What was the first sin in heaven

Audio Transcript

We start the week with a question from a listener, Rob, who writes in to ask, “Pastor John, as someone who is Reformed/Calvinist, I highly appreciate Jonathan Edwards, who claims that (1) free will is doing what we desire, but that (2) God gives us the desire to do good. With that being said, and keeping James 1:13 in mind, I’m having trouble understanding where Lucifer received his first desire to sin.

“Norman Geisler says that ‘the unmistakable logical conclusion for the extreme Calvinist [is that] both Lucifer and Adam sinned because God gave them the desire to sin’ (Chosen But Free, 36). I would imagine that Adam received his desire to sin from Eve, who received it from the serpent/Satan, but if God is sovereign over all things — including our desires — would that make him the initial author of the first desire to sin?” How do you answer this mystery?

The Original Fall

For as many years as I can remember, I have said that this is among the mysteries in my theology for which I do not have an adequate answer. The specific question here is how — how is a key word here — did the first sin come about? By “the first sin,” I don’t mean Adam’s first sin. I mean Satan’s first sin, the very first sin in the universe.

“To say that Satan had free will is not an explanation for why he committed his first sin.”

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. The serpent is deceitful and manifestly opposed to the God of creation. That is where the Bible begins.

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 refers to angels who did not stay within their own position of authority but left their proper dwelling. He says that God has kept these angels in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day (Jude 6).

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 am not a dualist: God and his goodness and wisdom and power are the only ultimate, eternal realities. Evil is somehow derivative. It is secondary, without God being a sinner. Concerning all of that, virtually all Christians agree on.

Answers Few and Futile

How did Satan become evil? I do not know. 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 — is not an explanation for why he committed his first sin. It is a label. It is not an explanation.

It is 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? The answer is that nobody knows, including those who say, “Oh, it is free will.” That is not an explanation. It is a name for a mystery.

We don’t know. The Bible doesn’t explain how. Rob quotes Norman Geisler, who says, “The unmistakable logical conclusion for the extreme Calvinist [is that] both Lucifer and Adam sinned because God gave them the desire to sin.” Now I am not sure whether I qualify as Geisler’s “extreme Calvinist,” but I strongly suspect that I do.

At this point I am disagreeing with that description of me, and I am saying, “No, I am not driven to say God gave Lucifer his first desire to sin. That is an oversimplification of virtually everybody’s viewpoint. I do not know how Lucifer came to feel his first inclination to rebel against God.”

Sovereign He Stands

Here is what I do know. God is sovereign. Nothing comes to pass apart from his plan, which includes things he more or less causes directly — things he more or less permits indirectly. There is no doubt in my mind that Satan’s fall and all the redemptive plan of God for the glory of his grace afterward were according to God’s eternal plan.

“The Bible opens not with the beginning of evil, but with the presence of unexplained evil.”

But it is precisely at this point that the how of the causality, how Satan’s first sin worked, that we do not know. I have a category in my thinking for the fact that God can see to it that something comes to pass which he hates.

This is what he did, for example, when he planned the crucifixion of Jesus, according to Acts 4:27–28. The murder of Jesus was sinful, and it was planned down to the detail by God. You can read it in the Psalms, and you can read it in the New Testament.

Precisely how God does that while maintaining his sinlessness and the sin of the things that come about and the moral accountability of those who do those sins — the how of that — I do not know. But I think the Bible leads us to believe that he is sovereign over all sin and that he never sins. That is what I believe the Bible teaches.

Biblical Hints

As to how he does it, there might be hints in the Bible. I am going to give you one pointer. I do not claim this is an explanation, but it is worth thinking about as a pointer toward a possible explanation that maybe we will understand someday.

In Isaiah 63:17 the prophet cries out to the people, “O Lord, why do you make us wander from your ways?” Did you hear that? “O Lord, why do you make us wander from your ways and harden our heart, so that we fear you not? Return for the sake of your servants, the tribes of your heritage.”

So, he ascribes to God the ultimate causality of our wandering — of Israel’s wandering into sin. How did God do that? The second half of the verse says, “Return for the sake of your servants,” suggesting, pointing, that somehow God’s absence did it.

Then he says in Isaiah 64:7, which is nine verses later, “There is no one who calls upon your name, who rouses himself to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have made us melt in the hand of our iniquities.” So again, it is the hiding of his face that explains the sin.

Light and Shadow

I am not saying this is a foolproof explanation of sin, but somehow God cloaked his glory from Lucifer, and in the cloaking of his glory — somehow still inexplicable to me — there rises a preference in Lucifer’s heart for himself over God, who has cloaked his glory.

“What I am taught in the Bible is that God is sovereign over all things, including sin, and he himself is never a sinner.”

I don’t know how that happens, but this is a pointer that something like that might have been going on. I am simply saying this is worth pondering: that God may be able to govern the presence and absence of sin not by direct, active agency, but by concealing himself.

I think it was Edwards who said that there is a difference between the way light is caused at three o’clock in the afternoon by the shining of the sun and the way the shadows are caused by the blocking of that sun by the tree — though it is the light of the sun that is responsible for both the brightness of the day and the shadows under the tree.

But I end where I began, with how the very first sin in the universe came about is a mystery to me. I do not know how. What I am taught in the Bible is that God is sovereign over all things, including sin, and he himself is never a sinner.

The question of the origin of sin holds importance because of what it tells us about both man and God. According to modern theories, man’s sin originates in his evolutionary origins. History is said to involve an ascent from savage beginnings, so that sin simply is seen as native to mankind’s nature. The effect of an evolutionary view of man is to normalize what the Bible calls sin as a simple necessity of our existence.

This modern approach to the origin of sin conflicts radically with the Bible in denying an original righteousness to Adam. Genesis 1:27 states that “God created man in his own image,” and this image implies personal holiness, righteousness, and thus freedom from the necessity of sin. Donald Macleod writes: “According to the Bible, man, as made by God, was upright. He was made in God’s image. He was absolutely sinless.”1 Man became a sinner, however, when Adam succumbed to temptation in the garden. In this important sense, man sinned when Adam willed to sin in his heart. Having been forbidden by God to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen 2:17–18), Adam ate the fruit and fell into sin (Gen 3:6). Sin therefore did not originate in the human nature as God made it but resulted when Adam was tempted by the evil serpent through his wife. Once Adam had sinned, the entire human race fell with him, losing the original righteousness of creation in God’s image (Gen 6:4), sharing Adam’s guilt (Rom 5:12, 18), and becoming corrupted with sin so that henceforth each individual human originates as a sinner (Ps 51:5).

Although we can trace the entry of human sin to Adam’s temptation and fall, we observe that Adam’s fall was preceded by the fall of the evil angels, chief of whom is Satan, who masqueraded in the garden as the serpent. For when Adam sinned, there was already a sinful angel present in the garden. The Bible does not clearly define the manner or time when the fall of the angels took place. But Jesus says that Satan “was a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44; see 1Jn 3:8), which most likely refers to the beginning of the creation account. Paul warns church leaders against becoming puffed up “with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil” (1Tim 3:16), suggesting that Satan’s originating sin was a pride which resented the creation of man in God’s image. It stands to reason that Satan tempted Adam and Eve to be “like God” (Gen. 3:5) because this same discontented rebellion occasioned his own fall.

Sin and God’s Will

This biblical data brings us to the question of God’s relationship to the origin of sin. Herman Bavinck comments: “On the basis of Scripture, it is certain that sin did not first start on earth but in heaven, at the feet of God’s throne, in his immediate presence.”2 Does this mean that sin has its origin in God, or in God’s will?

Given the divine attributes of omniscience and omnipotence, it is inconceivable that sin as either an act or a power could have originated apart from God’s will. Some thinkers have sought to exempt God from the implications of this reality. For instance, Immanuel Kant argued that God willed sin because it was necessary to the possibility of good in the world. Just as birds can only fly because of the contrary resistance of wind, so also the pressure of sin is necessary for human moral perfection.3 Others have argued that sin was necessary to God’s creation in order for man to exercise free will. A problem with these views is that sin is thus made normative to the human condition and may even be thought of as a kind of good. Such a view contrasts with the Bible’s insistence that sin is always “evil in the eyes of the Lord” (2Chron 29:6).

The Bible uniformly teaches God’s sovereignty over all things (Matt 10:9; Ps 33:11), which would include the origin of sin, yet Scripture explicitly denies that God is himself the source of evil. James 1:13 states that God is not the author of sin: “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God,’” for “God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.” 1 John 1:5 insists, “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all,” so sin does not originate in God’s nature or being. Neither was anything made by God evil in any way, as Genesis 1:31 declares: “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.” Job 34:10 states: “far be it from God that he should do wickedness, and from the Almighty that he should do wrong.” Moreover, the Bible explicitly states God’s hatred for sin (Ps 5:4; Luke 16:15).

Do these verses show that God merely permitted sin, without willing it? The answer must be “no,” if by permission we exclude God’s positive will. Fred G. Zaspel writes: “God’s relation to the sinful acts is not purely passive: his involvement is not that of mere allowance.”4 We may rightly say that God willed to permit sin, yet in so doing his providential government over sin is affirmed. Theologians approach this situation by asserting that God’s role in the origin of sin involves not primary but secondary causation. It was the will of Satan that sinned in leading the rebellion of angels, just as it was the will of Adam that sinned in taking the forbidden fruit. These were ultimately according to God’s decreed will, yet Satan and man remain responsible for their sin. Zaspel explains: “all that happens, good or evil, stems from God’s positive ordering of it; but the moral quality of the deed itself is rooted in the moral character of the person who does it.”5 At the same time, we must note a difference between God’s will of good and of evil, the former involving a positive enabling and the latter a positive permitting; Bavinck writes: “Light cannot of itself produce darkness; the darkness only arises when the light is withdrawn.”6

While we must deny any goodness in sin itself, it remains true that God has ordained sin—indeed, God sinlessly uses sin—for the praise of his glory. Since “from him and through him and to him are all things,” then God willed sin ultimately for the display of the perfection of his attributes, so that “to him [would] be glory forever” (Rom 11:36). We may therefore go so far as to say that although sin is evil, it is good that there was sin, or else God would not have willed it.

The clearest Scripture teaching affirming both God’s will for sin and man’s responsibility of sin formed a part of Peter’s sermon on the day of Pentecost. Convicting the people of Jerusalem for their sin against the Savior, Peter declared: “This Jesus . . . you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23). The sin was committed by the people who cried for Jesus’s crucifixion, by Pontius Pilate in his miscarriage of justice, by the Roman soldiers who nailed Christ to the cross, and by the priests and other religious leaders who mocked God’s Son in his torment. Yet, Peter also ascribes full sovereignty over all these wicked events to God. He inserts into that verse that Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23). God not only knew that his Son would be tortured, mocked, and slain, but it was according to his “definite” and eternal “plan” for history that these events took place.

The “Enigma” of Sin’s Origin

In answering questions as to the origin of sin, while we can affirm many important truths, we nonetheless stand before what Herman Bavinck called “the greatest enigma of life and the heaviest cross for the intellect to bear.”7 When considered as an explanation for the world as we know it, sin makes perfect sense: indeed, without a doctrine of the fall of mankind, the history of the world is incomprehensible. Yet, considering the biblical data about sin itself, when we ask how beings created as wholly good by God—such as the angel Satan and the man Adam—could will to sin, all answers escape us. Attempts to rationalize the origin of sin run aground against the essential irrationality of the creature rebelling against the Creator. This irrationality afflicts not merely the originating sins of ancient history but also every sin that we commit today. When the Christian bitterly asks, “Why did I sin?” there are descriptions—because of temptation, because of remaining indwelling sin, etc.—but there are no true explanations for the origin of any sin.

It is for this reason that Christians may be grateful that the question of “Why?” when it comes to sin, having no true answer on the human side of the equation, finds satisfaction in the grace of God’s sovereign will. Romans 11:32 states: “For God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all.” Only in the light of the glory of God’s grace does sin begin to make sense. God has chosen to save his people as sinners through the blood of his Son as a display of sovereign mercy. Christians thus realize that because we were converted from sin that was washed through atoning blood, God is glorified in his Son. Far from minimizing the significance of our ongoing sins, Christians also realize that God is glorified now in the power that his grace provides enabling us not to sin. The enigma of sin’s origin, then, enables believers in Christ to perceive in glorious clarity God’s amazing love and mercy in his Son, “to the praise of his glorious grace” (Eph 1:6).