But just here we may ask — and reverently so — Did Adam’s and Eve’s sin take God by surprise, and did He have to think out a way of escape for man after his fall? Here we come to the very acme of the infinite grace of God. May the Holy Spirit grant each reader spiritual understanding to apprehend “the breadth and length and depth and height of the love of God which passeth knowledge.”

No, Adam’s sin did not take God by surprise, nor was God’s way of redemption an afterthought. God knew, even before the foundation of the world and man’s creation, the sad and tragic devastation sin would work in the human race. God had anticipated the fall and was ready for it.

The cross, which was to bridge the chasm made by sin, was set up in love in the dateless eternity of the past before it was set up in promise in Eden or in history on Calvary. “The divine redemptive movement, in purpose anterior to creation, once determined upon, never paused until it victoriously expressed itself in the language of Calvary. . . The atonement in principle and in God is dateless, but as taking effect on man, it is historical, though dateless. Redemption then, in the large, is anything but an afterthought, a mere appendix to make good an unexpected disaster which had overtaken God’s universe. Both sin and redemption were foreseen from the beginning” (H. C. Mabie, The Divine Reason of the Cross, chap. 2).

There was a Cross set up in Heaven before it was ever set up on earth. The atonement for man’s sin made visible, effectual, and historical on Calvary was wrought out in purpose and in principle in the heart of the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the dateless past.

Revelation 13:8

“And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the Book of Life of the Lamb, slain from the foundation of the world.”

Ephesians 1:4

“According as he has chosen us in him before [the] world’s foundation, that we should be holy and blameless before him in love.”

Acts 2:23

“Him, being delivered by the determinate will and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken and by wicked hands have crucified and slain.”

2 Timothy 1:9

“Who saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but in accordance with His own purpose and grace, which was given to us in Christ Jesus before the world began.”

What can these words mean but that in the counsels of the triune God in the eternity of the past, the awful tragedy in Eden was foreknown and that, then and there, the wondrous plan of salvation through the Son’s redemptive work was formed by which God-in-Christ should reconcile a lost, sinning race to Himself? 

Source: “Life on the Highest Plane” by Ruth Paxson

O God, You knew we would hate You, reject You, despise You, and even kill You, yet it did not stop You from creating us. Thank You, I’m so glad to have been born!