiguity: “Thus saith the LORD, thy Redeemer” (48:17). Then the lu: “O that thou hadst hearkened to my commandments! then had thy peace been as a river, and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea: Thy seed also had been as the sand” (48:18-19). Peace like a river. Seed like the sand. A name not cut off. None of it came, and the verse says why: thou hadst not hearkened.

Those two are unmovable. A third lu sits in the Song of Moses, “O that they were wise, that they understood this, that they would consider their latter end!” (Deut 32:29), and most read the song’s later verses in God’s own voice; I will let you weigh the speaker for yourself, because the psalm and Isaiah carry the point without it. The fourth divine lu, Ezekiel 14:15, is a different sentence, a hypothetical judgment (“[I]f I cause noisome beasts to pass through the land”), not a lament over a mercy refused. It is the nearest miss, and I will not stretch it into a lament to make the count rounder. Two unmistakable. That is the number that holds.

The Gospels say it too

The same shape shows up in the mouth of Christ, in Greek this time, the contrary-to-fact conditional: if it had been, it would have been.

Matthew 11. The cities where he had done most of his works did not repent. And he says: “if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes” (11:21). Sodom, he says, “would have remained until this day” (11:23). The Gospel names the hinge itself: this was after “the cities wherein most of his mighty works were done” repented not (11:20). A repentance that would have come to another city, named against the one that refused.

Luke 19. He wept over the city, and the sentence he began does not finish: “If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace!” (19:42). The condition stands and the outcome breaks off, because it did not happen. The peace is named. The knowing is not there.

And the one already on record from the parables: “how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” (Matt 23:37). Not the same grammar. The same claim. I would. You would not.

What I am not saying

Say it before they do.

This does not refute compatibilism. A man can hold that God knows what other natures would do in other circumstances, because he authored the natures, and that every counterfactual is a truth about those natures. That reply is coherent. I am not pretending it isn’t. I am saying it is not what these verses are doing on the page. The page names a hearing refused and a good that did not come, and it lays the second on the first.

This is not Molinism. Matthew 11 and the “would have hearkened” texts are the verses middle knowledge leans on, and I do not hold 1588. I hold that God knows from the simplicity of his own nature, which is the essay before this one. How he knows the unrealized road is a separate question. That he speaks of it as a real road is this one.

This does not prove libertarian freedom. It proves that Scripture speaks of unrealized alternatives, and ties them to a response, every time. That is the whole claim, and I will not stretch it past its size.

The reversals, and the rule behind them

The second class is announced acts God then does not carry out, and the canon gives the rule in its own words: “At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it; If that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them” (Jer 18:7-8). I concede the point the verse concedes. The announcement was a warning he himself called revisable. This is not God breaking a decree. It is God keeping the rule he published.

Then the cases run as the rule says they will. Nineveh turned, and “God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not” (Jonah 3:10), against the flat “Yet forty days” of 3:4. Moses stood in the breach, and “the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people” (Exod 32:14), what he had spoken, not what he had sworn. Amos saw the locusts and the fire, and twice the LORD said “It shall not be” (Amos 7:3, 6). Ahab humbled himself and the evil was delayed (1 Kings 21:29). Hezekiah was told “thou shalt die, and not live” and after the tears, “I will add unto thy days fifteen years” (2 Kings 20:1, 5-6). The threat met the turn, and the threat did not fall.

They will throw the other line, and they should: “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent” (Num 23:19); “the Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent” (1 Sam 15:29). Here is the thing that settles it, and it is not a Hebrew trick I invented. First Samuel 15 uses the same word three times in one chapter. “It repenteth me that I have set up Saul” (15:11). “[t]he Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent” (15:29). “[t]he LORD repented that he had made Saul king” (15:35). The same stem, three times, and the chapter is not confused. It is drawing a line. A sworn purpose is not revoked. A threat is not executed when the threatened turn. Both are true, on the same page, in the same word. That distinction is the Bible’s, not mine.

He still names the road

So here is where it rests.

He knows the end. He inhabits eternity. And he says, in the particle reserved for the thing that never happened, oh that my people had hearkened. He says Tyre would have repented. He weeps over a peace they did not know. He says he will destroy, and when they turn, he does not.

A system that has already written every no has to recode those sentences. The sentences do not recode themselves. “Would not” stays would not. The river that never came stays a river he still names. The repentance that would have come to Tyre stays a repentance the other city refused.

The glance does not flatten the walk. And the decree does not erase the road they did not take.

Scripture quoted from the King James Version. Hebrew lu (H3863) and nacham verified against the tagged text; Greek contrary-to-fact conditionals against the tagged Greek. The full census, all twenty-one uses of lu with each speaker named, the seven contrary-to-fact conditionals in Christ’s mouth, the reversal set under Jeremiah 18, and the nacham count with its denials, is published in the road-not-taken audit.