Why Human Freedom, Finite Minds and the Lamb Belong to One Eternal Story
There is something about the Fall that has troubled me for a long time. We often say that God knew Adam was going to sin and therefore, before Adam ever sinned, He had already prepared the answer in Jesus Christ. Of course He knew. But recently I have begun to realise that, although true, this explanation may not be nearly big enough. It makes everything depend upon one particular decision by one particular man in the Garden of Eden, whereas I think the truth goes much deeper. God chose to create personal beings who could genuinely think, reason, choose, trust and love. They would be His creatures, wonderfully made and capable of fellowship with Him, but they would never possess His infinite mind. Once I began there rather than with Adam’s sin, something about the Cross became much clearer to me. The Cross was not simply going to be needed because Adam would eat the fruit. The Cross was always going to be needed.
God alone possesses infinite understanding. Every created mind, however magnificent, is finite because it is created. A creature can think and reason, but it can also reach a wrong conclusion because it can never see everything that God sees or understand every consequence as He understands it. The answer to that limitation has always been trust. We do not need to know everything because God does. Our security lies in knowing Him, trusting Him and accepting His judgment above our own.
Eve makes this wonderfully clear because Scripture specifically tells us that she was deceived. Paul says that “the woman being deceived, fell into transgression” (1 Timothy 2:14). Eve was innocent when the serpent approached her. She had no history of sin and no inherited sinful nature, yet she possessed a finite human mind, and a hostile spiritual intelligence deliberately set about deceiving her. The serpent questioned what God had said, contradicted His warning and offered Eve another explanation. She listened, considered what she had been told, looked at the tree and reached the wrong conclusion. She ate.
This is enormously important because Eve was not a wicked woman looking for an opportunity to rebel against her heavenly Father. She was deceived. She made a wrong decision, and that decision took her outside the perfect will of God. It shows us that sin and conscious rebellion are not necessarily the same thing. A finite human being can misunderstand, be deceived, weigh competing considerations wrongly or reach a conclusion which seems reasonable from within the limits of human understanding and yet is not God’s conclusion. God sees the whole field. We never do.
Adam presents us with something different because Scripture tells us that he was not deceived. My own understanding, which I have explored more fully elsewhere in my book Adam at The Threshold of Death, is that Adam found himself confronted by an appalling choice after Eve had eaten. The woman whom God had given him, whom he had recognised as “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,” had fallen. I believe Adam chose to remain with her and share whatever was going to happen to her. I have described this as making the wrong decision for all the right reasons. His motives could not alter the will of God, and through his disobedience sin entered the world, and death through sin. Yet Adam again shows us that a human being can make a choice outside God’s perfect will without beginning from a desire to rebel against Him.
And that raises a fascinating question. What if Adam and Eve had made the other choice? Suppose Eve had not been deceived and humanity had continued without the Fall occurring at that moment. Children would have been born, followed by grandchildren and great-grandchildren, until eventually millions and billions of genuinely free human beings were making countless genuine decisions. Every one of them would still have possessed a finite mind. Somewhere, at some time, somebody would have made a decision which fell outside the perfect will of God. I have come to believe that this was inevitable.
The benchmark is God Himself. His understanding is infinite, His righteousness perfect and His judgment embraces everything. A finite mind can reason carefully and still get something wrong. It can act from love and still choose wrongly. Even an unfallen mind must surely be vulnerable to this. Across an indefinitely continuing human race, exercising genuine freedom through countless circumstances and choices, human judgment would eventually, and I suspect sooner rather than later, fall short of the perfect judgment of God. Once that judgment became an action outside His perfect will, sin would exist and redemption would be needed.
Genesis then takes us almost immediately to Cain and Abel and shows us something different again. Hebrews tells us that Abel came to God by faith and offered a better sacrifice. Cain also brought an offering, but when God did not regard it as He regarded Abel’s, Cain became angry. God spoke to him, corrected him and warned him that sin was lying at the door. Cain was given the opportunity to accept God’s judgment above his own. But he refused.
Here we begin to see the difference between error and rebellion. A finite creature can reach a wrong conclusion, but when God corrects that conclusion another question arises. Will the creature accept that God knows better, or will he insist upon his own judgment? Humility says, “You are God and I am not. If You say I am wrong, then I am wrong.” Pride says, “I still think I am right.” Cain allowed his anger to harden until he murdered his brother.
This also gives us a fascinating glimpse into something which had already happened within the spiritual creation. Scripture presents Lucifer as an extraordinary created being, the anointed cherub, beautiful and exalted in the position God had given him, yet at some point pride arose within him and he set his will against the will of his Creator. We are not told what led up to that moment, and Cain makes me wonder whether God has deliberately given us a pattern by which we can begin to understand it. Cain had formed his own judgment about what was right, and when God corrected him he could have accepted that correction and changed his course. Instead, his anger and wounded pride hardened into rebellion. Could something similar have happened with Lucifer? As a created being with a genuine mind and will, he too could think, reason and form judgments of his own. I wonder whether he came to believe that his own ideas were right and, when God corrected him, resented the correction rather than accepting the infinite wisdom of his Creator. Pride would then have transformed disagreement into resistance, until the magnificent creature whom God had made began to exalt himself and desire to be like the Most High. He was even able to draw other spiritual beings into his rebellion, something we see replicated throughout human history when a proud and persuasive leader convinces others to share his grievance and follow him. Scripture does not give us Lucifer’s story in this detail, so I offer this as a deduction rather than something expressly revealed. But Cain may have been placed before us so early in Genesis partly to show us how a created will can travel that terrible road. A creature thinks he is right, resents being corrected by God, allows pride to take possession of his thinking and eventually prefers his own will to God’s. Seen in that light, the otherwise extraordinary question of why an angel would ever rebel against his Creator begins, at least for me, to make much more sense.
And yet all of this remained within the sovereignty of God. Human freedom exists because God sovereignly chose that it should exist. It is genuine freedom, but it never becomes sovereign. Joseph understood this when he looked back upon what his brothers had done and said, “You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20). His brothers made genuine choices and intended genuine evil, while God worked through the same history to accomplish His purpose.
At the Cross we see this on an altogether greater scale. Human beings made their decisions, the hostile spiritual powers pursued their purposes, and Satan sought to destroy the Son of God. Yet the Cross towards which all that wickedness and hostility converged became the very place where Christ “disarmed principalities and powers” and triumphed over them. The rebellious kingdom brought all its strength against Jesus and arrived at the place where its defeat had already been prepared.
And now we can go back beyond Eden, because this is where the whole thing becomes breathtaking. Paul tells us that God chose us in Christ “before the foundation of the world” and that His purpose was our adoption as His children through Jesus Christ. Peter speaks of the precious blood of Christ, “as of a lamb without blemish and without spot,” and tells us that Christ was foreordained “before the foundation of the world.” Before Adam had drawn his first breath, before Eve had heard the serpent’s voice and before Cain had become angry with Abel, the Lamb was already in the purpose of God.
God knew what He was doing when He chose to create personal beings with genuine minds and wills. He knew the difference between His infinite understanding and every finite mind He would create. He knew that created beings could make wrong judgments and wrong choices, and that pride could harden a created will into rebellion. He knew the spiritual conflict which would follow, the suffering sin would bring and the price His own righteousness required.
And still He created us.
God wanted a human family who could know Him, trust Him, respond to Him and love Him, children who would one day cry, “Abba, Father.” He gave us the extraordinary dignity of genuine thought and choice, knowing before the foundation of the world what that gift would cost. The eternal Word through whom everything had been created would Himself become flesh and bear that cost.
Calvary happened at one moment in human history, but the Lamb belongs to eternity. Peter takes us backwards and shows us Christ foreordained before the foundation of the world. John then takes us forward into heaven and sees “a Lamb as though it had been slain” standing in the midst of the throne. The sacrifice has been accomplished, yet the Lamb remains the Lamb who was slain. Heaven worships Him because He was slain and has redeemed His people to God by His blood.
So the Bible gives us an extraordinary sweep. Before creation, the Lamb is already within the purpose of God. At the centre of human history stands the Cross. And in eternity, upon the throne, stands the Lamb who was slain.
I used to ask, “Why did God create humanity when He knew Adam was going to sin?” I now think that question begins much too late. God knew what finite understanding meant. He knew what freedom meant. He knew the possibility of error, the danger of pride and the terrible reality of rebellion. He knew the Fall, the suffering and the Cross. Yet He also knew the family who would finally stand before Him, redeemed and restored in Christ.
And He wanted that family.
Before humanity ever sinned, the answer was already in the heart of God. The freedom was ours, and the cost was His.
I have explored this argument more fully, including Cain, Lucifer and the relationship between human freedom and God’s sovereignty, in the longer version of The Cross Was Always Going to Be Needed on my Substack, The Way of Truth.