Wednesday, May 22, 2019

Jesus wasn't plan B


Genesis 2:15-17, “And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”

This passage has been a puzzle to many Christians and the subject of much criticism from unbelievers. The question often asked is why would an all-knowing God put the Tree in the Garden if He knew Adam would disobey and bring the Curse on all of creation? If there were no tree, Adam could not have eaten of it so would not have sinned by disobeying God. No tree means no Fall, no Curse, and no history of death in the world. In other words, if God knows everything, why didn't He just not put the tree in the garden and spare the world generations of misery?

Critics sometimes exaggerate the dilemma, hoping to raise doubt on the omniscience of God or the plausibility of the Bible. Such criticism could have a chilling effect on the gospel. It tries to make it look like God made a mistake and then had to come up with the cross as a way to fix it. Jesus was a sort of “plan B.”

There are a few bad assumptions behind this criticism. First, it's completely non sequitur as an argument for atheism. I'm not sure exactly how it follows that, because people die, there can be no God. You could try to make a case that He's not a loving God or that He's not the God of the Bible but there's no reason we must necessarily conclude that death means there's no God. It goes back to a point I made a few months back: people have a false idea of how God should act and, when they can't find a god that acts they way, they conclude there must be no god at all.

The other flaw in this criticism is the assumption that eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was the only sin Adam could have committed. Removing the tree does not necessarily mean Adam could no longer sin. Adam still had free will and so could have disobeyed God in other ways. For example, God also commanded Adam and Eve to multiply; Adam could have refused. We have to ask if it is even possible for God to create a creature with free will but not the ability to choose to disobey Him? It's sort of like asking if God could create a square circle.

I certainly can't claim to completely understand God. Indeed, if a finite, simple man like me could completely understand Him, He wouldn't be a very big God. But after having thought about this and looking into His word, I think I have an inkling of why things are they way they are.

We like to say that God can do anything. Of course, there are things even God can't do. God cannot lie, for example. He cannot even be wrong. And here is another very important thing – God cannot stop being God. He will always be the Infinite One, the Eternal One, the Perfect One. Logically speaking, it can be no other way.

Isaiah 46:9-11 says, Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me, Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure: Calling a ravenous bird from the east, the man that executes my counsel from a far country: yea, I have spoken it, I will also bring it to pass; I have purposed it, I will also do it.

Like this passages says, there cannot be anyone like God. In logic, there is an interesting paradox called the Irresistible Force Paradox. Essentially it says that irresistible force and an immovable object cannot exist simultaneously. One must yield to the other. The same is true for God. Not only must there be only one supreme power, He must also have supreme authority. You cannot have 2 beings with free will unless the will of one them yields to the other. Think about it – what would happen if one god says, “this will be blue” and the other says, “no, this will not be blue”? One of them must yield to the other.

When God made man, He could have made us like robots who only can do what He programmed us to do. That isn't what God wanted. He wanted someone with whom He could have fellowship - someone who would have emotions and reason similar to His. So, He created in His image. Yet, even though we are like God, we cannot be just like God. God wanted us to have fellowship with Him. He created us with free will and the ability to genuinely love Him. But by giving us free will, it was inevitable that we would disobey him. If we have free will, there will come a point that what a man wants will conflict with what God wants. Obviously, God would have known all this.

God is love (1 John 4:7-8). Because of His perfect love, He desired an object to love. However, His perfect justice would not allow Him to suffer the disobedience of His creation. So when He purposed to create us, He simultaneously would have had a plan to reconcile us to Himself again, once we disobeyed Him. His plan was the cross!

Revelation 13:8 refers to Jesus as, “The Lamb, slain from the foundation of the world.” In dutiful obedience to the Father, Jesus created the entire universe and shaped man with His own hands, knowing that the cost would be His own blood. It's overwhelming to think about it. It reminds me of a moving passage from that famous hymn:

And when I think of God, His Son not sparing
Sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in
That on the Cross, my burden gladly bearing
He bled and died to take away my sin

God didn't make a mistake. He didn't create us without realizing the cost. Jesus wasn't plan B. He was always the plan!

2 comments:

  1. Such criticism ... tries to make it look like God made a mistake and then had to come up with the cross as a way to fix it.

    The story of Noah in Genesis seems to make it look that way. “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created ... for I regret that I have made them.” God, here, seems genuinely surprised at how humans have turned out; "regret" is in order only when one has anticipated some different outcome from one's efforts. One might even say that God hints that His creation of humans was a mistake.

    Indeed, it seems to me that at least through Isaiah, God's ability to foreknow the future consists entirely of God's power to enforce His will regardless of what humans might try; there's no implication until, arguably, the book of Daniel that He actually knows our choices before we make them.

    Removing the tree does not necessarily mean Adam could no longer sin.

    I think you have a valid point here.

    He created us with free will and the ability to genuinely love Him. But by giving us free will, it was inevitable that we would disobey him.

    On the one hand, that seems a rather dolorous concept of free will: your will is not free unless you can make stupid and bad decisions? You seem to be arguing here that any entity with free will must, if it lives long enough, rebel against God.

    Which brings us to the other hand. It is generally accepted that in Heaven (or the New Sky and Earth of Revelation), the saved will not sin. Will God remove their free will, and spend all eternity in the company of the sort of automatons that He found inadequate as worshipers on the former Earth? Or will God somehow endow the saved with free will that will never be used for evil, any more than His own will is? And in either case, why could He not do this in the garden in Eden?

    Benjamin Franklin, in his own theological speculations, supposed that the saved would, on the one hand, progress onward to become superior spiritual beings (anticipating the views of Joseph Smith), and on the other, that from time to time they would rebel against God, be cast out of Heaven, and have to work their way back up to salvation and progress. It did not occur to me, when I was first reading his speculations, that this comes of taking seriously the ideas you propound on the importance of free will to God (yet I think they are not your ideas).

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  2. Steven J,

    We tend to anthropomorhize God. When we think of love, for example, we think the love God has for us is exactly the same as how we love others. It's more likely that we can never feel love exactly the same way as God, who is the embodiment of love. In that same vein, I don't think regret means the same thing to us as it does to God. We sometimes regret our decisions because we didn't understand the full consequence of what we were doing. We couldn't know the future and, once we see where our decision has led, we wish we could have done things differently. God obviously understands what will happen. It simply breaks His heart when the thing He knew would happen does happen.

    Think of the example of King Saul. For centuries, Israel had no king and governed themselves using only the Law (and judges to interpret the Law). When the people said they wanted a king like other nations had, God warned them how bad it would be for them (1 Samuel 8). They persisted and God gave them Saul. Interestingly, the name Saul means, “asked for.” We know how things turned out and it was as bad as God had warned. In 1 Samuel 15:11, God says, “I regret that I have made Saul king, for he has turned back from following Me and has not carried out My commands.” So we can't say that God was surprised by Saul; Instead, it genuinely hurt God when all the things He knew would happen happened.

    To your points on free will: I believe liberty requires the ability to make stupid decisions. I see this often in the political sphere. I've gotten more than one ticket for not wearing a seat belt. Really? Am I really free if the government can compel me to take care of myself? What else might this include? If I'm overweight, can I be compelled to diet? Will they give me a ticket if they see me eating a back of chips? What if the law said if you drop out of high school, you are sent to prison where you will be forced to complete your education? You can see how protecting me against making “bad decisions” can actually enslave me.

    Now, how free will works in heaven is a little more difficult to imagine. For what it's worth, here are some of my thoughts on the subject. As we mature as Christians, I believe God's will becomes our will. If Jesus is our Lord, we should long to do what He commands. However, as long as we live in the flesh, our rebellious nature will always be in conflict with our desire to be obedient. Maybe it is not until we are rid of these bodies and dwell in the presence of Christ that we can perfectly submit to His will.

    Thanks for your comments. They're interesting, as always. God bless!!

    RKBentley

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