Why God Allowed Sin

If God is good and knew what would happen, why did He put the tree in the garden at all? It is one of the oldest questions people ask, and it deserves better than a shrug. Two answers are given by serious Christians. One says God allowed sin so that His glory could be seen, in mercy and in judgment. The other says He allowed it because He wanted love, and love that cannot be refused is not love. Both answers are in the Bible. Both can be said badly. This letter hears each one fairly, and then goes where Jesus put them, which is together, on the night before He died.

First, what Scripture rules out

God did not make sin, and He does not tempt anyone to it. "Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man" (James 1:13). He is "of purer eyes than to behold evil" (Habakkuk 1:13). What He made, He called "very good" (Genesis 1:31). So the question is never whether God is the author of sin. He is not (see The Character of God).

But Scripture is just as plain that He allowed it, knowing what He allowed. The cross was "by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God" and also "by wicked hands" (Acts 2:23), both at once. Christ was "foreordained before the foundation of the world" (1 Peter 1:20), "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world" (Revelation 13:8). The remedy was settled before the wound. Whatever the answer to "why," it was not a surprise and it was not a mistake.

The case for glory

Many teachers, John MacArthur and John Piper among them, answer that God allowed sin so that the whole range of who He is could be seen: His mercy on the forgiven, His justice on the unrepentant, His patience with both. They are reading real verses. "I have created him for my glory" (Isaiah 43:7). "For mine own sake, even for mine own sake, will I do it… I will not give my glory unto another" (Isaiah 48:11). Paul says God "endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath" so "that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy" (Romans 9:22-23), and that grace itself is "to the praise of the glory of his grace" (Ephesians 1:6). "For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever" (Romans 11:36).

That is not a small case. A God who is the centre of everything has every right to be the point of everything. The trouble comes only in how it is said. Put the wrong way, "for His glory" makes God sound like He allowed the cancer ward and the killing fields so that He could be admired for fixing them. It turns suffering into a stage and God into someone who needs an audience. Scripture never talks like that. When Moses asked, "shew me thy glory," what passed before him was goodness: "The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth" (Exodus 33:18, 34:6). His glory, when He showed it, was His character.

The case for love

The other answer starts from John. "God is love" (1 John 4:8). "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 4:10). On this reading, God did not want a universe of things that obey. He wanted sons and daughters who love Him, and love has to be able to say no. That is what the tree was. "Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it" (Genesis 2:16-17). A garden with one real choice in it is a garden where love is possible. A garden with no choice is a machine.

Scripture keeps talking this way all the way through. "I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life" (Deuteronomy 30:19). "Choose you this day whom ye will serve" (Joshua 24:15). And Jesus, weeping over a city: "how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!" (Matthew 23:37). He would. They would not. The refusal was real, and He let it be real, and it cost Him.

Irenaeus, writing in the second century, took that very verse and built the answer on it. "God made man a free [agent] from the beginning, possessing his own power," he wrote, made "to obey the behests of God voluntarily, and not by compulsion of God" (Against Heresies IV.37). Goodness that is forced is not goodness; it is only nature. God wanted the other kind.

One caution, so the case is not overstated. "God is love" is not the only sentence of its shape in the Bible. The same John wrote "God is light" (1 John 1:5) and "God is a Spirit" (John 4:24); Hebrews says "our God is a consuming fire" (Hebrews 12:29). Love is not the one word that swallows the rest. It is the word that tells you what the rest are for.

Where the two answers meet

Jesus did not treat glory and love as rivals. He put them in one sentence. On the last week, told that Greeks were asking for Him, He said: "The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit" (John 12:23-24). The glory He named was a death. A few verses later: "Father, glorify thy name," and the answer from heaven, "I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again" (John 12:28). Then, the moment Judas walked out into the dark to sell Him: "Now is the Son of man glorified, and God is glorified in him" (John 13:31). And in His last prayer, the two words finally side by side: "that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me: for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world" (John 17:24).

So the glory of God, the thing the first answer is right to insist on, is not a throne room where He is admired from a distance. Paul says exactly where it is seen: "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Corinthians 4:6). A face. A man on a cross. The glory the first answer wants and the love the second answer wants turn out to be one thing looked at from two sides. Glory is what love looks like when it is finally seen. And the place it was finally seen was Golgotha, where God was, in the same act, "just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus" (Romans 3:26).

Augustine said the underlying thing in two sentences. God "would never permit the existence of anything evil among His works, if He were not so omnipotent and good that He can bring good even out of evil" (Enchiridion 11). And: "He judged it better to bring good out of evil, than not to permit any evil to exist" (Enchiridion 27). Better, not because evil is good, but because of what He would do with it. Joseph said the same thing to the brothers who sold him: "ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good" (Genesis 50:20).

Where this lands

You can hold both answers, then, and should. God made a world where love could be refused, because He wanted love. He knew it would be refused, and He had already decided what He would do about that. What He did is the most glorious thing that has ever happened, and it does not look like glory. It looks like a man dying for the people who refused Him. "God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). Get the love wrong and "for His glory" becomes a God who allows pain for an audience. Get the love right and His glory is exactly what you would expect from Him: "He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?" (Romans 8:32). That is why He allowed it. Not to be watched. To be known, and to have you.

Related: The Character of God, Providence, Free Will, Suffering, and The Heart. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of God are marked in gold, the words of Christ in purple. Augustine from the Enchiridion and Irenaeus from Against Heresies, both in the public-domain Schaff translations at CCEL.