Hopwin wrote:
Diamondeye wrote:
The reason they need it is because they don't know they're following the plan; they're doing it of their own volition. One could argue that they aren't because God is deciding that they will, but nothing about God's plan to send Jesus implies that he necessarily had planned to send Him at any particular time. Rather, He sent Jesus at the time when He knew His plan would be fulfilled
But doesn't that raise the question of whether or not sin is part of His plan? Or more troubling that sinning sometimes
is His will? In which case
is it even sin at all...? ugh. This is why I stopped thinking about this question years ago.
Yes, and quite frankly, we simply can't understand God's internal mechanics (for lack of a better term) well enough to really answer this. The best answer we can come up with in human terms is that the
possibility of sin is part of the plan, but the sins themselves are not. In other words, people have to be allowed to sin in order to have a meaningful choice to love God and not sin, but that does not mean that any of them choosing to sin was ever part of the plan. Rather, that was what the plan was formulated to deal with. In theory, every single person who ever lived
could have elected not to sin.