God Did Not Improvise

The Story We Tell Children

Most of us learned it in Sunday school, with a felt board. God makes a garden. Adam and Eve spoil it. The garden is in ruins, and so God, after some thought, sends his Son to put things right. First the plan, then the breakdown, then the repair.

Nobody tells it that way to be unkind to God. But listen to what the order says. It says something happened in Eden that heaven had not made provision for, and that the cross is what you do when the first arrangement fails. A good many adult sermons keep the same sequence and just use longer words. The cross becomes a rescue mission launched in a hurry.

I want to argue that this is wrong, and that people pay for the mistake in two places. The first is the hospital corridor, where someone is wondering whether God was looking the other way. The second is the three o’clock waking, when a believer who has failed again wonders how firm a fix can be if it was patched together after the damage. A God who improvises is a God whose repairs might not hold.

Scripture tells a different story. In it the cross is in view before the world has a floor under it. That doesn’t remove the pain from the corridor. It changes who is standing there with you.

What Scripture Says About Before

Start with the texts that say it most plainly. Paul, writing to the church in Ephesus, says this of the people who belong to Christ.

“even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.”

— Ephesians 1:4 (ESV)

Peter says something similar about Christ himself. He has reminded his readers that they were ransomed, and then he says with what.

“the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times”

— 1 Peter 1:19 to 20 (ESV)

Notice what Peter has put side by side. The lamb, the blood, and the phrase “before the foundation of the world” all sit in one breath. Paul adds a third witness when he tells Timothy that God’s grace was given to us “in Christ Jesus before the ages began” (2 Timothy 1:9, ESV). Jesus himself speaks of a kingdom “prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matthew 25:34, ESV).

Then there’s Revelation 13:8, the verse many preachers reach for first, and it deserves honest handling because it can’t carry what is often put on it. The English Standard Version, in its 2025 text, reads that those who worship the beast are the people

“everyone whose name has not been written from the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who was slain.”

— Revelation 13:8 (ESV)

On that reading the phrase “from the foundation of the world” attaches to the writing of the names. The New International Version, the King James Version, the New King James Version and the New Living Translation attach it to the slaying instead, so that the NIV ends with “the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world.” Greek word order allows either. The United Bible Societies handbook on Revelation prefers the reading with “written”, partly because Revelation 17:8 uses the same phrase and can only mean that, and it names Phillips, the NIV and the Revised English Bible as translations that go the other way, with commentators who point to 1 Peter 1:19 to 20 (Bratcher & Hatton, 1993). One small practical note. For years the ESV said “before” the foundation of the world here. Some Bible websites still show that older wording, and the Greek preposition is the ordinary one for “from”.

So what do we do with a verse that’s honestly divided? We stop asking it to be the whole case. Either way it places something before creation, whether the book of the Lamb or the slaying of the Lamb. And the other texts I’ve just read don’t have the problem. Ephesians has no ambiguity about when the choosing happened. Peter has none about who was foreknown. That’s enough to stand on. It’s a stronger position than one proof text, because nobody can knock it over by arguing about a preposition.

Why the Old Testament Sounds Like a Rehearsal

If the cross was always the plan, then what was the long run of sacrifices before it? Anyone who has run a generator knows the answer in outline. You fill the tank in the morning, and by evening you are filling it again. It does the job, and it also tells you every day that you’re not connected to the grid. The sacrifices of Israel were like that. The Day of Atonement came once a year, as Leviticus 16:34 lays down, and the following year it came again.

The writer of Hebrews is blunt about what that repetition meant. “For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Hebrews 10:4, ESV). Then he turns the argument on its head with a sentence that is easy to read past.

“for then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.”

— Hebrews 9:26 (ESV)

Look at the starting line he picks. He doesn’t say “since Adam” or “since Sinai”. He says since the foundation of the world. The writer is measuring the sacrifice of Christ against the whole span of creation, and finding that it has been in view over all of it.

The earliest hint comes in Genesis, in the same chapter as the fall. God tells the serpent that the woman’s offspring “shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15, ESV). The verse reads like a plan already moving. Isaiah, many centuries on, says of the suffering servant that “it was the will of the LORD to crush him” (Isaiah 53:10, ESV), which is a hard sentence and not one to soften. And when John the Baptist sees Jesus walking towards him, the first thing he does is point. “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29, ESV). John is not announcing a new idea. He’s saying that this is what the lambs had been about.

There’s a further question an honest sceptic will ask. Couldn’t God have just forgiven? Why a cross at all? Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria in Egypt, took that question seriously in the fourth century in On the Incarnation. He said it was “out of the question to leave men to the current of corruption; because this would be unseemly, and unworthy of God’s goodness” (Athanasius, chapter 6, section 10). A few paragraphs later he argues that repentance on its own could stop sinful acts but could not restore a nature that corruption had already entered, and that only the Word, through whom everything was first made, could remake it (chapter 7, paraphrased). I’d rather not claim more than that for him. But notice the shape of his reasoning. He doesn’t treat the cross as a convenient gesture. He treats it as the fitting answer to the actual size of the problem, which is what you would expect if the answer had been prepared before the problem arrived.

The Strongest Objection

The best objection I know goes like this. If the Lamb was in view before Adam ate the fruit, then God saw the fall coming. If he saw it coming and made the world anyway, he is responsible for it, and Adam was a character in a script. The alternative is that God did not see it coming, and then he improvised after all. You’ve picked one of the horns, and neither is comfortable.

I’d answer that Scripture refuses the choice, and refuses it in the plainest place. Peter, preaching at Pentecost, says of Jesus that he was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God”, and that “you crucified and killed” him “by the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23, ESV). The plan is God’s and the guilt is theirs, in the same sentence. Peter doesn’t stop to explain how the two fit, and neither will I pretend to. Christians have disagreed for a long time about whether God’s purpose here is best called foreknowledge or decree, and thoughtful people sit on both sides of that. What both sides hold is that the sin belongs to the sinner and that God’s answer to it was never an afterthought.

And here the objection quietly backfires. It pictures a God who watches from a safe distance, signs off on a world with a flaw in it, and leaves the creatures to cope. The Lamb is the opposite of that. Whatever else foresight meant in heaven, it meant that the one who saw the cost was the one who took it on himself. A God who knew what the garden would cost and began it anyway, with his own Son as the price, is not an engineer shrugging at a defect. He’s a father who signs for the debt before the child is born.

What an Unsurprised God Means for Suffering

Picture a woman in Ibadan whose brother has died after a crash on the expressway. At the burial, someone kind and well meaning leans over and says that God knows best. Anyone who has stood at a Nigerian burial knows that sentence can land like a slap, and that the person who says it often means well and has run out of words. It is a cheap sentence when it travels alone, because it asks the grieving to admire a plan they can’t see.

The cross is what stops it being cheap. Look at what the Bible shows at the centre of heaven. In John’s vision, “between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain” (Revelation 5:6, ESV). The wounds are still there. The one who rules is the one who was hurt, and he carries the marks of it into the throne room. That doesn’t explain why a brother died on the road. Scripture doesn’t give us that explanation, and I’d distrust anyone who says they have it. What it gives is something different and, I think, sturdier. The worst thing that will ever happen in this world was already inside God’s purpose, and he went through it himself. So nothing that happens to you lies outside the reach of that purpose, and the God in charge of it is no stranger to loss.

I should say what this doesn’t claim. It doesn’t say every sorrow is good, or that your pain is secretly a gift. Joseph told his brothers that what they meant for evil God meant for good (Genesis 50:20), and he said it after the fact, as a man looking back, and he did not say it to anyone in the middle of the pit. The promise isn’t that you’ll understand. The promise is that you aren’t being managed by someone who is making it up as he goes.

What It Means for the Person Who Keeps Doubting

Now go back to the three o’clock waking. A believer has failed at the same thing for the fourth time this year, and the voice in the dark says that surely this is the failure that finally goes too far for God. If the cross were a hurried fix, that voice would have a point. A patch has limits. But Paul tells Timothy that God “saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began” (2 Timothy 1:9, ESV).

Before the ages began, you had done nothing. There was no list of your failures to be surprised by, because grace was not waiting on the list. The cross was set against sin, and that includes the sin you’re ashamed of tonight. It wasn’t drafted against some milder version of you.

One thing needs saying carefully. Ephesians 1:4 says God chose “us”, the people in Christ, and it is written to a church. So I wouldn’t tell any reader that the text hands them a private certificate with their name printed on it. What I’d say is that if you are in Christ, you are not an afterthought in his plan, and that the apostle who wrote those words thought it enough to stop a troubled conscience. Nor is any of this a licence. The same verse says the purpose is that we’d be holy and blameless, and the passage from Timothy speaks of a holy calling. The assurance is meant to steady a person who is running toward God, and not to let one stop running.

Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa, wrote in the opening of his Confessions, in the English of E. B. Pusey, that God had made us for himself, “and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee” (Augustine, Book I). He had tried a good deal else before he wrote that. The restlessness he describes is not a malfunction to be managed. It’s the sign that we were made for a particular person, and the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world is the answer prepared for that exact longing, in advance, at cost.

Where to Start Tonight

Tonight, if you can, read 1 Peter 1:17 to 21 slowly, from start to finish, and not only the verses I’ve picked out. Notice that Peter is writing to people who were scattered and under pressure, and that he reaches for the lamb and the foundation of the world to steady them. He doesn’t reach for a theory of suffering.

Then, if you’re the one who has been waiting for God to catch up with your situation, try saying aloud that he isn’t behind. It may feel like a thin sentence at first. It is carrying the weight of a cross that was in view before you had a name.

And if some part of this argument sits badly with you, particularly the part about the plan and the guilt in Acts 2:23, take it to your pastor or to an older believer you trust, and let them argue back. It’s a question worth an evening’s conversation, and I’d rather you wrestled with it than left it alone.

References

Biblical References

Ephesians 1:4 (ESV). Epigraph and the first text in the argument: God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world; the passage that carries the case without Revelation 13:8.
1 Peter 1:19 to 20 (ESV). Christ as the foreknown lamb before the foundation of the world; the second clear text, and the parallel the commentators cite for the “slain” reading. Also named in the closing invitation as 1 Peter 1:17 to 21, for the reader to read in full.
2 Timothy 1:9 (ESV). Grace given in Christ Jesus before the ages began, not on the ground of works; used in the section on assurance.
Matthew 25:34 (ESV). The kingdom prepared from the foundation of the world; a further parallel for God’s settled purpose.
Revelation 13:8 (ESV). The translation question in 2025 ESV wording; the NIV phrase “the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world” is quoted as a short comparison only.
Revelation 17:8. Referred to by reference only, as the parallel that favours “written”.
Hebrews 10:4 (ESV). The blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sins; why the old sacrifices were repeated.
Hebrews 9:26 (ESV). Christ would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world; measures the cross against the span of creation.
Leviticus 16:34. Referred to by reference only: the Day of Atonement as an annual ordinance.
Genesis 3:15 (ESV). The earliest hint of the offspring who will bruise the serpent’s head, in the same chapter as the fall.
Isaiah 53:10 (ESV). The will of the LORD to crush the servant; the cross as purpose and not accident.
John 1:29 (ESV). John the Baptist names Jesus as the Lamb of God.
Acts 2:23 (ESV). Divine plan and human guilt in one sentence; the answer to the strongest objection.
Revelation 5:6 (ESV). The Lamb standing as though slain at the centre of heaven; the turn into suffering.
Genesis 50:20. Referred to by reference only: Joseph’s backward look at what his brothers meant for evil.

Other Sources

Athanasius of Alexandria. (n.d.). On the incarnation of the Word (chapters 7 to 9; Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers translation, translator not named on the page). Early Church Texts. Used for the paraphrase of chapter 7. https://www.earlychurchtexts.com/public/athanasius_on_atonement.htm
Athanasius of Alexandria. (n.d.). On the incarnation of the Word (chapter 6, section 10; translator not named on the page). Bibliothek der Kirchenväter. https://bkv.unifr.ch/works/cpg-2091/versions/incarnation-of-the-word/divisions/7
Augustine of Hippo. (n.d.). The confessions of Saint Augustine (E. B. Pusey, Trans.; Book I). Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3296/pg3296.html
Bible Hub. (n.d.). Revelation 13:8 [Parallel translations]. https://biblehub.com/revelation/13-8.htm
Bratcher, R. G., & Hatton, H. A. (1993). A handbook on the Revelation to John (UBS Handbook Series). United Bible Societies. Read at https://tips.translation.bible/story/translation-commentary-on-revelation-138/
Crossway. (2026). Revelation 13:8; 17:8 (ESV). ESV.org. https://www.esv.org/verses/Revelation+13:8;Revelation+17:8/

Translation Notices

Scripture quotations are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
The short phrase quoted from Revelation 13:8 in the New International Version is from the Holy Bible, New International Version, copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.