GOOD REALIZED
ONLY BY MEANS OF EVIL
by D. Buchanan

God's purpose is to reveal Himself to His creatures as the God of all grace, causing them thereby to understand and to appreciate His goodness and also to become partakers of the same. In keeping with this purpose, God's first and only plan was based on redemption. To teach that God had a previous plan dependent for its fulfillment on Adam's faithfulness and that redemption was introduced only when it became a necessity because of Adam's sin, is to teach what is contrary to truth; a delusion reflecting on the character of God. Never will we understand God's ways until delivered from this delusion's power. Since God is God, He does not attempt and fail and try again. God does not need to try things out. He knows, and His omnipotence works all things after the counsel of His own will (Eph.1:11). He would make Himself known and redemption is the means by which the God of all grace reveals Himself. No other plan would fit; nor had He another. His Lamb was slain from the disruption of the world. Yet man was made in innocence, and the innocent need no redemption.

So it is that in planning, before creation, to redeem man, God necessarily reckoned on man's coming to where he would need redemption. Fully aware that Adam, if forbidden to eat, would eat, God forbade him not in the hope that he would obey, but in order that when he did eat he would be guilty and in need of salvation. Moreover, by partaking in disobedience, man became selfwilled, or evil inclined, and so doubly in need of deliverance, which God had prepared for him before creation but which was applicable only after man had come to be in need. This need was the need of being dealt with, not in righteousness simply, but in goodness. It is goodness that will make a man die for you. Scarcely for a righteous man will one die, yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die, but God commendeth not His righteousness, but that which is beyond righteousness. God commendeth His love, His grace, His goodness, to us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.