Why Did God Allow Lucifer to Rebel? | The War Before Genesis – EP 4

0:00We have spent three episodes building in the case, the anointed cherub who covered the throne of God, the rebellion, and the two stagefall. The gap between Genesis 1-1 and 1-2 where a prior creation may have been judged into ruin. The adversary in the Divine Council accusing human beings day and night until the cross-remove and his legal standing. Now we have to ask the question, frankly, that all of it eventually leads to, and that's why. Not why did lose for rebel. We covered that. Pride, rooted in beauty, corrupted wisdom, the five I will statements. We know the mechanism.

1:04Why did God allow it? A perfect God, perfect foreknowledge, the ability to create any kind of creation with any characteristics under any circumstances. He could have created beings incapable of rebellion. He could have created a creation where the five I will statements were simply not possible. He could have built something that could not break. He didn't. And the consequences of that choice include every atrocity in human history. Every child who has died from disease before medicine, every genocide, even slavery, every form of cruelty that human beings have devised and inflicted on each other.

2:10The full weight of human suffering from the gap to the present moment flows from a rebellion that God permitted, but did not cause. That is not a comfortable fact. It is not supposed to be either, and any answer that minimizes the cost in order to make the permission seem reasonable is not actually answering the question. It is changing the subject. This episode is going to answer the question without changing the subject. And the answer gives us more specific and more demanding than most Christians are ever asked to engage.

3:12So here we go. From the broadcasting seeds, I'm Ben Attanton. This is the arc for this week, the war, the four genesis episode four. The final question. Let's answer it. The free will answer and its limits. The most common answer Christians give to the question of why God permitted the rebellion. Their Lucifer Adams is free will. God wanted beings capable of genuine love and worship and genuine love requires the freedom to choose otherwise. You can't program devotion, folks. You can't engineer relationship. The capacity for rebellion is the unavoidable logical consequence of the capacity for genuine

4:17love. So God created beings with both. This answer is not wrong. It is true. It is important. Let me lay out why it is true before I tell you why it is incomplete. Okay, consider what a creation without genuine freedom would look like. Every being in the creation will respond to God perfectly always by design. They would worship Him and serve Him and reflect His glory back to Him, but not because they chose to, because that's how they were made to. The way a music box plays a song when you wind the key, the output is what it is. It cannot be otherwise. Is that really love?

5:19Is that worship? The biblical framework consistently treats genuine relationship as requiring genuine agency. The entire covenant structure of the Old Testament is built on the premise that Israel can choose to follow God or choose to reject Him. And both choices have actual real consequences. The call to choose in Deuteronomy 30, 19, I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore, choose life is not rhetorical. It is a real choice with real options. And if Israel could not actually choose death, the call to choose life would be meaningless.

6:22The same logic applies to the Divine Council, Psalm 82 records, God judging the Divine Council members who failed their responsibility as administrators of the nations. I think they went way farther that is in my upcoming book, which is available July 20. They judged unjustly. They showed partial, partiality to the wicked. They did not maintain justice for the poor. And God holds them accountable for that. He could only hold them accountable if they had genuine responsibility. If their failure was a real choice, not an inevitable malfunction. So the free will answer is correct as far as it goes.

7:24Genuine relationship with genuine beings required genuine freedom. Freedom requires the possibility of rebellion. Lucifer's rebellion was the first exercise of that possibility. Now here's where it is incomplete. The free will answer explains why rebellion was possible. It does not fully explain why God allowed this particular rebellion to proceed to its full consequences rather than intervening earlier. God could have created beings with genuine freedom and then intervened at the first sign of misuse, right? Copping the rebellion before it produced the Tohuvu Vohu before the watchers descended from Mount Hurtman. Before the serpent spoke to Eve, he could have interceded.

8:28He did not intervene that way. The rebellion was permitted to run and the reason it was permitted to run involves something more than free will as a principle. It involves a specific purpose that the conflict itself was designed to serve. The demonstration argument. And Job 1 and 2 are, as I have said before in this series, a cosmic courtroom case. But the case being tried is not primarily about Job's righteousness. The case being tried is about whether genuine devotion to God is possible at all, right? The adversary's challenge is precise. Does Job fear God for nothing?

9:29Have you not put a head around him and his household and everything he has? You have blessed the work of his hands so that his flock and herd are spread throughout the land, but now stretch out your hand and strike. Everything he has and he will surely curse you to your face. The argument is, Job is not actually devoted to God. He is devoted to what God provides. Take away the provision and you take away the devotion. The fear of God and Job is not genuine relationship. It is transactional. And God gives blessings. Job gives worship. Remove the blessings and watch the worship evaporate. This was Satan was pushing. This is the question the rebellion raised in its original form.

10:36The anointed cherub was the most magnificent being in the created order. He was given possession, beauty, wisdom, proximity to the divine presence. And the question his rebellion poses to the entire divine council is this. Is any being in creation capable of genuinely loving God for who God is rather than for what God gives? Where is all devotion ultimately transactional? All worship, ultimately self-interested? Great question, right? The Job narrative is God's answer to that question through actual demonstration. Job loses health.

11:37He loses everything. His children, his wealth. And he does not curse God. He says, naked, I came from my mother's womb and naked I shall return. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. The adversary's challenge is answered, right? The case is made. Genuine devotion is possible. Job loved God for God, not for the blessings. But Job is one person. The demonstration needed to run longer and at greater scale for a full answer to the adversary's challenge to be established. Which brings us to the most extraordinary passage in the ark. Okay, Ephesians 3, 10 through 11, his intent was that now through the church, the manifold

12:41wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places, according to his eternal purpose, that he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord. Read that carefully. The church, the community of human beings who have chosen God through Christ is the vehicle through which God makes known his manifold wisdom to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places, the divine counsel, the remaining divine beings watching this conflict unfold. The wisdom of redemption, the wisdom of what God did through the cross to answer the adversary's challenge at the level of the divine court's justice.

13:45But also, the wisdom of what genuine devotion looks like when it has been tested, when it has cost something. When it has held through loss and suffering and death, the church has a demonstration. Paul says this, the human beings who choose God in the context of a conflict where the adversary has legitimate claims, where the cost is real, where the alternative is always present. These human beings are answering the adversary's original question about whether genuine devotion to God is possible, not by argument, but by existence. First Corinthians 4.9 adds the cosmic theater image. For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men's sentence to death,

14:50as we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to human beings. A spectacle, a theatron in Greek, a theater piece, the apostles, and by extension the community of believers in a conflict tested world are on display. The conflict is not in private, it is fricking cosmic, and the resolution of the conflict is being watched by every divine being in the heavenly places. They are watching to see whether genuine devotion is actually possible. They are watching to see what God does with rebellion. Again, they are watching to see whether the cross is sufficient to answer the accusation.

15:53The answer to why God permitted the rebellion to run is partly this. The rebellion raised a real question. The answer to that question required a demonstration, and the demonstration required real actual conflict with real costs and real stakes and real choices to be genuinely conclusive. The cost and the cross. I will not minimize the cost of the conflict. I said at the beginning of this episode that I would not, and I mean it. Every human being who has ever suffered, and that is every human being who has ever lived, is paying a cost that originated, and they rebelling in, they did not cause. Every child who has died of disease before modern medicine, every person tortured for

16:59reasons, they had nothing to do with their choices. We have all had instances of craziness, every atrocity, every genocide, every act of cruelty that human beings have perpetuated against each other. The full weight of human suffering flows from the consequences of a rebellion that God absolutely could have prevented. I am not going to hold that fact and not put it down. It is real. It is heavy. And any answer that waves it away has somehow not, as somehow not that bad, or necessarily for the greater good in a way that makes it sound acceptable, is not actually answering the question. It is flinching from it. It is no, because it is a real question.

18:02Here is what I think scripture actually says about the cost. God did not observe the cost from a distance and decide it was acceptable. If you did notice, God entered the cost. John 114, the word became flesh and dwelt among us. The second person of the Trinity entered the creation that the rebellion had ruined. He was not born into a world where things were comfortable and occasional suffering, suffering to hutch the edges. He was born into a world under Roman occupation in a freaking stable to a poor family and a culture where infermortality was common and cruelty was absolutely ordinary. He lived inside the cost. Guys, and then he paid it.

19:06The cross is not just a transaction that satisfies divine justice, though it is that. The cross is also God's statement about the cost of the conflict. God did not require others to absorb because he was unwilling to absorb himself. The incarnation and the cross are the answer to the freaking question. Is this cost acceptable? Not with a theological argument, but with a personal entrance into the suffering. This is what makes Christianity categorically different from every other framework for understanding suffering. It is not a God who allows suffering from a position of safety, folks. I know people think that, but it is a God who allowed the rebellion.

20:10Entered the consequences personally as Jesus and absorbed the ultimate cost. Don't even say because people will be like, oh, Jesus, there's no... Okay, so he entered the consequences personally as the Christ. Look at what you will and absorbed the ultimate cost in the most public and specific way possible. The cross also accomplishes the specific legal work he discussed in episode two. It answers every charge the adversary has brought or could bring. It removes the legal ground for any accusation. It establishes the basis on which every human being who has ever suffered, including the innocent, including those who suffering had nothing to do with their choices, can be restored

21:13and more than restored. Romans 8.18 I consider that our present suffering are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed to us. This is not minimizing present sufferings. Paul uses the word pathomata, sufferings, afflictions, which one endures. He is talking about real suffering, the kind he personally knew from beatings and imprisonment and shipwreck and hunger. And he says, not comparable, not because the suffering is small, but because what is coming is that large. Revelation 21, 3 and through 4 is the end point.

22:13And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, look, God's dwelling place is now among the people and he will dwell with them. They will be his people and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain for the older, older of things has passed away. Every tear, not some tears, every tear that the conflict has produced, every loss, every grief, every death, every atrocity, God himself wipes away. This is not a statement about the past being erased. It is a statement about God personally attending to every cost the conflict produced.

23:14He enters the cost. He will close the cost as well. And he will not leave a single account unaddressed. The eternal purpose. So here is the theological claim that I find most significant in the entire ark. The plan that answers the rebellion was not made in response to the rebellion. In the beginning of time, Christ has given to us in Christ before the beginning of time, before the ages began, before the gap, before Genesis 1, 1, before the creation of Lucifer. Grace and Christ was already the plan. Ephesians 3, 11 calls what God is doing, the eternal purpose realized in Christ Jesus our Lord. Eternal, not reactive, not improvised.

24:19The purpose predates everything we have been discussing in this ark this week. Revelation 138 refers to Christ as the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world. The Lamb was slain in the eternal purpose. The cross was not plan B. That God implemented front when Lucifer's rebellion and Adam's sin made plan A unworkable. The cross was the plan always. This changes the entire frame of the question of why God permitted the rebellion. God did not create Lucifer, watched the rebellion, and then decide to allow it to continue when he worked outside a response. While he worked out a response. God created Lucifer, permitted the rebellion, permitted the full consequences to develop,

25:19in the knowledge that the eternal purpose in Christ was already in place to address every consequence. The rebellion was permitted within a plan that already included the response to it. This does not make the rebellion less real. It does not make the suffering less real or catastrophic. What it means is that the permission was not reckless. It was not an experiment that God watched anxiously to see how it would turn out. It was a permission granted within a framework that already accounted for the outcome. Isaiah 46-10, I declare the end from the beginning. From ancient times, what is still to come I say, my purpose will stand and I will do all that I please. God declared the end from the beginning, the beginning of what?

26:23The beginning of everything. Before the beginning, the end was known. The eternal purpose was in place. What unfolds in time is the realization that what was settled and eternity. Romans 8-28 is often quoted as comfort and suffering. All things work together for good for those who love God, who have been called according to His purpose. It is a comfort. What it is also a theological claim about the structure of providence, not some things, all things, including the rebellion, including the gap, including the watcher descent and the nufflomand, the missing 411 wilderness disappearances, and the atrocities of human history and every single tear that Revelation 21 promises God will wipe away.

27:24All of it. It worked together for good within the eternal purpose that was already in place before any of it began, folks. What the new creation knows. Now let me close with the argument that I find most compelling for why the conflict was permitted rather than prevented. In 21-22 describes the new creation, the destination, the eternal biblical narrative has been pointing toward sense Genesis 1-1. God's dwelling is with humanity. Every tear wiped away, death ended, the tree of life accessible, the presence of God unmediated everything that Eden pointed towards but could not reach.

28:30But the new creation is not a return to Eden, it is better than Eden in a specific way. Revelation 21-24-26, the nations will walk by its light and the kings of the earth will bring their splendour into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut for there will be no night there. The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it. The nations bring their glory into the new Jerusalem. Human cultural achievement, the splendour accumulated through thousands of years of human creativity and discovery and building. It is carried into the new creation. The new creation is not blank, it is populated with the accumulated glory of human beings who lived through the conflict and produced in the midst of it.

29:32Things of genuine worth. The book of life in Revelation 20 contains names, real names of real people who made real choices in the context of a real conflict. Those names are there because the conflict was real. If the conflict had not been real, there would be no names to write because there would have been no choices to make. The new creation knows something, the original creation did not know. It knows what genuine devotion looks like under genuine pressure. It knows what the love of God accomplishes when it enters a broken creation. It knows what human beings are capable of choosing when the adversary has actual real influence and the cost of faithfulness is real.

30:33It knows the Lamb who was slain, not as an abstract theological category, but as a historical reality, as the moment when the conflict was resolved from within. A creation without the rebellion would have known God's power in creation. The new creation knows God's love in redemption. Those are not the same knowledge, guys, and the second is so much deeper. C.S. Lewis describes this as the great divorce. The idea that the redeemed looking back at the suffering that was part of their journey will find that it was not merely endured but transformed into something that contributed to who they have become. Not that it was good in itself, not that it was acceptable in a transactional sense, but

31:37that what God does with it, the specific transformation he accomplishes through suffering, willingly born and trust, produces something in the person that would not have been there otherwise. This is not a complete theodicie. I am not claiming it fully answers every objection. The problem of evil is deep enough that no single response reaches all the way down. What I am claiming is this. The biblical framework for why God permitted the rebellion is not naive optimism dressed in theological language. It is a specific claim about what the eternal purpose was building towards, what the conflict was designed to demonstrate, and what the cross accomplished at the level of divine justice

32:42and what the new creation will contain that the original creation could not have contained without the journey. The rebellion was permitted within a plan that already knew where it was going. The cost was real, and God entered the cost personally. The cost will be closed fully and individually by God himself. And what comes out on the other side of it is a creation that knows what the original creation could not, what it costs to love, and what the love, what that love and that the love held anyway. I guess is the best way to put it.

33:43Four episodes. One arc. Let me close it. We began with who the adversary was, the seal of perfection, the anointed cherub, wings spread over the throne of God. Five I will statements reaching for autonomous sovereignty over the created order. We traced the war in heaven and found it was two stage. The initial expulsion from the throne room left him with a limited prosecutorial access to the divine court as the accuser. The cross answered every charge he brought. Michael executed the enforcement. The accuser was hurled to the earth knowing his time is short. We opened the gap between Genesis 1, 1 and 1, 2 and found that the Hebrew permits and the Isaiah 45-18 problem may require a prior creation judged into Tohu-va-vohu by the fall of the

34:53being who presided over it. The darkness of verse 2 is the darkness of judgment. The six days were recreation. The adversary entered the renewed garden already fallen, already expelled from the throne room, already carrying the full weight of the rebellion. And tonight we asked why, why permit the rebellion, why allow the consequences to run? The answers, genuine freedom, has the prerequisite for genuine relationship. Genuine agency as the structure of God's governance, the demonstration that genuine devotion is possible, answered first in Job, answered finally in the church before the watching divine council. The cross as God's personal entrance into the cost he permitted, the eternal purpose

35:54that predated everything, grace and Christ given before the ages began, and the new creation that knows something the original could not, and that's that love, costs and that it can hold. This is the war before Genesis, not the background to the real story, the real story, the conflict that every human being born into this world enters whether they know it or not, and that the story that ends according to the last two chapters of the Bible, with God himself wiping every tear from every eye that the conflict produced. That is not a small ending, that is the only ending worth building toward. And if this arc gave you something to carry, I urge you to share it with someone who needs the framework.

36:55If you want the full content without ad breaks and video for the YouTube versions, the Patreon is at patreon.com slash broadcasting seeds, $5 for audio ad free, $10 for audio and video simple. I'm Ben and Tanton, this is broadcasting seeds. Stay rooted, stay curious, and as usual, don't stop digging. Have a good one.

40:22This was never planned to, the lemma slain before the world was framed. Grace was written before time had a name, the rebellion ran, but it did not rain. The grave was loud, but it could not remain. Every accusation silence, every fallen power touched. Every tear remembered, every wound touched by blood. Michael Stazzy accused of falls, the cross still thunders through heaven's halls, the church stands guard. But not alone, a living witness before the throne. The cross was real, the wound was deep, the whole earth grown, the angels weep.

41:28A God came down into our pain and broke the curse and bore the shame, through thorn and nail, through blood and loss, he crushed the serpent at the cross. Love held on, one the world fell through and every tear will be laid down. And not even restored, something greater. A creation that knows what love costs and knows that love. Hold on anyway.