War in Ukraine. Child labor in central Africa. Sudan in upheaval. Antifa running rogue. Human trafficking. Basic food almost unaffordable. Leaders that can’t lead. Obscene wealth. Abysmal poverty. High positions. Liars in high positions.
And other evils.
I am sure you could add to this rather limited list but what’s the point?
Do you see the common thread linking these evils?
The link is called sin and every human being is a sinner.
No exceptions.
The drag queen grooming the kids.
The preacher protesting the event.
“All have sinned and continue to fall short of the glory of God,” said Apostle Paul (St. Paul to hundreds of millions on this staggering earth) to the Romans.
So wherever you find two or more of the species, there you find opportunity for friction, theft, abuse, mayhem, and murder.
But if the Creator built a perfect world and populated it with perfect beings, how do we explain the presence of sin with all its ramifications?
For the answer, we have to go back to Genesis, the book of beginnings, and there, in Chapter 3, we learn how I came to have the potential for the ultimate in evil. And so did you.
(If you reject the Genesis account, you have to explain your behavior toward your spouse, your children, the tax return according to some other point of view. Good luck.)
Sin was introduced to this world, you might think of it as an inoculation of evil that infected the entire race, by a being that had once been a high-ranking official in the government of the Creator of the Cosmos.
Satan, now the adversary of everything the Creator had made, managed to seduce our first parents, at that time the entire human race, into rebelling against their Creator.
And we see the result of their rebellion: war in Ukraine, child labor in central Africa, Sudan in upheaval, Antifa running rogue, human trafficking, basic food almost unaffordable, leaders that can’t lead, obscene wealth, abysmal poverty, high positions, liars in high positions, famines, pandemics, “natural” upheavals, earthquakes, and every other manifestation of evil.
This story raises questions that have challenged philosophers and scholars for millennia. If God is good, if God is powerful, if God is love, why, in the name of all that is good and decent doesn’t He do something about the mess we are in?
Like end it.
Like get rid of all the sinners?
Yea. Maybe.
Hold on a minute. That’s the set I am in. And you, too, and everyone else. The entire human race, from the beginning of sin, has been and is marinated in evil. Even Marcus Aurelius, the second century Stoic Philosopher Roman Emperor recognized the universality of evil.
Are you calling for a moratorium on humanity?
If present social trends are allowed to continue to maturity it just might come to that without our consent. But that’s another story for another time.
Back to our questions but with a very short answer.
The Creator defines Himself, not as Power, not as Wisdom, not as Ultimate Insight, not as any other of His many attributes, but simply as Love (1 John 4:8).
Love requires freedom to flourish and grow. Love cannot be bought or coerced. Love can only be given voluntarily.
In a universe based on love, God could have wiped out evil in the beginning only at the price of greater evil. Hence, He had to let evil run its course, prove itself, demonstrate its utter malignity to the satisfaction of every intelligent inhabitant of His Cosmos.
Only then will He be able to eradicate evil from His creation.
That’s the plan as He has described it in the Holy Bible. And the signs for which He has warned us to watch are coming together faster than we might imagine.
That Is the reason evil is still in the world of a good and powerful Creator. He wants to save all who will consent to what He calls a rebirth. He wants to give everyone who will consent to this rebirth a home in the Paradise restored beyond the reach of flood or fire, bombs or bayonets, mayhem or murder, and every other manifestation of rebellion introduced by Satan.
By the way, when we witness acts of generosity, altruism, bravery, hope, faith, we actually see evidence of the Creator being demonstrated in a human being. Celebrate and applaud this evidence.
