What are We to Do?
Be a Disciple
Why Evil, Sin and Death?
A key concept to understand about God deals with why He allows evil, sin, suffering and death in this world. This is a bit of a challenge for many to accept, so we want to spend a little time to address this important question.
We will once again use the classroom analogy to help explain this concept. Many people wish the world did not have evil, suffering and death in it. This sounds like a pleasant utopia, but you might as well call it Heaven. This is what is described in the Word as the eternal state in Rev 21:1 which says, “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.”
In the above flowchart, you can see that God’s desire for love means He has to create beings that are in His own image, meaning having free will so that love is possible. In this life, we have the ability to choose to love God, which means following His ways (accepting Jesus as our savior and Lord), or we can choose ourselves, which means doing it our own way, not His. We all have to live in the same world, which is full of selfish, prideful people and sin, evil, suffering and death. There is no avoiding that in this life. However, if you choose God you have spiritual peace, joy and love in knowing that you are justified and are in the process of being sanctified. While dealing with a decaying world, we can be a light in the darkness. Those who choose self might have some short-term, worldly pleasures, but will be left feeling emptiness and longing for something missing. They won’t know what it is, but they know they want more. They will never be satisfied with the worldly things in the long-run.
Back to the class analogy. Let’s take a look at the big picture of what is happening in our existence.
If you think of our universe, which clearly had a definite beginning and will have a definite ending, we know from Genesis that it started perfect and sinless. It didn’t take long for us humans to mess it up. God not only knew that would happen, He deliberately allowed the option for sin to be in the garden with Adam and Eve. God knew before creating the universe what would happen and so it did. the Bible explains God’s Plan of Redemption throughout it pages. It concludes with Judgement Day after the Millennium. That ends this class we call the universe. It is replaced with a New Heaven and New Earth, as described in Revelation 21. This is the state God wanted for us all along and is the state that will go on forever. It is what we typically call heaven, only it’s more than just the spiritual realm where the Father exists. It is also the physical realm where the Son exists and the Holy Spirit lives in the believers forever more. It is a place that is multidimensional beyond our current understanding. The theory is that it contains 10 or more dimensions of reality, far more than the 4 we currently experience. This is where those who choose God will spend eternity. Those who choose self will spend eternity regretting their choice, because they are going to get exactly what they chose, an eternal life without God.
That sums up the reasons why we currently live in a temporary existence that contains the unpleasant experiences of evil, sin, suffering and death.
