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Thursday, June 8, 2017

P3: A Great Question: Did God Know Adam And Eve Were Going To Sin? If So, Why Did He Create Them? - Conclusions

Romans 8:18-21 "For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us. 19 For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God. 20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God."

Introduction:

In our last post, we covered five key Biblical concepts that can aid greatly in answering why it was that God created a world, wherein He knew about the fall? Those five concepts were:

1. God is good
2. God is Sovereign
3. God's Permissive Will
4. Man's free-will or responsibility
5. God's Morally Sufficient Reasons

In today's post, we are going to attempt to put everything discussed in the last two posts into a final summary. 

Putting it all together

We began this short series by asking the question: "Did God know Adam and Eve were going to sin? If so why did He create them?" If we utilize the five above terms that we introduced in the last post, we can offer the following response to this question. God is good, as plainly seen from the above passages and the fact He declared all that He had made "good" or "very good" some seven times in the Bible's opening chapter. The goodness of God is the basis for how He carries out that second concept, His Sovereignty. 

Passages such as Romans 8:28 tell us that God works together all things for the "good". The idea of "all things" in terms of the believer's Christian life includes blessings, trails, triumphs and testings. If this be true of the Christian life, then on a much broader scale we can include this understanding of life in general (see Genesis 50:20; Job 42:1-2; Romans 11:36). We then see the third concept, "God's permissive will", included in this scenario of Adam and Eve. God created them with the ability to choose, which is our fourth idea mentioned above. God did not create people to be machines, but persons endowed with freedom of the will. Adam and Eve concluded in their minds that the serpent's deception represented a "greater-good" than God's revelation. God permitted this to happen in order for Him to bring about His purposes for reconciling creation and redeemed human beings and His glory. Such purposes can be fleshed out in the fifth concept of God's morally sufficient reasons. Thus we return back to Romans 8:21 "that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God."
I close with a quote from Bible teacher Chuck Swindoll: "Although God's Sovereignty may not answer all of my questions, yet, God's Sovereignty calms all my fears."