i have a question for you,we know God is all.so in affect God is good and evil.know we are told how to become good or should i say learning and getting better.so would not God have done this first,seperated his light from his darkness.?are we not following Gods lead.?Christ is the light,so would not this be obvious.?but we are not God,and need help from the light.Christ is the way and the life.
(In my response, below, any you see "
He", "
His", or "
Him", I am referring to God. Anytime you see "
he", "
his", or "
him" I am referring to Satan)
Bro Larry is correct. This idea throws alot of people, and many loose faith because they cannot come to grips with the issue of a loving God allowing the presence of the pain and suffering that stems from evil. They can't believe that a loving good God would allow evil at all. The two, in their eyes, just don't seem to fit.
But God was perfectly true to His own nature by giving us, and the angels the ability to choose to love Him and to serve Him. By doing so, He allowed the potential for rebellion, for sin, but He also gave us the ability to reflect back to Him the type of love that He has for us. He chose to create us. He didn't Have to. Similarly, we can chose to love Him, or not. Does it not glorify God even more, that even if we chose not to love Him with all of our hearts, that He still loves us with His? Does it not magnify His merciful side of His nature even more that He loves us to the point that He would sacrifice His own Son, allowing Him to pay the penalty for our own disobedience, even though we have rejected Him?
So evil is not part of God, it is the actions that follow the choice made not to honor God and to give Him the love and honor that He does deserve, because of who He is. Satan, the father of evil, chose not to honor God. He believed he was God's equal, and could over throw God. Because of His rebellion, God exiled Him from Heaven to Earth. God didn't totally strip Satan of his power, or destroy Him altogether, because He knew that Satan had already become his own undoing, and that his presence among us would be used as a contrast, to show us how wonderful our Creator really is.
Think about it. If there had been no serpent in the Garden, and sin had never entered into us, how could we ever appreciate God's wonder and majesty? The penalty for sin is death. If there where no death, how could we ever truely appreciate the life we are given? If there was nothing deserving punishment, how could we appreciate His mercy? God's nature consists of every good quality there is. He is Eternal. He is Wisdom. He is Love. He is Mercy. He is the only source by which we can posess any of those qualites. We know this because He tells us in His Word, but we know it to be absolutely true because we have a basis for comparison in the existance of Satan. Consequently, because God allows his existance and influence in this world, we have a basis for comparison in ourselves. Now, because we are able to see the alternative to who and what God is with our own eyes, and feel its influence in our daily lives, we can truely, appreciate God to the fullest level of the limitations of our creation, by giving our lives to Him, and honoring Him every minute of every day that we are given in this world. How could we do that of our own choosing, if we never had the choice to make?
Yes, I believe that God did know that Eve, then Adam would eat of the fruit. I do not believe that by putting the tree there in the first place and telling them not to eat of it that He led them to temptation, He simply showed them that they had a choice; to obey Him or not. That is the same choice we are given with every breath we take.