God is all knowing. He always has been and always will be. He knew that man would fall when He created Adam and Eve, so he created them with a plan in mind, that is, He created them knowing that their creation meant that Jesus would one day have to die on the cross to correct their mistake. Ok, fine, but something I hadn't thought about before was the creation of Lucifer. God made him, and in in making him, also gave him his status as most powerful angel. This means that when God created Lucifer, He also knew that Lucifer would be the one to tempt Eve to eat the fruit. So why create Lucifer? God could have created man with a free will, and made another angel that would not have fallen, or made Lucifer so that he would not fall. But He didn't. Instead He made everything. He was the one, essentially, who set things in motion for the fall to happen. Why? Because in knowing everything in advance, He could have made it otherwise. This sort of points back to a question I asked here about the possible good side of the fall. God could have, if He had wanted to, made everything different. But He didn't. It happened the way it did, and it seems like the biggest reason for that is His desire for us to know Him. He doesn't just want us to just know part of Him, or one side, but all of Him. This wouldn't be possible without the fall.
Now that makes me wonder though, knowing that God knew ahead of time what would happen when He created Lucifer and doing it anyway, if the fall was not just God turning a bad situation into something good, but necessary. He would not create us to be robots, and in order for us to have free will, we had to fall. That would mean that the fall in itself was good...responses on this one would be nice because I'm not sure how I feel about that, and I've run out of ideas :P
2 comments:
Interesting thoughts. Keep at it!
If God made Adam and Eve with free will for some reason, would he have made Lucifer free for the same reasons? That is, perhaps the ability to choose is in itself a good. If so, why?
It might be helpful for you to spell out for yourself what you mean by the fall being good. In what sense? The whole thing? That it happened?
Your post brings to mind Alvin Plantinga's Free Will Defense against the logical problem of evil. There's a decent Wikipedia article on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantinga%27s_free_will_defense
The stuff on transworld depravity is confusing, but I find it helpful to chart it out as he describes it.
thanks Jon :)
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