My regrets for not answering my own question!
God is all-mighty, sovereign, holy (separate and sacred*), and righteous, and He is wholly all of these things. While God is not the author of sin, God is sovereign over it (otherwise he would not be almighty) and can therefore use sin any way He so chooses. This is expressed in Isaiah 45:7's declaration God creates evil or disaster/calamity. This is a post-disobedient statement said in a post-disobedient world brought about by one man's disobedience, not God. In a good and sinless world God does not cause evil and call it good (Isa. 5:20). In a not-good and sin-drenched world full of evil God remains sovereign and can do what He wants as He pleases because the mere fact any of it persists in its existence for even a fraction of a nanosecond is due solely to grace.
Furthermore, we know from James that God is not tempted, nor can He be tempted, by sin. James' description should not be considered exclusive or exhaustive (temptation may have other means beside our own desires) but, relevant to what James wrote, God has no lusts within Him by which He might be dragged away and enticed. He is perfect and righteous in all His ways.
So God can and does use sin, or perhaps that is better clarified to say God uses the sinful conditions of sinful world for His purposes and He does so quite often throughout the Bible. His use of Egypt, Babylon and Assyria would be obvious examples. Understand these examples are deliberate uses, not laissez-faire uses. They bear the force of prophetic decision and not merely "natural" contingencies to secondary causes. God could have prevented the capture and exile of Israel in any number of ways, such as giving them victory over the stronger armies (as He had done many times before) or simply moving in the opponent's heart to go around Israel. All of those possibilities are examples of God using sinful conditions in a sinful world. All of them have to do with judgment, too. God clearly uses sinful conditions to judge sin.
Can God use sin to save from sin?
The impulse to reflexively or automatically give and axiomatic, "
Of course!" is understandable given God's always sovereign might, but not so axiomatic when the nature of sin and the need it brings for salvation is continued because sin is the antithesis of God. Satan is an "
adversary," but satan is a victim of his own disobedience. If the law that sin brings death and bondage, and eventual destruction applies to all who disobey then satan is just as dead in sin as any human. He is just as enslaved. Jude and other passages make it clear his destiny is destruction. All that is bad news for him, but the real adversary is sin. Sin nearly rivals God in its might and usurps God in its determinism: God may allow some degree of volitional agency, even in the life of the sinful sinner, but sin corrupts everything; it does not allow for true liberty.
Again: sin, not satan, is the antithesis of God. Sin does not care. To use a comparative analogy, many people think hate is the opposite of love but that is incorrect. A hating person is still invested in the object/person of hate, contempt, anger, fear, etc. The opposite of love is
apathy. Sin is like
that. Sin does not care. It is antithetical to everything having to do with the God of the Bible. The juxtaposition of sin and God is articulated in many ways throughout scripture, such as righteousness/unrighteousness, law/lawlessness or disobedience, holiness/wicked, sacred/worldly, perfect/imperfect, liberty/bondage, slave of sin versus slave of righteousness (no autonomous third option).
When this dichotomy is understood the question, this op asks can then be rephased several ways.
- Does The Righteous One use unrighteousness to save from unrighteousness?
- Does The Law Maker use lawlessness to save from lawlessness?
- Does The Holy One* use common wickedness to save from common wickedness?
- Does The Sacred One use worldly means to save from worldliness?
- Does The Perfect One (who demands perfection) use imperfection to save from imperfection?
- Does The Only Free One use bondage to save from bondage?
- Does the Father of Truth use the cause of lies to save from lies?
- Does the Uncaused Cause of all that was good and sinless use the cause of everything evil and sinful to save from unrighteousness and sin?
- Does The Thesis use antithesis to save from antithesis?
That's just a sampling. Since the attributes of God are many, that list could be much longer. Now aside from the questionable question-begging circular nature of any argument whereby God would use something against itself, we'd have to ask other questions, like is God's ethic merely utilitarian? Do the ends justify the means? If that is the case, then God can do anything - even sin - as long as it brings about His will or purpose. So, we want to avoid the strict utilitarianism and any other explanation that would contradictorily assert some compromise of God ontological character. Most important, imo, is the question of dependency. God is always and everywhere independent of or from everything in creation. The Creator exists apart from that which He created and He always has and always will. That includes the purpose for which He created. If the purpose of creation was to create and raise up (in all scriptural senses of that term) adopted sons and daughters, then He always and everywhere exists independent of that purpose. He is never dependent on the created, whether that be created conditions, created creatures, or the contingencies brought about by either. He is always autonomous and never dependent.
This applies to salvation from sin.
This is all the more so if the condition or person upon which He might be dependent is sinful/evil/unrighteous/imperfect, etc.
In summary, the Creator cannot use sin to save from sin in any way whereby He is dependent. Theologically/logically, we can't be begging the question. Ethically, God cannot be merely utilitarian. Sovereignly He cannot be dependent (not even if self-imposed), especially not on sin. There are a few other lesser concerns, but because of the length of this post I'll stop here. Perhaps other will broach them.
In conclusion, there is a set of presuppositional conditions that make it ontologically, teleologically, existentially, and ethically impossible for God to use sin to save from sin.
*
The word "holy" simply means "separate" and in in its theological or religious context the word means "separate for sacred purpose."
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