And what I am saying is there is a better way to look at God's plan (and the whole of scripture) than to believe "
God had the fall take place." It begins with a simple but very important change in the premise of God having a pln.
God has a plan for creating creation.
vs
God has a plan for the fall.
God has a plan for all of creation, not just the fall. God has a plan for all of creation and the fall is simply one very small event in the MUCH larger creation, a single event in history, a single event that is not the defining moment of creation or its history. To start with, or to specify "
the fall" is to already have made a mistake.
I'll provide two comparative examples to better clarify what I just said. The first example has to do with a recurring conversation I used to have with a troll in another forum. He liked to define the entire Bible and the entire history of God's relationship with his people by the covenant God made with Abraham in Genesis 17. No matter how many times I tried to get the point across to him he could never accept the premise starting seventeen chapters into the story of the Bible was NOT starting from the beginning. He could not or would not begin with the beginning. I tried to use the analogy of picking up any novel and starting with the seventeenth chapter and how that would skew the reader's understanding of the entire novel. He refused to accept the premise. The second example is just the opposite. I am currently reading a book discussing God's covenants from a historical-redemptive hermeneutic that makes a very similar observation, commenting on how many do start with Abraham but in doing so entirely miss all the redemptive aspects and all the covenant aspects of the Bible that precede Abraham and are found referenced later - thousands of years later in the New Testament.
The point is this: it a huge mistake to define "God's plan" by the "fall." You, GeneZ seem to grasp this. At least it appears that way reading the posts. However, the posts do not read very consistent because the fall is continuously brought up as a defining feature of the plan - so much so that God had the fall take place. God did certainly allow the fall to take place but if the fall is seen as an event for which God has to have a specific particular dedicated plan, then that immediately returns us (you and me) to the point I broached earlier:
God cannot be made the cause of sin.
That is, simply put, bad theology. It is bad theology because it has the righteous God making unrighteousness. It has The Law Maker making lawlessness. It has the God who made flesh good, unashamed, and sinless changing His mind to make the same flesh evil, shameful, and sinful. These are contradictions at a presuppositional level.
And when I ask what the various comments have to do with God's plan for the fall the response is to either tell me I'm ignorant and you're know more than everyone else, or non sequiturs like,
Well, what if God did not
have the fall take place?
Yeah. What if God did not have the fall take place? What if the fall is one of countless events that take place every single day, day in and day out that have absolutely no effect whatsoever on the plan of God that preceded the fall? What if God, knowing the fall was going to occur, shrugged His almighty shoulders and said, "
Meh, already got it taken care of; it's not a thing." What if humanity has wasted huge amounts of time, energy, pen, ink, paper, and cyberspace on an event that is nowhere near central to the BOTH the whole of scripture and
God's plan for creation? What if starting with the fall is a huge mistake? What if the plan is Jesus and not the fall? What if Jesus was coming whether or not the fall ever happened?
Have you got any room in your thinking for any of those premises?