GOD’S PREDISTINED PLAN
All we really know about what God
planned to do with His creation is what the scriptures tell us. Ignoring all the speculation on this subject
and looking only at His word we can get a good general picture of His
plan. Of course, we must start with the
belief He is sovereign and therefore He had a plan before He created this
world. Without such a starting point,
His word, His promises, our hope, and our life are meaningless. Being sovereign, His plan was perfectly
thought out in every detail before any of it came to be. He knew all about our future because He could
see all of the future from His eternal vantage point. Being sovereign, He commanded all the power
necessary to carry out His plan just the way He planned it. Being sovereign, by definition, He could not
make any mistakes, change His plan, or start over. Being sovereign, He designed everything the
way He planned them to be. Being
sovereign, His word is the truth just the way He transmits it to our hearts and
soul. Being sovereign, His plan is
infinite in all its detail and is beyond human understanding. We are not expected to understand it, to
agree with it, or even to immediately like it.
It seems that God’s purpose for this
creation is to create His family, who will live with Him forever. In His sovereign wisdom He knows that for
this family to be worthy of such an honor they must be perfect as He is perfect
and always be subservient to Him in all things.
The first requirement is easy for God because He can create any level of
perfection He desires. The subservient
part is harder because this requires a development process where the created
being learns about obedience one lesson at a time. Therefore, to have both perfection and
subservience in the same created being requires starting with imperfection and
teaching subservience through a labor intensive process of comparing right with
wrong.
The problem with starting with
imperfection is that there must be some connection made between the perfect and
the imperfect, the finite and the infinite, and the unholy and the holy, in
order to start the development process.
This impediment is called the problem of evil. The nature of the imperfect according to its
design naturally gravitates into a state of disobedience. This disobedient state is called the problem
of sin. The imperfect created being, by
design, falls into disobedience by definition.
There can be no imperfection in the perfect and there can be no
perfection in the imperfect. God solved
this problem by lending a part of Himself in a joining relationship with the
imperfect design and living a full lifetime demonstrating His perfection to
all. This temporal demonstration had
then to be translated into the eternal spiritual domain in order to create a
new kind of creature with a nature that could learn to understand the problem
of good and evil.
Jesus was the one who justified the
imperfect into the perfect [Romans 8:1].
Jesus was the one who paid the price necessary to redeem the future and
past members of God’s family [Romans 8:2-4].
Because of Jesus’ death, His Spirit was able to come as an indwelling
force to control the development process [Romans