Making an Omelet

Details: Written by: Alan Jones; Read Time: 29 mins; Published: 22 July 2026; Hits: 470

A Theodicy of Tested Power. We can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, but God, it turns out, can undo the breaking and still serve the omelet.

Omelet

1. The Detective's Dilemma

Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot observed that it is far easier to catch a murderer than it is to prevent a murder. A detective works with what has already happened—the evidence a crime leaves behind, the patterns criminals reveal by committing crime. Prevention, by contrast, requires skills vastly superior to those of detection. No detective, however brilliant he or his mustaches are, can easily prevent a crime, even one he may accurately predict.

Poirot is commenting on detective work, a distinctly human endeavor. But set it beside the oldest question in theology—why does a good and all-powerful God allow evil to happen at all—it becomes a bit of a mirror, and a strangely honest one. If it is easier to catch a murderer than to prevent a murder, is it possible that God, too, has chosen the harder and more meaningful path—not to prevent evil from ever appearing, but to let it run its course and then undo it completely for a greater purpose? And if so, what would that decision say about the difference between a world that is merely innocent and naive and a world that is truly good?

This essay argues that there is precisely such reasoning given in the Bible—and that the reason lies in a distinction that’s very easy to miss: the difference between innocence and righteousness.

2. Righteousness, Not Innocence

Innocence, amongst other things, is the state of never having been tested. Adam, in the garden, was innocent in exactly this sense—created good, but untried. At first he had never faced real temptation and refused it; he had never chosen rightly under pressure. His goodness was given at creation, not achieved—in fact God called His creation “very good” (Genesis 1:31.) And Scripture is honest about how little innocent goodness can withstand: it lasted precisely one conversation with a serpent.

Christ's righteousness is a different category of goodness entirely. The letter to the Hebrews says he was "tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin" (Hebrews 4:15), and that he "learned obedience from what he suffered" (Hebrews 5:8). This is not the language of a naive innocence that was simply preserved. It is the language of a righteousness that was earned through real trial and real refusal of temptation. Refusal to give in to temptation is very different from never being tempted. Paul's contrast between Adam and Christ in Romans 5 depends on exactly this difference: the first Adam's untested goodness proved fragile: the second Adam's tested goodness proved unbreakable.

If that is true of the two Adams, could it be true of creation as a whole? Perhaps the entire shape that the world is in—its long history of evil permitted and evil eventually undone—is not a design flaw that God is managing, but a project aimed at producing something innocence could not produce on its own: proven, battle-tested righteousness. Not eggs left untouched in the carton, but an omelet; the making of which requires the breaking of some eggs.

3. Three Tiers: Some Eggs, a Hot Pan, an Omelet

To hold this together, it helps to distinguish three stages of reality rather than two.

Mesotopia — a term for the messy present, in-between age—is the raw material. It is where real choices are actually made, where good and evil are not merely known about but lived through, one decision at a time. Perhaps one could call it A Brief Time of History, transmogrifying Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time.”
One of the little spoken conclusions of phenomenology is that the moral significance of a choice can only be established if the choice is actually made. Knowing with certainty that someone would choose well if tested, is not the same thing as that choice actually occurring. It is the difference between an eternal, unchanging knowing and an unfolding, temporal happening. Some eggs, sitting uncracked on the counter, are only potential. Mesotopia is where the shell breaks. But it’s not where the omelet is made.

Eschaton — the moment of final judgment—is the pan: the point where heat is applied, where accounts are settled and evil is formally answered and unmade. Paul writes to the Thessalonians that the "lawless one" will be destroyed and "brought to nothing" at Christ's coming (2 Thessalonians 2:8)—brought to nothing here is the word katargeo meaning not just stopped, but nullified, as though its power to have ever mattered is cancelled outright. That is true Justice, what we call justice is, at best, only half of the picture. Justice, like light, exists once for all. Time has no meaning for either.

Aeon — the age beyond the Eschaton—is the omelet: the finished thing, the purpose. Paul tells the Colossians to "set your hearts on things above" (Colossians 3:1–2), a command built on a prior fact: their life is already "hidden with Christ in God." This is not an instruction to strive toward a future goal—it is a summons to turn toward something already true, ontologically secure, beyond the reaching and striving that define every stage before it. If the Eschaton is the last and largest act of judgment, it is still, in that sense, not truly an end but rather straining toward an end. What lies beyond it was never straining toward anything. It simply is.

Eggs are never going to become an omelet without the pan, but the pan alone does not explain what the eggs are for; only the omelet does that.

4. The Chaos Was Already There

If Mesotopia is where testing happens, it should not be surprising that the material it works with is neither tidy nor comfortable. Genesis 1 begins, famously, with the earth "formless and void," darkness over the face of "the deep"—tehom, the same root behind the Ancient Near East's chaos-waters of the sea, the embodiment of unpredictability (echoed later in the sea-monster imagery of Job and the Psalms.) This chaos is not created on day one. It is already there, and God's Spirit "hovers" over it (Genesis 1:2), and God brings order out of what already existed rather than erasing it. In Genesis 1 God also separates the chaos into two types—this is grossly overlooked foundational theology. In “days” 1-3 they are separated by the places of God’s order. God’s order becomes a middle dial between two extremes of chaos, two kinds of "the deep”—tehom. Unpredictability, symbolized by the sea; and extreme predictability (or sterility), symbolized by space.
And then in “days” 4-6 the various places of order and chaos are populated.
It is no accident that, even in 2026, we refer to vessels that travel through both forms of chaos by the same name: ships.

A Word about Chaos

‘Chaos’ here names bounded disorder or unintegrated potency. In Scripture it appears as primordial instability, as moral rebellion, as hostile personal powers, as unpredictability, and, by contrast, as sterile hyper-predictability: overbearing control that becomes fruitless. The sea often symbolizes the first; barrenness and desolation often symbolize the last.
Images of the unpredictable chaos of the sea are both abundant and blatant in the bible. Images of sterility chaos are a little more subtle, but they are not scarce:

The “void” aspect of the deep in Genesis 1.
Desert imagery.
Exodus 1:15-22 — an oppressive order trying to regulate fertility.
Isaiah 54:1 — sterility reversed by divine action.
Jeremiah 4:23-26 — creation rendered “formless and void” imagery in judgment.
Joel 1:10-12 — land stripped of joy, vine, fig tree, and grain.
Zephaniah 1:12 — people “stagnant” or complacent.
Romans 8:20-23 — creation subjected to futility, waiting for liberation.

Chaos left undirected is benign—Leviathan given a place to play; only chaos taken up by a will, weaponized rather than merely present, becomes evil personified, whether as the sea's naked ascent (Isaiah 14) or as sterility's quieter method, intrigue and counterfeit order (Daniel 8:23's "master of intrigue," 2 Thessalonians 2:9's "lying wonders" or 2:1-12's "man of lawleslessness").
All except in one case. The wind "blowing where it wishes" (John 3:8) pneuma means both wind and Spirit in Greek, exactly the way ruach does in Hebrew "over the tehom" in Genesis 1:2; a holy will.
This picture of the Spirit isn't unpredictablity the way the sea is unpredictable—the sea's unpredictability is a real property of bounded, created chaos-material. Neither is it weaponized chaos, but the wind of the Spirit is personified unpredictability. The Spirit's apparent unpredictability is something else entirely: it's what perfect, willed order looks like from inside a system too small to see the whole pattern at once. The Spirit doesn't shield the tested Son, Christ, from chaos, the Spirit propels him into it—first into the wilderness, then to the cross as the deepest chaos available, dissolution, death and apparent abandonment. This is at the chiastic crux of the entire Biblical narrative: Out of chaos comes order in Genesis 1, the Messiah is lead intentionally into the depths of the void, the end comes with a vanquishing of personified chaos, willful intrigue, evil. What remains in an adverbial kind of way is LOVE^1, Hope and Faith, not LOVE alone. Hope and Faith remind us that there is more benign chaos to rule over, perhaps infinitely more.

It is so important to note that nothing in Genesit 1 suggests that the chaos realms are destroyed at creation. Psalm 104:26 describes Leviathan, the sea-monster, as something God formed to "play" in the waters—he is given a place, he’s not annihilated. And still, at the end of it all, God calls the result "very good" (Genesis 1:31). Goodness, in other words, was never the absence of a chaos-power. It was chaos held at the edge of a bounded, functioning order—chaos endured, not eliminated.

That single observation out of the first chapter of the Bible reframes the whole problem of evil. If evil (or the raw material capable of becoming evil) was present from the very first "good," then its later eruption is not evidence that something in the design had failed. The Eschaton, when it finally deals with evil in full, is not correcting a flaw that crept in later. It is completing something that was already true on day one: order was always meant to hold back the chaos, not erase its possibility.

5. Accountability Beings

Why would God build a world this way—why introduce real accountability rather than simply making creatures who could not fail?

Because accountability requires beings who can actually be held to account—creatures with genuine standing, genuine voice, and genuine authority, not mere spectators. And God’s own ethic requires that if his creation is to be held accountable, then so should it’s creator!
Job 38:7 pictures "the morning stars" singing together and "the sons of God" shouting for joy at creation's foundation. Job 1 and 2 describe "the sons of God" presenting themselves before the Lord, and among them, the accuser (ha-satan, "the adversary") makes his case. A being designed for watching and for throwing flags, a referee even for God. This is the setting and language of a council—of members with real seats, summoned to ask and to answer, before any of them had done anything at all to earn the privilege. They were simply made for this function.
The fact that God does not simply squish this accuser for his impertinence suggests that he had a right at least to accuse even God! For he does accuse God, he does not accuse Job, that much is very clear.

That authority, given before it was tested, is precisely the problem. Jude describes certain angels who "did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their proper dwelling" (Jude 6). The chaos-realm, on this reading, is their native habitat, the place order had bounded but not abolished. Their crime was not trespass, they had a right of access; their crime was smuggling, an attempt to bring the very disorder native to their function (accuser) and domains (unpredictability and sterility) into God’s ordered realms that was never theirs to rule. Even when God delegated authority to them (Deuteronomy 32:8) it came with stewardship and accountability back to God (Psalm 82.) Taken together, these passages can be read as implying a delegated judicial role of the accuser that includes real standing before God, standing that remains despite being removed from God’s presence.
One has to ask, for example, by what means Satan “asked to sift Peter as wheat” at the end of Luke if there was total separation of access to God’s divine council. On that reading, the accuser’s role becomes intelligible as office before it becomes corruption, and it resolves why Paul’s Principalities and Powers have “authority” in Ephesians 6 while it also being true that “all authority in heaven and earth has been given” to the resurrected Christ at the end of Matthew. It is, for now, a legal standing in the council, awaiting the eschaton judgement.

And what did they actually want? Isaiah 14:13–14 gives the answer: "I will ascend to the heavens; I will raise my throne above the stars of God... I will make myself like the Most High." This is not accuser territory anymore, it is rivalry, wanting acknowledgment above God, wanting to be worshiped. What Isaiah 14 describes is a created being who desires to occupy the position reserved for God alone. That ambition, present as early as Genesis 1 and still active in Revelation 13's beast that receives the worship the dragon wanted for itself, will not be satisfied by being granted a place. It was never asking for a place, it was demanding the very throne of God.

6. A Foregone Conclusion Can Still Be a Choice

Given untested power and beings whose very nature is disruptive, the pre-Genesis rebellion could be known by God with total certainty and still be a genuinely open choice of the rebels, freely made in its own moment. A foregone conclusion and a genuine choice are not mutually exclusive—provided the "foregone" describes God's vantage, not God's decree.

Boethius, awaiting execution, distinguished simple necessity from conditional necessity:
simple necessity (the sunrise could not fail),
conditional necessity (a man you watch walking across a room must be walking while you watch him—but your watching does not cause his walking or fix his steps).
God’s knowledge of the rebellion is conditional in this sense: necessarily true given that they rebelled, but not causative. Eternity is not a long timeline running parallel to ours; it is a single, timeless present in which all history is seen at once, like viewing an entire painting rather than reading a scroll left to right. There is no 'before' on God’s side from which necessity could flow backward into time.

That is a different claim than the one associated with Martin Luther's On the Bondage of the Will, or its later, more careful development in Jonathan Edwards's Freedom of the Will—both hold that the will is determined with certainty by a prior cause (grace withheld, in Luther's case; a nature's strongest inclination, in Edwards's) and call the result "free" only in the thinner sense of being uncoerced by anything external. That buys certainty, but at a cost: the verdict was fixed by the mechanism before the trial ever opened. What "God gave them real authority he would not take back without due process" requires is closer to Boethius—a trial genuinely open at the moment it was held, its outcome undetermined until the choosing itself, known with total certainty only because it is seen whole from outside the courtroom's clock, not because it was decided in advance and merely permitted to run.

This aligns with the consistently positive thrust of biblical predestination language. Similar to the English term ‘earmark’, predestination language in Greek is used to denote people and creation for conformity to the image of the Son, for glory, and for the age to come—not for the initiating of evil itself. So questions like “were Adam and Eve predestined to sin?” don’t make grammar sense. Predestination (proorizó and related terms) and foreknowledge (prognóskó) language is overwhelmingly positive and telic—oriented toward glory, conformity to Christ, salvation, adoption, and good works (Romans 8:29-30, Ephesians 1:5, 11; 1 Peter 1:2, etc.) The foreknown breaking of eggs (conditional necessity) serves the earmarked omelet.
The predestination terms in the Bible consistently name God’s purpose for creatures and history, not the moral content of rebellion itself. Thus evil is foreseen within providence without being predestined as an end, and predestination is linked with faith and hope by the grace of God.

Untested power, given to disruptive-by-nature beings, did not have to break something. It was always going to—but "always going to," rightly read, names what eternity sees, not what necessity compelled. Breaking eggs is necessary if the goal is the making of an omelet. It is a certain necessity, not a forced necessity.

God doesn't magically turn bad things into good. Bad things stay bad. Rather, he uses for good what others intended for evil. Joseph had come to this conclusion as a buoyancy—perhaps the only buoyancy—that kept his faith from sinking beneath his dismal circumstances (Genesis 50:20).

This distinction between foreknown certainty and actual temporal occurrence raises a related question: Can God Himself 'learn' anything?

Interlude: Can God Learn?

Hebrews says Christ “learned obedience from what he suffered.” Psalm 45 says of the king, “your right hand shall teach you terrible things.” But how can God, who knows all things, learn anything?

The answer lies in a distinction omniscience itself requires: the difference between epistemological knowing and phenomenological happening.

God’s omniscience means he eternally knows every true proposition. He knows, without sequence or growth, that Peter would deny him three times, that you will choose faith in the furnace, that the eggs will break to make the omelet. Nothing happens that is new data he acquires.

But knowing that is not the same as the thing itself occurring. A foreknown choice is not an enacted choice. A foreseen omelet has not yet actually been eaten. Mesotopia exists because proven righteousness requires not just God’s knowledge of faithfulness, but faithfulness actually happening, in time, by real agents.

Christ didn’t gain information. He entered, as man, into the phenomenological reality his divine nature already knew. He “learned” in the way a composer “learns” his symphony by conducting it—the score was not unknown, but music is not music until it is played.

This is why Mesotopia is not theater. God knows the omelet. But omelets don’t exist as unbroken eggs, even in the mind of God. The pan is necessary. The breaking is necessary. The Aeon requires not just knowledge of victory, but victory itself, achieved.

This is not open theism. I affirm God’s exhaustive, timeless foreknowledge. The distinction is between knowing-that and the occurrence-of. One is eternal. The other is why we have an actual history.

7. The Human Divine Council

If God’s Divine Council was destined to rebel—at least some of them, what then was it for? Perhaps its purpose was never to succeed on its own terms, but to demonstrate two things: 1) that untested power cannot hold and 2) that God is impeachable. Power may corrupt, but absolute power is incorruptible because power given is derivative and insecure, and therefore corruptible; God's power is not derivative from anything, so it has nothing to prove and nothing to protect. It is incorruptible. This reveals what God wanted all along. Not beings who had never been tried, but a council of beings who had been tried and had overcome: not by power, but by faith, by humility, by an imputed righteousness… what God wanted was us, humans on his divine council!

Imputed righteousness so that no man may boast (Ephesians 2:8-9) for all eternity. What's tested in us isn't righteousness at all, it's the humility that receives the righteousness of Christ as a gift rather than claims righteousness as an achievement. All who claim righteousness apart from Christ side with the rebels of the chaos realms, who follow no law but hubris. Pride is precisely chaos, unpredictability and sterility.

Revelation 12:11 says of the redeemed that "they triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony." Paul asks the Corinthians "do you not know that we will judge angels?" (1 Corinthians 6:3)—a show stopping claim, easy to read past. And Christ tells the church at Laodicea, "to the one who is victorious, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I was victorious and sat down with my Father on his throne" (Revelation 3:21).
The council seat first given, unearned, to beings who fell from it is, in the end, offered to beings who reached it the only way it could ever be securely held—through real vulnerability, real testing, and real faith. A Human Council made up of saints: humbled, having overcome, never forgetting the depths from which they were rescued.

8. The Pincer and the Undoing

Two more pieces complete the rationale.

The first is what might be called a pincer move against the accuser. Job 40:2 has God silence the one who would presume to indict him: "Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him?" But God does not merely silence the accusation—he answers it. Paul, quoting Psalm 51, writes that God is, himself, to be judged "so that you may be proved right when you speak and prevail when you are judged" (Romans 3:4). At the cross, and in the accumulated testimony of the faithful—offered, though not strictly required—God’s accuser (made specifically for the task of accusing, having overstepped that role and taken up anarchy as a new profession) is answered fully. Then, having been proved just, God judges the accuser in turn (Revelation 12:10 names him "the accuser," cast down at last) and all who side with him.

The second move is the undoing itself. Katargeo—Paul's word for the bringing to nothing that happens after the lawless one is killed at Christ's appearing in 2 Thessalonians 2:8—does not merely stop evil going forward. It nullifies all evil, brought to nothing, as though its power over the victim never held.
This Katargeo is what makes Justice a one time event. No human court can undo a crime, bring a murderer back to life; Christ does exactly that! It is so effective that every human killed unjustly is brought back to life, so that they, in turn, can answer for the crimes that they have committed. Each must answer for their own sins (1 Corinthians 15:20-22 and Revelation 21:4, Matthew 25); they can't do that if someone murdered them, unless the murder is "brought to nothing.”
And yet the achievement made possible by the trial does not disappear along with the damage it caused. The eggs, in this sense, become unbroken again—but the omelet remains, the tested and proven righteousness gained through the ordeal. Undoing the wound does not undo the overcoming, because the overcoming was never dependent on the wound continuing to exist. It depended only on the wound having been real, and faithfully endured, while it lasted. God, it seems, can undo evil’s damage without undoing the history in which faith, courage, and humility were actually enacted.

Daniel 6 offers an old, exact picture of how this works. The officials who trap innocent Daniel do so by having King Darius sign an irrevocable law—one that, by the custom of the Medes and Persians, cannot be altered even by Darius himself. A law to which the lawgiver is accountable. Daniel is thrown to the lions and survives, untouched. Then, in a detail easy to skip past, the very same law and the very same lions are turned on the men who used the accountability of Darius as a trap: "before they reached the floor of the den, the lions overpowered them and crushed all their bones" (Daniel 6:24).
Darius didn’t break law to save Daniel or to destroy his accusers—he let the law he wrote run its full, irrevocable course, and that course closed on the ones who set it in motion.
Psalm 7 describes the same shape in miniature: "he who is pregnant with evil... has dug a hole and hollowed it out, falls into the pit he has made. The trouble he causes recoils on himself" (Psalm 7:14–16). The very instrument built to destroy the innocent becomes the instrument of the accuser's own undoing, and the innocent graduate into the righteous. Thus we have the purpose of evil.

9. Conclusion: Not Back to the Garden

The restoration promised at the end of Scripture is not a return to Eden. Innocence was never the goal—it was the starting material, untested and fragile by definition. What the entire arc of the Mesotopia, Eschaton, and Aeon aim at is something Eden could never have produced on its own: a humanity that has faced real evil, chosen rightly by faith under real pressure, and emerged not innocent but righteous with the righteousness of Christ imputed to them—proven, as Paul puts it, "a new creation" (2 Corinthians 5:17), not an old one restored.

An omelet is not found, gold is found. Someone has to want an omelet before any egg is cracked. The eggs on the counter—just some eggs, easy to overlook—have no idea yet what they are becoming. What they will be has not yet been revealed (1 John 3:2). All they know is that they are broken, leaked out, whisked and emulsified with other ingredients. They have yet to be placed in the hot pan; the eschaton, once for all judgement. It turns out that—although you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs—God can undo the breaking and still have his omelet.

10. Postscript.

The weight of these ideas needs a selah, a second pause and reflection: I quote Hercule Poirot again: "The worst part of murder is its effects on the murderer." Every accounting in this article upholds God's right to judge, because God is Justice—the vindication owed, the wrong undone. But the accuser's ruin was never something God had to add on. It was already there, self-inflicted, the moment the choice was made. And all who ally themselves with him—who bear his mark—will suffer the same doom. The accuser accuses God of running a transactional religion scheme (Job 1), Job's three friends agreed with the accuser. In the end it's the accuser who is proven to run every transactional religion in the world, But, "arise, O God, judge the earth; for you shall inherit all the nations!" (Psalm 82:8).

Katargeo doesn't just strip evil's power over the ones it touched. It exposes what evil had already done to the one who chose it—it sticks to them and will not let go. The murderer, the sinner, the accuser who comes to steal, kill and destroy, was never getting away with anything—not even for a day. The gallowes he built will be used on him. And that is a very sober thought.

References

Adams, Marilyn McCord. Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God. Cornell University Press, 1999.
Edwards, Jonathan. Freedom of the Will. 1754.
Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. Lexham Press, 2015.
Hick, John. Evil and the God of Love. Macmillan, 1966.
Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies, Book IV.
Jones, Alan. The Subjective God. Self-published, 2015.
Luther, Martin. On the Bondage of the Will. 1525.
Wright, N. T. Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. HarperOne, 2008.