Question: In your book, Knowing the Bible 101, on pages 63 and 64, you write: “God created an army of angels…one of the angels attempted a mutiny.” I’ve always heard that God was perfect and could do nothing that was imperfect. Please explain the imperfection in Lucifer that permitted him to mutiny.

Answer: God is perfect and cannot sin. And all that he creates is “very good” (Genesis 1:31). However, that doesn’t mean that His created beings (including Satan) were created without the ability to sin.

God created Satan (actually, he was first called Lucifer) as a sinless being, just as God created Adam and Eve as sinless beings. But Lucifer–and Adam and Eve–were also created with a free will. That is, they had the freedom to choose whether or not to obey God. Had they obeyed God and never strayed from that obedience, they would have remained sinless. But Lucifer disobeyed God and fell from heaven. Adam and Eve disobeyed God and were cast out of the Garden of Eden. Disobedience is sin. It is anything that does not meet God’s perfect standard.

God could have created all beings without free will so that they would have no choice but to obey him. But what good are created beings who love and obey God only because he made them that way? God desires that we love and obey him willingly.

Some theologians have argued that God’s perfection and holiness and goodness are made more evident by the fact that he created beings with free will.