6f) A Summary of this Plan of Salvation?
To summarize my model, I surmised that, God has been thinking forever and has had time to create many worlds. I believe they all have more than the 3 dimensions we know of. All His created angelic beings have free will, but there is a "battle" ongoing now, where the question of free will is center stage. If there is free will then there must be an alternative. Now, I’ve suggested that being naïve the “perfect” angelic beings would not understand good and evil well enough to always make good choices. I suggested that they like our own children, would eventually make bad choices and sin would arise. As such, I’m suggesting that there is a default mechanism available whereby sin would arise without any cognitive decision in particular. The question becomes this: What bad choices could they have made, when everything was perfect to begin with? Here’s where I get into pondering the question of “free will”.
As I a rocket scientist and father of a teenager I believe that rational angels would always ponder this question, “What would happen if anyone decided to choose an alternative that flew in the face of what their parent, God, was advocating?” Whom or what else would they trust in? One of them thought up an alternative - you could trust in yourself and perhaps you could get anything you want when you want it without waiting on God. This curiosity could possibly lead the angels into making bad choices.
There is another related question, "How can I be a free agent if God knows everything I'm going to do in advance? Since I am merely a thought of His, can I think up anything independent of Him?". If God says I'm a free agent, is that enough to make it real? Can God elect to not control me, ie to allow me to make my own choices? The only way I can know if this is possible is to do something that God would not want me to do. What's the only thing that God does not want His created beings to do? Separate themselves from Him! This is the essence of evil. This is also death, because God is our source of life.
There is always a choice to trust in God or not, but can we exist separated from the Thinker? Is it necessarily true that as we drift away from the Thinker we will tend to self-destruct. Can't we just distance ourselves a wee bit, and still survive? Lucifer, His top angel, may have needed to see if he could survive alone, in order to assure himself that he was a free agent. This would cause him to feel that he must distance himself from God to exhibit his free will. God's position would be that He only wanted what was best for His creatures, yet He would always honor their free will to choose alternates in their pursuit of happiness. Still, they must convince themselves that they do not need to push away from God to know they have free will. He contended that distancing themselves from Him even a wee bit, would lead to complete separation and self-destruction eventually. (This is because we can only push towards some substitute for God, which cannot give us Everlasting Life at all.)
So I can see some logical mechanisms to explain the origin of sin in that perfect angelic universe. I suggested that God inevitably had to set up a demonstration for all the angels to witness, which would answer these questions and provide a work-around for these inherent reasons for sin to arise.
Once sin arose, Lucifer continued to exist as he isolated himself from God, so it may have appeared to other angels that he was clearly more free than they. Many angels either out of naiveté or perhaps just curiosity, followed this reasoning and drifted away from pure trust in God. God said it would not work in the long run, even though it may have appeared to work in the near-term. The initial decisions were not so dramatic. They didn't need to choose overt separation from God, but merely to choose naively or to choose to try out the alternative lifestyle that rejected God. Kids will make these choices routinely. It's a matter of finding something other than God to put our trust in.
Temptation is like this even now. One decision leads to another and then another until there is no room in heaven for you. The unforgivable sin is to tell God not to intervene in your life. By that decision, you choose to isolate yourself completely from God (ie you blaspheme against the Holy Spirit of God - His thoughts). You want God to stop thinking about you. If/when He does stop thinking about you, you are dead; you cannot exist. Your trust in any alternative is only going to buy you temporary gratification, not eternal life. Death awaits.
Some interpret the Bible to say that Pride was the cause of Lucifer's downfall, so therefore it was pride that introduced sin for the first time. They quote Ezekiel that Lucifer was perfect in every way until iniquity was found in him. I suggest that Pride was eventually found in Lucifer, but here we find no explanation for the original cause of this iniquity. How could such destructive pride develop in a perfect being in a perfect world? Clearly, this is telling us that there was some other reason that originally introduced sin, so that sinful pride could develop. I believe that their basic naiveté coupled with the free will question were the original cause of sin arising. That then led to the sins of pride mentioned in the biblical account.
I would say that every naïve being is eventually going to make some bad choices even without having a logical reason to do so. So, there is a basic need for God to educate His created beings before the bad choices are made. Then, too, some beings like us scientists are driven to look for explanations and to take risks attempting to understand the world around us. We are then more likely to get into problems that the less curious or adventurous would miss.
Nevertheless, sin arises and keeps arising on an individual level.
The perception may have been that God was not fair and that there really was no choice, so that free will was a sham. Perhaps the only one with free will is the Thinker Himself. God knew that He could elect to not intervene and that His created beings could be allowed to have a choice. They could choose among all kinds of things, but the only thing He didn't want them to choose was to attempt to separate themselves from Him, because He knew that would lead to their death. Yet, like a father, God wanted them to conclude this themselves and elect of their own free will to avoid choices that seek to separate them from Him even a wee bit. God's point was that decisions for the temporary gratification at the expense of long-term gratification would lead to an ever-degrading system that would self-destruct eventually.
Everlasting life, requires trust in the Thinker to keep thinking up new meaning and new material to work with. Forever is too long for created beings to exist within their own means. They'll run out of ideas and get bored with happiness. The Thinker alone can introduce whatever is necessary for the everlasting happiness we all crave.
God knew these questions must be answered by allowing the alternate choice to play itself out completely. The stage is set for the human drama. Let's make a "movie" about free will for all the universe to see. We'll need to project it on the wall of this extra-dimensional universe for all of you to see, so it can't have as many dimensions. Just as a 2D movie is projected for a 3D audience, our 3D Universe is being projected for the extra-dimensional universe. The consequences of our choices are being observed and assessed by all the created beings.
Read Rev 4 - 6, where John is carried up into heaven, ie this angelic universe. He watches the drama unfold before a live audience, "the hosts of heaven". We and our entire 3D universe are on the stage. The Scroll (Rev 5:1) is the script. The hosts of heaven watch as we choose death in wee steps, leading to a deteriorating world. God steps into our world as a human Himself, to rectify the situation and to create a means by which we actors, who are proving His point, can continue to live anyway. Encouraged by the fallen angels and our own deteriorating character, we kill our own Creator when given the chance, then proceed to self-destruct completely. The wages of sin are to get what we ask for, ie death. But God/Christ as a human will die for us and God will then think Himself into the angelic universe as a glorified being like those in the audience.
Humans were set up to fall in
this way to prove the points to the angelic beings. God must be fair and
loving, so from our beginning He must institute the "escape clause"
that allows us to be saved in the end. Even though we must die to prove the
points, God can give us everlasting life after that on one condition. That
condition is going to be: We must remake the choice and to choose life once the
debt is paid. For those who still choose death, the
12 August 2001, Updated Sept 7, 2004
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