Saturday, May 20, 2017

Why Didn't God Stop Satan?

I heard my niece repeat her question from the Bible study last night. Jodi and I were talking to her sister and their family over Skype (they’re serving as missionaries in another country). I didn’t think that now was the time to jump in with a response, especially because I didn’t know how the question and answer played out in the Bible study itself. But it’s a question that a lot of Christians, not just young people, have pondered. The question is this: If God is all-knowing, wouldn’t he know that Satan was going to be evil, and do something to prevent it? A good question, indeed!

Strictly speaking, this does not merely assume God’s omniscience. It also assumes his omnibenevolence, or all-goodness. It also assumes his omnipotence (or at least a faculty of powers such that he could overcome Satan’s intentions). This is fine, for these things are part and parcel of historic Christianity. But then why didn’t God do something about it?

I think the key lies in the concept of love. God wants his creatures to love him (those that are capable of loving). At some level, and at some time, it appears Lucifer (Satan’s angelic name) had the ability to love God (and perhaps most or even all of the angels have had such an opportunity also). But to be in a love relationship requires two or more participants and a response that freely chooses love.

This makes sense, at least intuitively, right? Consider a man who wanted a woman to love him. She didn’t seem to at first, so he breaks out his magic spell. The magic spell makes it to where she fawns all over him, and even causes her to desire only him.[1] But can she be really said to love him? At the very least, we recognize she lacks something crucially important to love relationships: that she at least should choose to want to love him (or at least should choose to want to choose, if such a thing be demanded). Instead, this was foisted upon her. Her response is no different from an automaton.

So then, love requires freedom of choice at some level. Now the reason God doesn’t intervene is because if a choice is to be successfully made, it must be free. If God mitigates the choice when Satan tries to reject him, then it’s not really a choice (that is, forcing Satan to choose God in the event that Satan tries to reject him[2]. So God allows his choice to be real, and have real consequences. But why would God, knowing that his world would go so wrong, still stick with it? For a few reasons: 1. The love relationship God deems to be worth it. That should be humbling! 2. God knows something we don’t.[3] It may be that only in this type of a world would we get the number of saved freely trusting in Christ and living in eternal bliss with him, with the low-balance to minimize the lost.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments!



[1] Thanks to Jerry Walls for a relevantly similar example.

[2] Frankfurt examples are interesting here, but not directly relevant, since on this discussion it’s not the case that Satan chooses and God does not intervene. On this supposition, Satan does not choose God and God has to intervene. Frankfurt examples tend to lose their intuitive force on these situations.

[3] I once heard Tim McGrew say this.

6 comments:

  1. Recently I just finished a series of debates with a couple liberals and a jew over passages in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 concerning their application to Satan. Obviously I took the traditional stance. So it is comforting to here an essay with a tradition Satanology of Lucifer.
    I think there are some questions that are problematic because of there vaguery. Often there are multiple contexts and multiple meanings and God had defeated Satan, He is defeating Satan and He will Defeat Satan. But for us it is like we watch a championship boxing match and we keep flipping the channel to see the losers punches instead of the victors.

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    1. Good thoughts, here, Matt! Thanks for dropping by! :)

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  2. Love must be free? I dont think freedom is the quintessential element to love. For instance, while we are free to love billions of women, we dont. We love our wives, and sometimes we cant explain why. When we try, we describe things about them that attract us to them, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and physically. So what if God planned to make Satan, even in such a way that he would have a proclivity to choose disobedience to bring about the loving redemptive plan of God?

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    1. Thanks for your comments, Ryan! I don't think your proposed counterexample ends up working, though. Here, I mentioned freedom for the purpose of being a necessary condition of love. So in fact it looks like you're reinforcing the main point: you are free to love others, but you don't. You freely choose to love your wife, even if you could have refrained from doing so or otherwise chosen. That is precisely the point! :)

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  3. If love must be freely chosen, then how is it that the members of the Trinity can be characterized as loving one another? As a triune being, God is supposed to be essentially loving. But if love has to be freely chosen, couldn't the Son choose, say, to not love the Father? If not, then it would seem that the necessary conditions for love may be relative to the sort of creatures we're talking about.

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    1. Hey Eli, thanks for commenting! While some might complain that such a move is ad hoc, I wouldn't necessarily have any kind of a problem with that. :) However, it's also open to this person to claim that a kind of Frankfurtian libertarianism might be true, such that a sufficient condition of freedom is that one is the causal origin of one's own choices, and is not caused to do what she does by something else (but instead is, as I mention, the causal origin of the choice ). At least, this is what I am currently thinking.

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