Jesus Is Not God's Plan B
On the riddle that contains the whole gospel
John the Baptist says something strange in the first chapter of John’s Gospel: “After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me, because he was before me.”
Read that again. It sounds like a riddle—the kind where you squint at the words trying to figure out the trick. Someone comes after but is ahead because he was before?
But this isn’t wordplay. It’s one of the most important theological claims in the entire New Testament. And if we get it wrong, we misread the whole story.
The Bifurcation Problem
Here’s something I’ve noticed in how many of us—myself included, at times—unconsciously read the Bible: we split it in half.
Old Testament: Plan A.
New Testament: Plan B.
It’s right there in the titles we’ve given these collections. “Old” and “New.” And we know what new usually means. New and improved. Updated formula. Version 2.0 after the bugs in 1.0 got too embarrassing.
We read the Old Testament as God’s first attempt—working with Israel, giving the law, sending prophets—and the New Testament as what happens when that didn’t quite pan out. Jesus shows up as the pivot, the course correction, the backup plan when the original strategy failed. I don’t think we do this consciously. But the framework is there, lurking beneath the surface of how we tell the story.
And it’s wrong.
Before the Foundation of the World
John the Baptist’s riddle points to something the early church understood but we’ve often forgotten: Jesus didn’t show up because something went wrong. Jesus has always been the plan.
The Son—the second person of the Trinity—is eternally begotten of the Father. Not created. Not made. Not an afterthought. The creeds use careful language here: “begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father.” There has never been a moment when the Son was not. This isn’t just metaphysical speculation. It matters for how we understand salvation.
In Revelation, Jesus is called “the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world.” Before creation. Before the fall. Before Israel. Before the law. The saving work of Christ wasn’t a reaction to human failure—it was God’s intention from eternity.
The prophet Isaiah puts it this way: the servant of the Lord was commissioned “before I was formed in my mother’s womb” to be “a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” Not just Israel. The whole cosmos.
What This Changes
If Jesus is Plan B, then salvation is fundamentally reactive. God makes something, it breaks, and God scrambles to fix it. We’re an accident that required emergency intervention.
But if Jesus has always been the plan—if the world was, as John’s prologue suggests, created through the Son in order to be redeemed by the Son—then something else is true.
God has always intended union.
Not rescue as damage control. Union as the goal from the beginning.
The early church fathers had a phrase for this: theosis. Divinization. The idea that salvation isn’t merely forgiveness of sins (though it includes that) but transformation into the likeness of God. Athanasius put it most famously: “God became what we are so that we might become what God is.”
This is what John the Baptist sees when Jesus walks toward him at the Jordan River. Not a backup plan. Not a course correction. The eternal Son, stepping from eternity into history, to complete what was always intended.
“Behold,” John says, “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”
Not the sin of Israel. Not the sin of a preordained few. The world.
The Good News in This
There’s profound comfort here, if we let it sink in.
If Jesus is Plan B, then our redemption depends on us being broken enough to warrant emergency measures. We matter because we’re a problem to be solved. But if Jesus has always been the plan, then our redemption flows from who God is, not from how badly we’ve failed. God didn’t decide to save us because we hit rock bottom. God has always desired union with creation. That’s simply who God is.
Karl Barth, the Swiss theologian, wrote a small book called The Humanity of God in which he argues that Jesus Christ was elected before the foundation of the world to be the Redeemer. In Jesus, Barth says, we see the completeness of God’s desire for everything God has made.
Not because we earned it. Not because we’re special. Because God is God.
The Riddle Solved
So what does John’s strange phrase actually mean?
“After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me, because he was before me.”
Jesus comes after John chronologically—born later, baptized by John, beginning his ministry after John’s. But Jesus ranks ahead because he was before—eternally existent, the Word through whom all things were made, the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. The riddle contains the whole gospel: The eternal God has entered time to unite creation to himself. Not as a fallback. As the fulfillment of everything God has always wanted.
There has never been a moment when Jesus was not.
And because there has never been a moment when Jesus was not, there has never been a moment when the world was without a Savior.
That’s the good news.