did God ordain the fall, and why?

In Christian theology, “the fall” refers to the sin of our first ancestors (Adam and Eve), God’s judgment of their sin, and the resulting strained “relationship status” that all of Adam and Eve’s posterity have been born into.

In Genesis 1, after God created man, male and female, He said His creation was good. The rest of the Bible, the word of God, could be accurately summed up by saying that mankind is not good. The massive and total shift in our relationship status is referred to as “the fall.”

After Adam and Eve sinned they were ejected from the garden of Eden. Apparently, if they had not sinned then God would obviously not have judged their sin (there would have been none), and all subsequent generations would have been born “good” like Adam and Eve were when God spoke them into being. Instead, through Adam’s and Eve’s disobedience, the “problem of evil” came to be. That first sin was the catalyst for every evil and every calamity since.

Naturally, God did not plan for the fall to happen from the beginning, right? Obviously, Adam and Eve disobeyed and caused God to change from His plan of eternal Eden which resulted in this fallen and broken world, problem of evil and all- right? Typically, the free will of Satan and the free will of Adam and Eve have been blamed for the fall. Satan attempted to “set his throne above God’s” and was cast out of heaven. He then entered the Garden of Eden and tempted Eve, who ate the forbidden fruit and gave it to her husband who also ate. That is where the explanation of the fall ends, right?

I think that, while Satan, Adam, and Eve freely chose to do what they did, and bear the blame for bringing evil into the world, the explanation does not end there. I think that the fall was part of God’s predestined plan from before the foundation of the world- yet in such a way that He did not sin.

Why would I think such a thing, and why would God predestine the event that brought every evil in the history of mankind into the world, you ask?

Glad you asked! Tune in next time!