I placed my belief in Jesus as my Savior when I was a young boy. That belief was sincere and legitimate, which meant that God the Holy Spirit took up permanent residence inside my body and I was thus “born again.” A few weeks afterward, as a way of publicly evidencing the fact that I had experienced salvation, I was baptized by immersion.

The next few years saw me living the way the average Christian lives. I went to church, prayed, read my Bible, and for the most part lived a moral kind of life. But then came my teenage years. That’s when the wheels fell off my walk with Christ. I stopped going to church, stopped praying, stopped reading my Bible, and replaced it all with other things that I shouldn’t have been doing.

It took a while, but by my early twenties my sinful ways had led me to rock bottom. That’s when I rededicated my life to Christ. Did I get saved again? No. I had never lost my salvation. What I did do was confess my sins and genuinely repent of them. I also did something I’d never done before: I surrendered myself 100% to Christ’s lordship over my life.

As a result of my rededication, I began to seek God’s will concerning every area of my life. That included the so-called “little” decisions as well as the “big” ones. And truth be told, since then I haven’t really had all that much trouble discerning what God did or didn’t want me to do. Oh, sure, some decisions take a fair amount of time and a lot of prayer to figure out, and oftentimes I’ve even had to work through the slow process of proving God’s will regarding a situation. In the end, though, I’ve always gotten the answers I needed. I don’t say that to brag. I offer it simply as proof that the Lord does have a will for the saved believer and does guide that believer into it.

Ah, but there is one particular knot in the wood that has oftentimes plagued me in regards to doing God’s will in my life. It’s the problem of other people preventing me from doing that will. You ask, “But how could someone prevent someone else from doing God’s will?” Oh, it’s not that hard. Consider the following hypothetical examples:

1. It is God’s will for Linda to marry Frank, but Frank refuses to submit to God’s plan and rebelliously marries Jennifer instead. Where does that leave Linda?
2. It is God’s will for Phillip to get a certain job, but Jeff, who is in charge of the hiring of personnel, isn’t a submitted Christian, has his own agenda for who he hires, and subsequently gives the job to Ray instead. Where does that leave Phillip?
3. It is God’s will for little Joey to attend church, but his parents, Steven and Monica, have no interest whatsoever in attending church themselves or taking him. Where does that leave little Joey?

On and on we could go with the hypothetical examples. How could that not be the case when the vast majority people living on planet earth DON’T attempt to discern and do God’s will concerning the countless circumstances and decisions life presents? Consequently, we all at various times get caught in the backwash of other people rebelling against God’s will. Call it unfortunate. Call it frustrating. Call it complex. But whatever you call it, call it life.

So, where does this leave us, as Christians? Well, this is where God’s foreknowledge comes into play. Because He has perfect foreknowledge concerning every act of rebellion against His will (and has had that foreknowledge since before Genesis 1:1), no act of rebellion ever catches Him off guard or unprepared. Much to the contrary, as soon as the act is committed, God immediately sets His alternative plan into motion.

The perfect illustration of this is Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. They went against God’s will by eating the fruit from the knowledge of good and evil, and in so doing fell into sin. But did God panic? No. Instead, He instituted the concept of a substitutionary sacrifice as He killed either one animal or two animals and used animal skin to make clothing for Adam and Eve (Genesis 3:21; Hebrews 9:22). This shedding of blood was an early foreshadowing of all the animal sacrifices that would be offered up during the Old Testament period under the law. Taking things even further, all of those Old Testament offerings eventually found their ultimate fulfillment in Jesus offering Himself up on a Roman cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world.

Now let’s think about something fascinating: From eternity past, God’s ultimate plan was NOT that Adam and Eve and all their descendants would live in sinless perfection in the garden of Eden; it was instead that Jesus would die as the substitutionary sacrifice for the sins committed by Adam and Eve and all their descendants. How do we know this was God’s ultimate plan? Consider the following passages and make special note of the words I’ve highlighted in each:

…knowing that you were not redeemed with corruptible things, like silver or gold, from your aimless conduct received by tradition from your fathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot. He indeed was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you… (1 Peter 1:18-20, N.K.J.V.)

All who dwell on the earth will worship him, whose names have not been written in the Book of Life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. (Revelation 13:8, N.K.J.V.)

You see, this is how God works. In some strange way that you and I can’t fully fathom or grasp, His original plan doesn’t necessarily have to be His ultimate plan. Even more than that, His original plan doesn’t have to be as good as His ultimate plan. Have you ever thought about what would have happened if Adam and Eve hadn’t sinned? I’ll tell you. Since bodily death is the result of sin (Romans 5:12), they would have lived forever on earth in the garden of Eden. That means that a sinless Adam and Eve would have been immortal there in the garden of Eden. You say, “Great! What could have been lacking about that?” What would have been lacking about it is this: They would never have seen the inside of heaven or been able to spend eternity in direct fellowship with God on His throne.

Do you see now how what seemed to be God’s secondary plan of Jesus dying on a cross to eternally pay their sin debt was actually God’s ultimate plan? Furthermore, do you see how it was the better plan for Adam and Eve? This explains why the Genesis story makes a special point of saying that God drove them out of the garden after their sin and posted cherub angels and a flaming sword to prevent them from continuing to have access to the garden’s tree of life (Genesis 4:22-24). Evidently, it was the fruit from that tree that gave them their bodily immortality. If they had continued to eat that fruit after they had sinned, they would have been forced to live endlessly on the earth in their pitiful, sinful state.

So, in closing, I ask you, “Can you think of a situation in your life when someone else prevented you from getting in on God’s will?” If you can, then take some time right now and meditate on how things played out for you in the wake of that debacle. When you do this, you might just find that God’s backup plan for you concerning that situation actually turned out better for you than His original plan would have. Even more than that, because of His foreknowledge, in many situations His backup plan winds up being what He was ideally up to the whole time. Is this a deep subject? You bet. But is it a Bible one? Absolutely. And I hope this post has helped you understand it at least a little better.