Articles
Necessity - 1.28.2024 Bulletin
Necessity
There’s an old adage that says “Necessity is the mother of invention”. This means that new inventions or new methods of doing things will be created or discovered when there is a need to improve. As one example, when cars were first invented, they did not have windshield wipers. At the time, the creators of cars did not realize how important these would be. Yet after a few years of drivers having to get out of their cars and manually wipe snow off the windshield, it quickly became apparent they would need a better way to do this task. In 1903, Mary Anderson invented the windshield wiper blade to solve this issue, and windshield wipers have been part of cars ever since.
Some people have applied this idea of necessity leading to “invention” to the Bible. Some suggest that when Adam and Eve took the forbidden fruit, this altered God’s plan, and required Him to come up with a new one to address humanity. Those who hold this belief seem to believe that God was surprised that Adam and Eve committed this sin and had not accounted for it. Of course, this would deny the all-knowing nature of God. If nothing else, the fact that God warned them not to take the fruit and told them what would happen if they did indicate that He knew it was a possibility, and had a plan in mind if they did. We read in 1 Peter 1:20 that Jesus was “foreordained before the foundation of the world”. Foreordained for what? To be the Christ, to be the Son of God, to be the perfect offering for sin by which we humans could come into fellowship with God once again. And Peter tells us that this was ordained before the world even existed. Truly, God did not need a “Plan B” to address sin.
Those who hold the belief that the Bible was “Plan B” have argued that if Christ indeed was meant to be the perfect offering for sin, why did God go through the Old Testament first? Why not just send Christ down immediately to extinguish sin on the world in the Garden of Eden? Galatians 4:4-5 tells us that Christ came in “The fullness of time”. In other words, He came when God knew the time was right. That is the bottom line, the ultimate answer. He came when God said it was time, and He will come again when God says it is time for the world to end, (Mark 13:32-33). Returning to Galatians 4:4-5, we also see that Jesus was “born of a woman, born under the law”. What law? The Law of Moses. But the Law of Moses did not exist in the Garden of Eden. Jesus couldn’t very well be “born under the law” if the law didn’t exist, could He? The Law of Moses was established at Mount Sinai and became God’s law for the Israelite people for many centuries, and finally in the 1st century Jesus came forth, “born under the law” and was the only man to perfectly fulfill the Law of Moses, which was one of the requirements for Him to be the perfect offering.
Still unsatisfied with these answers, those who hold the belief that the Bible was “Plan B” have pointed to the multitude of times from Genesis to the Gospels that God’s plan seemed to be close to failure. The Flood which decimated the world and spared only 8 humans and all the animals on the ark could have ended the lineage that would ultimately lead to Christ, yet it didn’t. If Abraham, Isaac or Jacob or their descendants had been slain by their adversaries, that would have ended the lineage. Every time the Israelite nation went into idolatry, they violated the Law of Moses that God intended them to keep, and many times they faced certain destruction because of it. Yet God always kept a remnant, as we read in Ezekiel 6:8. The Israelites, and therefore the lineage of Christ, was never eradicated, and thus Christ was able to come forth in accordance with all the prophecies.
Even when Christ was born, Satan did not give up. He used Herod to try to kill off the young Jesus. He later tried to tempt Jesus in the wilderness and continued this right up to and including the cross itself. Yet God’s plan never failed. Christ dying on the cross as the perfect sacrifice was always part of the plan, and the church was always intended to come, to be the final covenant between God and man. The Bible was not “Plan B”. It wasn’t even “Plan A”. It was simply the plan, born not out of necessity, but by the perfect foreknowledge of God. May we accept His perfect foresight and trust in His Word.
Daniel Young
- Glad_Tidings_1.28.2024_PDF.pdf (4.07 MB)
