I don’t feel comfortable when people talk about God’s perfect plan, probably because I don’t believe in it. I believe in God’s perfection, or at least I think I do. I don’t really know what perfection means. Not fully anyway. As for the plan, I believe God has one in the same way Google has a plan to improve technology or NASA has a plan to explore space. It’s too complex for me to understand, and it’s full of opportunism and closed-door decisions that from the outside look like luck or inevitability, but there’s a very real, laid-out plan powering the few pieces I can see. But a perfect plan? I can’t believe in that, and it feels irreverent to try.
Abraham bargained with God over Sodom. Fifty righteous? Forty-five? Ten? Abraham argued, and God changed his mind. I can’t write that off like God’s disappearing acts with the Israelites, in which he abandons and returns like an abusive husband who spends half his life in prison. Those are slow shifts, and I can blame the Israelites. They deserved it. They changed. They changed again. Or I can blame the narrative perspective, or the lessons attached to the story as it was told, taught, told, written, translated, written, translated, translated, taught, summarized, taught, and then explained to me. But the Sodom argument happens in a single interaction. God came in with one decision, and he left with another.