I'm not a christian, but I grew up in a Baptist household, so I have at least a passing understanding of the Bible. Lemme know if I got any wrong.
If I'm understanding the bible correctly;
God Created heaven and Earth, Including Mankind and Angels
God is all-knowing and all-powerful
Relevant to this discussion, God created Lucifer and all the angels who sided with him.
God made Man in His image, and ordered the angels to serve them.
Lucifer, prideful of his own beauty, and envious of God's (at least perceived) favoritism of Man, and of God's position, started a rebellion in heaven and was/will be cast down into the lake of fire(aka Hell).
lucifer later tempted/took the form of the Serpent in the Garden of Eden and tempted Eve to eat of the Tree of Knowledge.
my conclusion: God, with full knowledge of what lucifer would do/become created him and set him on the path that led to his downfall, and to the Sin of Mankind.
Or to put it more simply; God created Sin through his foreknowledge of what Lucifer would become.
I'm not trying to start a shitstorm here, but this is the logical conclusion that I find myself at.
Any Christian pedes wanna poke holes in this for me?
First, you tell me if creating beings with no freewill is worth creating in the first place.
To quote the great C.S. Lewis:
Yup, free will. We all have the “potential” to commit sin, didn’t mean God had foreknowledge. We must choose. Doesn’t mean we won’t make some wrong decisions, but some evil acts we just won’t do. Life on earth—kinda like a loyalty test.
Or, it is possible that, because God knows all that will happen, and can manipulate His creation, He may have plans that we cannot imagine for the fallen beings. For instance, I was recently listening to an Orthodox priest who mentioned a doctrine unfamiliar to me, that until Christ returns, there is a Hades for the condemned souls and they can be redeemed even from there. But at the end of the age, Hades will truly become Hell and there will be no escape. Demons appear to be irredeemable.
You may be confusing Hades with Purgatory.
No, he was discussing a special day when prayers are offered for those in hell. Maybe he meant Purgatory, but he didn't call it that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKei3nbx6wE
Before Christ's sacrifice, there was an afterlife of sorts that had two sections, one for the lost and one for the OT believers. The former doesn't really have a name, but the latter is called Abraham's Bosom, and the realm as a whole is called Sheol in the OT. This concept got conflated with Greek notions of Hades and Tartarus. Given the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man, Tartarus is an apt comparison to the place where the lost are tormented.
After Christ's death, He took the souls that were in Abraham's Bosom into heaven proper. The lost are left behind in what we now call hell. After the Millennium, these souls will be called up to the great white throne for judgment. Since they didn't trust Christ, they and hell itself will be cast into the lake of fire for eternity.
I'm sorry, but there's no room in scripture for the lost to be saved after physical death. It's common for Christians to concoct schemes whereby the lost get a second chance, or that they all get saved in the end (universal salvation). They mean well, as no one wants anyone to be in fiery torment for eternity. But the Bible indicates that this life is the only life you have to make the right choice.
God gave us free will. The choice is ours whether to serve God or Satan. This is not the same thing as creating sin.
Absolutely, freewill is paramount (insert vague reference to AI here), but I'm not trying to pass some moral judgement, just trying to figure out if I have this correct. If God created Lucifer with foreknowledge of the sin he would introduce into the world, did God create sin?
God created the option/freedom to sin. Sin is just a voluntary distancing from the Creator. You can choose to go to Him or not, but He wants you to choose Him. That is the whole point.
Also, what would be the other option? To not create Lucifer? Eventually you have to accept that to truly be creating beings with genuine freewill, something like Lucifer would be spawned on its own volition.
So then, God needed Lucifer to tempt man to sin to create the environment for freewill to flourish?
Without the temptation to sin, no choice would be made, right?
Here is the problem with applying human logic while pondering the infinite: if someone were to ask me the classic question "Can God create a boulder so heavy that even He can't lift it?" My response would be "Yes, but since He is omnipotent and there is nothing He can't do, it would break your mind upon witnessing it" And so it is with Him needing Lucifer to unfold the story of creation as we know it.
You don't need an external source of influence.
When God told Adam and Eve to not eat of the Tree (and to keep the Garden, and subdue the earth), they could choose to follow any or none of those commands. Satan was the specific catalyst for the Fall, but it could have happened from Adam and Eve just deciding on their own that they wanted to do their own thing. Man's Fall could have happened with or without Satan.
I don’t think God “needed” Lucifer for that necessarily. Lucifer was simply making sure Adam and Eve did disobey.
Adam and Eve were fully capable of disobeying God without Lucifer’s help, otherwise Gods command to not eat of the Tree of Knowledge wouldn’t have meant anything.
THIS!!!!
Agree