The Free Will Defense

Many have argued along these lines that creatures could not love God fully without making the free choice to love him, and that God gave them this freedom and let them walk on their own feet in the hope that they would embrace him. Some have said that this constituted a necessary risk on God’s part, a risk that creatures would reject God. I agree that free will is necessary if we are to love God fully – the freedom to walk on our own two feet, without God’s predetermining guidance, is an essential part of what it means to be human.* However, I vehemently disagree with the idea that God took a risk in giving free will. Rather, God left room for free will among his creatures, both humans and higher beings such as Satan, knowing exactly and exhaustively what would happen, and approving of each event for the greater purpose it would serve. In Lewis’ words, “From a world of free creatures, even though they fell, He could work out (and this is the reascent) a deeper happiness and a fuller splendour than any world of automata would admit” (Miracles, ch. 14, see also Mere Christianity p. 52). When claiming that evil resulted from free will, let us not be content to say no more than that free will was necessary for love. It was necessary for so much more – not just the creature’s love for God, but a greater revelation of God’s love to the creatures, a more joy-filled end to the story, and a more perfect and glorious reality in every way.

*In Perelandra, the second book in his “Ransom Trilogy,” C. S. Lewis eloquently conveys the wonder of free will and the gift to the creature of stepping out of the guidance of divine predeterminism and walking on its own feet, as it were, and thus becoming more fully what God intended.

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Sin and Free Will

Does this mean the blood of Christ is on the Father’s hands, and not ours? No. As we have seen, in ordaining that creatures sin, God does not approve of sin, nor can he himself be accused of sinning. Edwards compares God to the sun, and sin or evil to darkness. Darkness is what happens when the light and heat of the sun does not reach a place – for some reason it is blocked off. Similarly, “sin is not the fruit of any positive agency or influence of the most High, but on the contrary, arises from the withholding of his action and energy, and under certain circumstances, necessarily follows on the want of his influence” (Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will). Evil is everything that is not of God – “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). Evil is the negation of God – it is what happens when he holds back the fullness of his Being and allows creation to run its own course, and creatures to make their own free choices. Thus, the blood of Christ is still on each person’s hands (because each person chose freely to sin), and on the hands of the whole of humanity.

There may still be some tension between the predestination of the cross and the giving of free will. It is almost as if there was a risk that creation would not have fallen. I am inclined to think that the fall was inevitable – not specifically the fall of man, but the fall of creation in general, going back ultimately to the fall of Satan, which introduced evil into creation in the first place. For some thoughts on how this could be consistent with a fall resulting from free choices, see my post on “The Fall.” However, it is worth observing that speculation about what “would have happened” is ultimately futile – we are talking about a non-reality, thinking about things that never happened and thus do not exist in any sense at all (cf. C. S. Lewis, The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, The Problem of Pain p. 598).

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The Cross Predestined

[Completely unrelated note: Today is March 25, Tolkien Reading Day, and the day the one ring was destroyed! Go treat yourself to some Tolkien literature today.]

This distinction between God’s approval of a thing morally, or in and of itself, and God’s approval of a thing with respect to the difference it makes in the whole of reality is helpful for understanding verses in Scripture which describe God as ordaining or planning for evil events, and in particular the cross, to take place:

“For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself may be liberated from its bondage to decay.” – Romans 8:20-21

“Truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the people of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.” – Acts 4:27-28

Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God.” – Acts 2:23

“It was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer.” – Isaiah 53:10

“No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again.” – Jesus, John 10:18

“…you were redeemed…with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. He was chosen before the creation of the world.” – 1 Peter 1:18-20

These and other verses show together that God had foreknown and planned evil events (Genesis 50:20, Revelation 17:17, Job 2:10, Amos 3:6, Lamentations 3:37-38) and especially the cross (Revelation 13:8, 2 Timothy 1:9, Matthew 21:42, 27:9-10; John 13:18, 15:25, 19:34-37) from the beginning of time.* Many of these verses point to the cross as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies, which were, of course, designed ultimately by God. As a man, Jesus also knew the purpose for which he came to earth (Matthew 12:40, 16:21, 17:23, 20:17-19,28, 26:61; Mark 8:31, 9:31, 10:33-34; Luke 9:22, 18:33; John 2:19). Throughout all of redemptive history, God had foreseen and ordained what was to come – it was the central event in his grand plan. “God saw the crucifixion in the act of creating the first nebula” (C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, ch. 6). It was the most horrible sin ever committed, but it was predestined for a redemption and a joy so unimaginably great that it would make even the cross of Christ worth it – preferable, in Edwards’ words, “with respect to the universality of things.”

*I have been assuming and implying (maybe even saying) this all along, but I (re)state here explicitly God’s sovereignty over history in accomplishing his purposes, without which one could not argue, as I do, that this is the best of all possible realities.

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Jonathan Edwards on the Two “Wills” of God

In a sense, God must approve of everything that exists. If God has exhaustive knowledge of reality and has power to do whatever he wants, and if everything he brings into existence is there for a purpose, then God must think the existence of this reality better than that of any other logically possible reality, and he must approve of the difference made by the existence of each element in this reality. September 11, cancer, the holocaust, the murder of Jesus Christ – all these, God allows purposefully.

In order to understand how this could be – how a good God could possibly tolerate the existence of evil, and in particular the murder of his Son – let us turn to the writings of Jonathan Edwards. Edwards has, like many other theologians, described God as having two “wills.” God’s “will of command” is his will in the sense of what he commands morally or those things he approves of in and of themselves. When his moral standard is broken he is angered, and when his creatures find joy in him, he is glad. These are simple truths.

But Edwards describes a second ‘will’ of God. He says, “his will of decree is his inclination to a thing not as to that thing absolutely and simply, but with reference to the universality of things, that have been, are or shall be. So God, though he hates a thing as it is simply, may incline to it with reference to the universality of things… So, though he has no inclination to a creature’s misery, considered absolutely, yet he may will it, for the greater promotion of happiness in this universality…For all must own, that God sometimes wills not to hinder the breach of his own commands, because he does not in fact hinder it” (Jonathan Edwards, “Concerning the Divine Decrees”).* This is similar to Edwards’s description of two “lenses” through which God observes reality: through the narrow lens he condemns evil and sin in and of themselves, but through the wide lens he sees them (as passing and defeated realities) in relation to all reality. Through the wide lens God sees each component of reality as a contribution to the whole, the great tapestry or story or symphony. In the words of A. W. Tozer, God’s deep wisdom sees “each in proper relation to all.”

*How, one might wonder, can God simultaneously hate evil and rejoice in the difference its existence makes? Here we must remember our limited state as finite creatures. God transcends not only time, but all that he has created. One would only expect his mental and emotional life to be on an incomparably higher level of existence than that of human emotions or thoughts (see John Piper, The Pleasures of God, p. 72, “The Infinitely Complex Emotional Life of God”). Using C. S. Lewis’ comparison, we can understand God no more than people in a two-dimensional world could comprehend a cube. But this is only an analogy to physical spacetime dimensions. God transcends ALL – all things that exist, even dimensions themselves! We would be foolish to think we can come close to comprehending the mind of God.

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God’s Eucatastrophe

Here in the cross of Christ, and in his resurrection on the third day, we find exactly such an event in history as Tolkien describes as necessary for any complete fairy-story (see “The Eucatastrophe”). The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the Great Eucatastrophe, that central event in God’s Story – in the real world – that is both rooted in the character of God and reflected in the stories we tell (see “Tolkien on Stories and Sub-creation”). In Christ’s victory on the cross we find a reality that explains our confident intuitive hope that good will triumph over evil. It may also be that we will find in what is accomplished through the cross a greater redemptive purpose for evil. That is the question to which I will now turn: What is the final and ultimate end or goal that this victory achieves and for which evil was ordained in the first place? Does it make all the evil and suffering through the ages worth it in the end because of what is accomplished through evil? To do answer these questions, let’s take a step back and look at the wider scope of redemptive history, and of reality in general.

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The Passion of the Christ

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C. S. Lewis and John Piper on Death Defeating Death

Consider further the beauty of paradox in God’s way of defeating death through death:

“On the one hand Death is the triumph of Satan, the punishment of the Fall, and the last enemy. Christ shed tears at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in Gethsemane: the Life of Lives that was in Him detested this penal obscenity not less than we do, but more. On the other hand, only he who loses his life will save it. We are baptized into the death of Christ, and it is the remedy for the Fall. Death…is Satan’s great weapon and also God’s great weapon: it is holy and unholy; our supreme disgrace and our only hope; the thing Christ came to conquer and the means by which he conquered.” – C. S. Lewis, Miracles, ch. 14*

“In a general way it is not difficult to understand how the same thing can be a masterstroke on the part of one combatant and also the very means whereby the superior combatant defeats him. Every good general, every good chessplayer, takes what is precisely the strong point of his opponent’s plan and makes it the pivot of his own plan. Take that castle of mine if you insist…For now I move thus…and thus…and it is mate in three moves. Something like this must be supposed to have happened about death.” – C. S. Lewis, Miracles, ch. 14

“He made evil serve the overcoming of evil. He made evil commit suicide in doing its worst evil…In the death of Christ, the powers of darkness did their best to destroy the glory of the Son of God. This is the apex of evil. But instead they found themselves quoting the script of ancient prophecy and acting the part assigned by God. Precisely in putting Christ to death, they put his glory on display – the very glory that they aimed to destroy. The apex of evil achieved the apex of the glory of Christ.” – John Piper, Spectacular Sins and Their Global Purpose for the Glory of Christ, p. 12

“It was by the Evil One himself that he brought us out…Little did that dark mind know the errand on which he really came to Perelandra!” – C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, p. 209

*Lewis also writes, “Our enemy…becomes our servant: bodily Death, the monster, becomes blessed spiritual Death to self,” which is new life in Christ.

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Death Destroyed by Death, Death is Swallowed up in Victory (Romans 3:23, 1 Corinthians 15:54-56)

“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” – 1 Corinthians 15:26

“I am the resurrection and the life.” – Jesus, John 11:25

We saw earlier how the wages of sin were paid, and the sin that divided man from God overcome. Paul writes that “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 3:23; sin is the just effect of man’s original sin) and that “the sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law” (1 Corinthians 15:56). That is, since death is the effect of sin, death depends on sin for its power. So when Christ’s death paid the full and final price for sins and satisfied the demands of the law (see “Atonement,” Hebrews 10:12, 9:15), he stripped death of its sting – it’s as if Christ ripped Death’s fang’s out in the act of dying (Colossians 2:15). Death was destroyed by death. We arrive at this beautiful paradox simply by combining Paul’s two powerful statements, just cited. Death couldn’t handle Christ – the evil one couldn’t overcome God’s deeper wisdom and greater power (1 Corinthians 1:23-24) to bring victory out of the cross.

“‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’ ‘O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?’ The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” – 1 Corinthians 15:54-55

“God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.” – Acts 2:24

“And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.” – Colossians 2:15

“…Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” – Hebrews 12:2

And thus it was that on the third day Jesus Christ the Son of God rose from the dead, bursting forth in triumph and glory and shining his light on all creation. The Son has risen, and he rose because his death had defeated Death. This is the power behind the resurrection which compelled the apostle Paul (Ephesians 1:19-20, Philippians 3:10), and it is rooted ultimately in God’s character, in his sacrificial love and commitment to justice and to his own holiness. With infinite wisdom God designed the cross, revealed himself more than he could have any other way, atoned for our sin, defeated death, and destroyed evil finally and completely. It is finished. God has suffered. The price has been paid. Death is defeated. The Son has risen.

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A Deeper Wisdom

But God is not mystified by the darkness as the Enemy is by the light; he ordained it and knows its inevitable failure. Jesus knew what he was doing, and he knew he would rise. As the Maker of all things and Author of all reality, God has and always had complete knowledge of and sovereignty over creation. It is because of who he is, then, that God retained the upper hand in the Great Battle between himself and the evil one. The Victory of God was won because of the absolute supremacy of God – he is before all things and underneath all things and above all things and the end of all things. No evil design or plot of darkness can elude his knowledge or outmatch his wisdom – he knows and sees all. Before the foundation of the universe he knew Satan’s every move – in the wilderness, in Gethsemane, at the cross.¹ Satan is but a creature, and a creature that fell out of touch with reality – his doom was sealed from the beginning.² God’s love and justice are deeper and older and stronger than any weapon of evil. His wisdom is deep and eternal, original and infinite, and his ways are true and foundational to reality.

“And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more beautiful, which he himself hath not imagined.” – J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

“It was by the Evil One himself that he brought us out…Little did that dark mind know the errand on which he really came to Perelandra!” – C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, p. 209

¹ Satan’s success in tempting Eve to sin became an important element in God’s redemptive plan, and, as John Piper explains in Spectacular Sins, his actions throughout redemptive history were woven into God’s plan. It seems that behind all Satan’s actions was a blindness and inability to understand God’s ways – he was unknowingly acting the part God had purposed for him.

² One might object that God’s victory was over a weak opponent and therefore a cheap and petty victory. First, this kind of reasoning will not accept any sort of “divine victory” because no opponent could possibly compare to God. That seems a bit strict as far as standards for victory over evil go. Must God’s victory be measured by the strength and skill of the opponent? I think not. When it is God’s victory that is being discussed, a better standard is the level of good achieved by the victory. The victory is great not because Satan was ever a real danger or threat to God (as if God worried that he might lose) but because it achieved a deeper and greater unveiling of God’s wisdom and power. Also, the victory is measured in part by the sacrifice made, and the sacrifice of the cross was more costly than we can imagine. That God endured and overcame the cross of all things is surely an incomparable victory.

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The Ruin of Satan

“We have learned of evil, though not as the Evil One wished us to learn. We have learned better than that, and know it more, for it is waking that understands sleep and not sleep that understands waking. There is an ignorance of evil that comes from being young: there is a darker ignorance that comes from doing it.” – C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, p. 209

This ignorance is the very nature of evil, and the inevitable fate of those who choose evil. God is the Creator of all things – it is in Him that truth is defined and according to his ways and character that all reality is structured. Thus, in rejecting and perverting God’s light, Satan gave himself over to darkness and blindness and foolishness, cut himself off from ultimate reality, and lost the truth. In defying the source of all reality, who imbues all things with his qualities (Romans 1:20), Satan lost touch with reality. I would guess that Satan lost something of his former knowledge of God – God’s nature and ways.

For these reasons, I imagine that Satan experienced some sort of confused glee at the cross. He knew he had been unable to deter Christ from wherever he was going, and yet what God was doing seemed to make no sense. Perhaps when Satan “entered into Judas Iscariot” (Luke 22:3), he had reverted to reveling in the pleasure of seeing God suffer. Perhaps when the Son cried out in seeming despair (see Lewis, Perelandra, p. 153), it may even have appeared to him that his victory was at hand, despite the fact that God’s plan was also apparently going forward unhindered.

But what may have appeared senseless or ridiculous or even suicidal to the dark mind was rooted in the greatest and deepest divine truths. Love, God’s love, is all-inclusive, desiring and valuing the good of others. Love gives – God gave himself for us. It was this strange sacrificial “love,” I imagine, that baffled the Enemy (see my posts on “The Love of God”). And perhaps the Enemy was no less baffled by God’s firm commitment to justice – that is, by the things God did to execute justice. Paradoxically, Satan’s undoing, and the destruction of death, was the result of God’s insistence on dying himself in order to pay the just wages of sin (Romans 3:23). The actions of God, being determined by both his love and justice – indeed, by all of his divine qualities – could only have been perplexing and mystifying to an adversary who knew no love for others and had no commitment to justice, righteousness, and holiness. The Enemy’s ignorance put him “out of reckoning” in his match against God.

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A Mind in Darkness

Satan was clearly aware that God was up to something in Christ, and that he had to stop Jesus from going through with his plan. But how much did Satan really know of God’s plans. Did his mind penetrate the mysterious victory God planned, with all its intricacies and beauties? I think not, and to show why I turn to the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.

In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien portrays Sauron, the Dark Lord, as one wholly corrupted by desire for power and consumed with himself and his own glory. In the words of Gandalf, “the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it. If we seek this, we shall put him out of reckoning” (The Fellowship of the Rings 322, see also The Two Towers 127). Noble themes such as humility and sacrificial love are beyond the comprehension of the Dark Lord. In giving himself over to darkness, he blinded himself to the light of Eru, the One. In the end, this twisted and narrowed vision of reality, where the self is at the center, would lead to his ruin and destruction. Evil is confused by the ways of good – it cannot understand, and it cannot overcome (John 1:5).

C. S. Lewis makes a very similar point in a number of books. In The Screwtape Letters, he vividly portrays Screwtape the demon’s inability to understand God’s ways:

“All his talk about Love must be a disguise for something else – He must have some real motive for creating them and taking so much trouble about them…This very problem was a chief cause of Our Father’s quarrel with the Enemy. When…the Enemy freely confessed that he foresaw a certain episode about a cross, Our Father… implored the Enemy to lay His cards on the table, and gave Him every opportunity. He admitted that he felt a real anxiety to know the secret; the Enemy replied ‘I wish with all my heart that you did.’…[I]f ever we came to understand what He means by love, the war would be over and we should re-enter Heaven. And there lies the great task. We know that he cannot really love: nobody can: it doesn’t make sense. If we could only find out what he is really up to! Hypothesis after hypothesis has been tried, and still we can’t find out.” – The Screwtape Letters, ch. 19

And in Perelandra, he describes Satan’s fall from glory into a ruinous self-centered nothingness:

“…on the surface, great designs and an antagonism to heaven which involved the fate of world; but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?” – Perelandra, p. 123

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