CHANCE & DESIGN

                                                                 Chance & Design

With God nothing is left to chance. All is by design. God’s sovereignty over His creation means that everything is under His control. There is great comfort in knowing that even seemingly random things, like a sparrow or a hair from our heads do not fall to the ground outside of His attention. Yes, God designed it that way.

This, of course, inevitably brings up the questions of man’s freewill and the origin of evil. Very much related, both are by design. However, one must quickly add that this is not to say that God is the author of evil. Yes, ultimately, evil would not exist (with its attendant suffering) if the eternal God had not created His creation and mankind. But, ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’ Genesis 1:1.

God’s eternal plan to give His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, a people, and a kingdom in which only righteousness dwells, was planned in the Godhead. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are bringing it to pass. The Fall of angels and mankind was part of that plan.

Adam and Eve had freewill while being tempted by an already fallen Satan. As Man’s representative, Adam exercised his freewill to side with Satan against God. After the Fall he still had a freewill. However, post-Fall he now had something he did not have pre-Fall: a sinful nature. The Bible says that the wages of sin is death. We all die because we are sinners. We sin because, like Adam, we have a fallen or sinful nature.

The Fall of Man through Adam was part of God’s grand design. God had created Adam with a good nature, i.e., holy, righteous, and with a true knowledge of God. However, though forewarned of the consequences, Adam wanted to be like God knowing good and evil, i.e., determining good and evil by his own standards. The forbidden fruit was an outward test for Adam on probation. By Adam eating the forbidden fruit, mankind has set itself up as God. The great evil is that Man would rather suffer in this life, die, and go to Hell, than have God rule over him!

Immediately upon Adam’s (and mankind’s) Fall, God began to reveal His abhorrence of sin and evil and His remedy to deal with it. Christ is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8). One has only to trace the genealogy of Jesus’s humanity from Adam to His birth to see that it was by design. His ancestors went through many narrow escapes as the Serpent and his seed tried to destroy the Seed of the woman (Gen. 3:15). ‘But when the fulness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons’ Galatians 4:4-5. To be born under the law is to be born under the condemnation of the law. But not Jesus. Unlike us, the law showed Him to be righteous and perfect in every way, and as such, the perfect Redeemer. Jay Adams says, ‘The cross was not merely an act of compassion and mercy directed toward mankind; it was a cosmic event in which God demonstrated who and what He is before all the universe.’

God has left nothing to chance, past, present, or future. Christians have a glorious future to look forward to with Him on the new earth because He has designed it that way. Therefore, though we may miss it, every little thing is significant to God. So, call on Jesus. Why? Because, ‘We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God, who are called according to his purpose’ Romans 8:28.