Creation to Restoration 2
Creation and Free Will: Restoration Was Preferable to Robots
God’s Plan is a Picture of His Love
The full Gospel starts with God, eternal, all powerful, and wise. In His wisdom, He created the universe and all that is in it, including humanity—the aspect of His creation that reflects Him and can have a relationship with Him. Whatever other motivations God had in creating, most of which we cannot hope to grasp in our limited intellectual capacity, God was motivated by love. He created humanity for relationship. And in spite of the fact that we know that God foresaw the way things would go, He had a plan that tells us our existence was valuable enough for God to set things in motion that would require such a high, costly price on His behalf.
Why Did God Allow for Evil and Sin?
To ask why God created evil reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what evil is. The first thing we see God create in Genesis is light. Some point out that the darkness was already there, not created by God. To put a finer point on it, the darkness first became a concept when light was created. It is not a “thing” but the absence of a thing: light. In the same way, evil is not a creation of God, but a concept that represents the absence of the good things that God made. Sin is a similar concept in that it is simply the choice of humanity to reject God’s good and loving plan for creation in favor of our own flawed, failed plans. The reason why God allowed for evil and sin, however, is that His desire, His plan, was a relationship with beings who freely choose to follow His plan. He does not desire automatons who follow programing with no ability to reject Him. [For whether allowing is the same a requiring, see the excursus in the next C2R post.]
Religious Effort is More Evidence of Sin…
The first reaction to sin seen in the Bible is religion. Mankind in its lost, cast out, purposeless state, tries to build a way back into relationship with God. Every culture in history has had religion. It is an invention of man; a proud attempt to solve the problem it had created by turning away from God. It has been trusted, used and abused ever since. Not to solve humanity’s problem, but rather to control people, to wield power, or to make people feel a little bit better about their state. It is not the answer, even though a huge percentage of the world—including the Christian world—think that it is.
God’s Plan is a Picture of His Love
The full Gospel starts with God, eternal, all powerful, and wise. In His wisdom, He created the universe and all that is in it, including humanity—the aspect of His creation that reflects Him and can have a relationship with Him. Whatever other motivations God had in creating, most of which we cannot hope to grasp in our limited intellectual capacity, God was motivated by love. He created humanity for relationship. And in spite of the fact that we know that God foresaw the way things would go, He had a plan that tells us our existence was valuable enough for God to set things in motion that would require such a high, costly price on His behalf.
Why Did God Allow for Evil and Sin?
To ask why God created evil reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what evil is. The first thing we see God create in Genesis is light. Some point out that the darkness was already there, not created by God. To put a finer point on it, the darkness first became a concept when light was created. It is not a “thing” but the absence of a thing: light. In the same way, evil is not a creation of God, but a concept that represents the absence of the good things that God made. Sin is a similar concept in that it is simply the choice of humanity to reject God’s good and loving plan for creation in favor of our own flawed, failed plans. The reason why God allowed for evil and sin, however, is that His desire, His plan, was a relationship with beings who freely choose to follow His plan. He does not desire automatons who follow programing with no ability to reject Him. [For whether allowing is the same a requiring, see the excursus in the next C2R post.]
Religious Effort is More Evidence of Sin…
The first reaction to sin seen in the Bible is religion. Mankind in its lost, cast out, purposeless state, tries to build a way back into relationship with God. Every culture in history has had religion. It is an invention of man; a proud attempt to solve the problem it had created by turning away from God. It has been trusted, used and abused ever since. Not to solve humanity’s problem, but rather to control people, to wield power, or to make people feel a little bit better about their state. It is not the answer, even though a huge percentage of the world—including the Christian world—think that it is.
Comments
Post a Comment