Sovereignty, Sin & Culpability: Part 1

First, allow me to apologize for my long absense from posting. Though I have been silent here, I have been hammering out several ideas. This post is an excerpt from about 10 pages I have written regarding sin and sovereignty. So, there will be more in short order, I promise.

There are many who would seek to subordinate foreordination to foreknowledge. They do this, as I undertand it, to preserve free will and to distance God from culpability for sin. I assert that foreknowledge and foreordination are commensurate: God does not create that which He does not know, or as Albert Einstein put it, "God does not play dice." Before creating, God considered the world He would create, including every action that every man would commit. I can hear the cries already, "He's making God the author of sin!" I will deal with this objection more fully in a latter post, but for now I will respond that the retort "God is not the author of sin" is not a Bible quote, and I can find little support for such a contention, though I can find much support for the assertion that God is the designer and sustainer of all creation, even of calamity, and that in His ordaining every action in this creation God does not sin. Again, more on this later.

In considering the world He would create, God chose His own level of interaction, whereby He restrains evil (by oppressing freedom, by the way!), and the instances where He would harden the sinful hearts of men. He chose when to use supernatural signs and wonders and when to be eerily silent. Ultimately, all of this relates to how God chose to restrain Himself. He is the all-powerful source of goodness, and the light of His goodness would fill all creation if unrestrained (which is the picture of heaven). Who then might restrain this light? Who has the power to shield the glory of God? Satan? Sinful man? Heaven forbid! Only God can restrain God, for He has no equal. For what purpose does He do this? I dare not presume to know the secret counsels of God, but we can consider the results of this creation. When all is said and done this creation will have yielded a heaven filled with glorified men and sinless angels, both impeccable, and a lake of fire filled with sinful men and devils, both beyond redemption. The earth we know and the whole sweep of starry heavens above will dissolve away and be replaced. All of this is so He can gain us!

With His divine plan fully before Him, He spoke the word of Creation. He was not under any compunction to create at all, much less to create any particular world with any particular actions. He was at complete liberty to change His plan, altering any event, by restricting evil more, or permitting more freedom, by hardening more or less, by bestowing grace or withholding it, by using supernatural means or not. The simple fact is that while the still un-created universe was nothing but a thought in the mind of God it was ultimately malleable, He could reshape it in any way He cared to. This is not to say that He does not have the power to still change anything He cares to, He does, but that He will not change His plan now since to do so would violate His omniscience. How? For God to have known a future event at the beginning of creation and to alter the future so that this previously known event does not come to pass causes His prior foreknowledge to be wrong. Prior to creation there is no violation of foreknowledge in the weighing of contingencies since there is no actual thing to know.

The persons He was considering creating were not yet people, but mere thoughts of people. These as-yet-imaginary people had no real wills, but only the wills God imagined they might have, if He created the man He imagined, and influenced by the situations in life He might permit. To suggest that the imaginary wills of imaginary people might exalt themselves over the real will of the real God and win personal freedom at the cost of God's own freedom is silly. But God, seeing the end from the beginning, spoke the word of creation, placing His seal of approval on it, judging the results worthy of the cost. This is necessarily so. If God did not approve, He could have changed the plan, or scraped it altogether. Again, God created not under compunction but according to His own good pleasure. We can rest in the fact that His intention (and, necessarily, the result) for every action is for good (Rom 8:28, Rom 11:36). In the next installment of this series I will be discussing the relation of intentions to actions, and how this affects culpability for sin.