6G) What is this Plan of Salvation?
To summarize my model, I surmised that, God has been thinking forever and has had time to create many worlds. I believe they all have more than the 3 dimensions we know of. There is free will, but there is a "battle" ongoing now, where the question of free will is center stage. If there is free will then there must be alternatives. What would happen if anyone decided to choose an alternative? Whom or what else would they trust in? He thought up an alternative - you could trust in yourself and perhaps you could get anything you want when you want it without waiting on God. There is another related question, "How can I be a free agent if God knows everything I'm going to do in advance? Since I am merely a thought of His, can I think up anything independent of Him?". If God says I'm a free agent, is that enough to make it real? Can God elect to not control me, ie to allow me to make my own choices? The only way I can know if this is possible is to do something that God would not want me to do. What's the only thing that God does not want His created beings to do? Separate themselves from Him, because God is our source of life! This is the essence of evil. Evil is the set of all the decisions we can make to do things that will hurt us. Doing things that hurt us leads to death. God as our loving parent does not want us to hurt ourselves, so He doesn’t want us to do evil things, even when we may not understand why they’re evil.
I suggest that Sin is inevitable even in a world of perfect beings, if they have free will and do not have the knowledge of Good and Evil. God inevitably had to set up a demonstration for all the angels to witness, which would answer these questions:
- Is there really a choice, where we could elect to do things independent of what God would want us to do?
- Can we trust that God could, but is not intervening in our decisions; so that we actually have Free Will?
- If we do such things, will we self destruct or can we actually survive as such - separated from our Creator?
Lucifer, His top angel, needed to see if he could survive alone, in order to assure himself that he was a free agent. He felt that he must distance himself from God to exhibit his free will. God's position was that He only wanted what was best for His creatures, yet He would always honor their free will to choose alternates in their pursuit of happiness. Still, they must convince themselves that they do not need to push away from God to know they have free will. He contended that distancing themselves from Him even a wee bit, would lead to complete separation and self-destruction eventually. (This is because we can only push towards some substitute for God, which cannot give us Everlasting Life at all.)
As a Rocket Scientist, I see that Intelligence by nature requires learning. If something can be programmed to do the right things all the time, then it is not intelligent. It’s robotic. If God wanted robots only, He would have made more animals. Instead He made the angelic beings and gave them Free Will so they could make their own choices. Then, just as with our own children, they must somehow Learn what works and what doesn’t, so they can make Good choices, which will enhance their existence. Any way we look at this, learning is pre-requisite to living happily ever after with Free Will. If they must learn by doing Evil then they will perish eventually and God will have to start over and over again. This is what Lucifer chose to do. He effectively said, “If I can do things that God doesn’t want me to do, only then will I know for certain that I’m doing them on my own and not being controlled by God.”
Lucifer found things to do such as perhaps physically fighting with other angels, which were clearly not recommended by God. Still, he continued to exist as he isolated himself from God, so it may have appeared to other angels that he was clearly more free than they. Many angels followed the reasoning and drifted away from pure trust in God. They might well have felt that he was more free than they were. And, even though he had some kinks to work out, they could all get it to work themselves eventually. God said it would not work in the long run, even though it may have appeared to work in the near-term. The initial decisions were not so dramatic. They didn't necessarily want an overt separation from God, but merely a chance to consider the alternatives presented. Thus they made the decision to try them out. In retrospect, it is essentially a matter of finding something other than God to put their trust in.
Temptation is like this even now. One decision leads to another and then another until there is no room in heaven for you. The unforgivable sin is to tell God not to intervene in your life. By that decision, you choose to isolate yourself completely from God (ie you blaspheme against the Holy Spirit of God - His thoughts). You want God to stop thinking about you. If/when He does stop thinking about you, you are dead; you cannot exist. Your trust in any alternative is only going to buy you temporary gratification, not eternal life. Death awaits.
Some Bible readers feel that the Bible says that Pride was the cause of Lucifer's downfall, so therefore it was pride that introduced sin for the first time. They quote Ezekiel that Lucifer was perfect in every way until iniquity was found in him. Here we find no explanation for the original cause of this iniquity. How could such destructive pride develop in a perfect being in a perfect world? Clearly, this is telling us that there was some other reason that originally introduced sin, so that sinful pride could develop. I believe that the free will question was that original cause. It then led to the sins of pride mentioned in the biblical account.
The perception may have been that God was not fair and that there really was no choice, so that free will was a sham. Perhaps the only one with free will is the Thinker Himself. God knew that He could elect to not intervene and that His created beings could be allowed to have a choice. They could choose among all kinds of things, but the only things He didn't want them to choose were to do things that separate themselves from Him, because He knew that would lead to their death. Yet, like a father, God wanted them to conclude this themselves and elect of their own free will to avoid choices that seek to separate them from Him even a wee bit. God's point was that decisions for the temporary gratification at the expense of long-term gratification would lead to an ever-degrading system that would self-destruct eventually.
Everlasting life, requires trust in the Thinker to keep thinking up new meaning and new material to work with. Forever is too long for created beings to exist within their own means. They'll run out of ideas and get bored with happiness. The Thinker alone can introduce whatever is necessary for the everlasting happiness we all crave.
God knew these questions must be answered by allowing the alternate choice to play itself out completely. The problem again is that once they “do” evil, Sin arises and eventually destroys them. So, Rather than let all the angels self-destruct, God sets up a “training Video” using beings in a 3D universe, a little lower than the Angels. The stage is set for the human drama.
Michael, the angel Who is Like God – the image of God in the Angelic universe is the Word of God. When He speaks face-to-face to the other angels, they are speaking directly to God. At some point, after a third of the angels have decided to try what Lucifer was trying, Michael calls a “timeout”. He says, let’s make a "movie" about free will for all this universe to see. We'll need to project it on the wall of this extra-dimensional universe for all of you to see, so it can't have as many dimensions. Just as a 2D movie is projected for a 3D audience, our 3D Universe is being projected for the extra-dimensional universe. The consequences of our choices are being observed and assessed by all the created beings. The angels who have not as yet fallen are now quarantined where they can watch the unfolding Human Drama (1 Cor 4:9).
Read Rev 4 - 6, where John is carried up into heaven, ie this angelic universe. He watches the drama unfold before a live audience, "the hosts of heaven". We and our entire 3D universe are on the stage. The Scroll (Rev 5:1) is the script. The hosts of heaven watch as we choose death in wee steps, leading to a deteriorating world. God steps into our world as a human Himself, to rectify the situation and to create a means by which we actors, who are proving His point, can continue to live anyway. Encouraged by the fallen angels and our own deteriorating character, we kill our own Creator when given the chance, then proceed to self-destruct completely. The wages of sin are to get what we ask for, ie death. But God/Christ as a human dies for us. This is what we equate to “paying the debt for our sins”. Someone has to die, since the wages of sin is death. Yes, humans will die as humans. Yet, God’s personal sacrifice demonstrates that He has the power and the desire to re-create any humans, who choose Life. This is the sense in which our inevitable death is not necessarily the final outcome. Even though we die a human death, God can and will implement His Plan of Salvation for us. God resurrects Himself not as human but as angelic, showing us that He can do the same for those of us who choose Life. Now again, Michael the Archangel is back in the angelic universe as a glorified being like those in the audience (Rev 12:5), but forever more with those “holes in His hands”.
Humans were set up to fall in this way to prove the points to the angelic
beings. God must be fair and loving, so from our beginning He must institute
the "escape clause" that allows us to be saved in the end. Even
though we must die to prove the points, God can give us everlasting life after
that on one condition. That condition is going to be: We must remake the choice
and to choose life once the debt is paid. For those who still choose death, the
12 August 2001, 8 Dec 2008
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