Obedience, of course, is a good thing. Our Father delights to see His children embracing His wisdom, heeding His warnings, walking in the joy that is His law. When we dance in His presence we presage the beauty and glory of heaven. But this is not how we get there.
“In the beginning God” tells us that once there was God, and nothing else. There are no givens that He must contend with, and so everything that came after is utterly under His absolute control. He could have constructed a world in which there was no temptation. He could have planned a world in which there was no sin. But He didn’t.
Some believers at this point break out in odes to the glory of free will. God, they tell us, was so utterly committed to having our love for Him flow freely that He took the risk of the fall. The fall, it turned out, was a plenty horrible thing, but still, when you look at the beauty and importance of free will, it’s all worth it, right?
No. “Free will” is not worth it. It is not why God ordained that humanity would fall into sin. He did ordain it, but for a far more worthy reason. Sin came into this world that He might manifest the glory of His grace. God is, of course, glorified in the manifestation of His just wrath, as Romans 9 makes abundantly clear. We ought not to shy away from that truth, from that glory. We will praise Him eternally for the justice of the eternal torment of the damned.
But the grace. Oh, the grace. Our sin is the theater of His mercy. By it we are broken, that He might heal us. By it we are lost, that He might find us. By it we are shamed, that He might delight in us. He delights in our broken and contrite spirits not because they are worthy to be praised, but because He is worthy to be praised. He delights when we are bowed down by the weight of our sin, because He rejoices to lift it from us.
We may not, of course, sin all the more that grace may abound. Neither, however, may we stay in our remorse, because grace abounds. Our calling is to enter into the reality and depth of our sins, to own not just our misdeeds, but the darkness that yet resides in our hearts. No matter how deeply we look at our sin, however, it has already been outpaced by His grace. We look at it as His children, already forgiven, loved from eternity. We give thanks then not just for forgiveness, but for the Forgiver. We rejoice to know that He rejoices to forgive.
Ours is no begrudging Father. He is so quick to forgive us that He doesn’t wait for our free will to bring us to repentance, but sends His Spirit to drive us there. All the world is His stage. We are indeed His players. May we, however, ever thank Him for every plot twist He has planned, every line He has written, every moment of shame and contrition. For it all, all of it, redounds to His everlasting glory.