Welcome back to Aspastor John. This summer Pastor John is out of the studio preaching in Belfast in Scotland before returning to the States for a 40-day writing leave to finish up a book on Providence on the sovereignty of God a book he started last summer and hopes to finish this summer I cannot wait to see it and all of it the travel the book writing in this very podcast is all made possible by you we are supported by the prayers and the funding of God's people so thank you for generously

investing in this important and eternal work so with Pastor John busy we're diving into our archive of 1500 episodes and this summer we're pulling out some of your favorites about once every 50 episodes we release one that touches a nerve and touches the 300,000 play mark these are the elite episodes in our six and a half year history we only have about 30 of them and here's one of them

Rob writes in to ask this Pastor John as a reformed Calvinist I highly appreciate Jonathan Edwards who claims that number one free will is doing what we desire but that too God gives us the desire to do good and with that being said and keeping James one 13 in mind I'm having trouble understanding where Lucifer received his first desire for sin

Norman Geisler says quote the unmistakable logical conclusion for the extreme Calvinist is that both Lucifer and Adam sinned because God gave them the desire to sin first

in quote I would imagine that Adam received his desire to sin from Eve who received it from the serpent from Satan

but if God has sovereign overall things including all of our desires would that make him the initial author of the first desire for sin in Satan how do you answer this mystery

for as many years as I can remember I have said that among the mysteries in my theology for which I do not have an adequate answer

one of them is the question how how is the key word here how did the first sin come about and by first sin I don't mean Adam's first sin I mean Satan's first sin the very first sin in the universe

the Bible opens not with the beginning of evil but with the presence of unexplained evil

man is created innocent and the serpent is already there deceitful manifestly opposed to the God of creation that's where the Bible begins and as far as I can see no explanation is offered in the Bible for how Satan became evil

I know there are hints that he was a perfect angel created by God Jude says that he refers to angels who did not stay within their own position of authority but left their proper dwelling

whom God has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day and I don't doubt that Satan was created good

and fell from his proper place like Jude says because I don't think that evil and God are both eternal and ultimate realities

I'm not a dualist God and his good goodness and wisdom and power are the only ultimate eternal realities

and thus evil is somehow derivative secondary without God being a sinner and all of that virtually all Christians agree on

but how did Satan become evil I do not know and it is plain to me that those who believe in ultimate self determination of God's creatures like angels and humans don't know either

to say that Satan had free will that is ultimate self determination to say that Satan had free will

is not an explanation for why he committed his first sin it's a label it's a label it's not an explanation it's a label of a mystery

how could a perfectly good being with a perfectly good will and a perfectly good heart ever experience any imperfect impulse that would cause the will to move in the direction of sin

and the answer is nobody knows including those who say oh it's free will that's not an explanation it's a name for a mystery

so we don't know the Bible doesn't explain the how of it so Rob quotes Norman Geistler who says the unmistakable logical conclusion for the extreme Calvinist

for both Lucifer and Adam that they sin is because God gave them the desire to sin now I'm not sure whether I qualify for Geistler's extreme Calvinist but I strongly suspect that I do

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