WHY DID GOD ALLOW SIN TO BEGIN?

WHY DID HE ALLOW IT TO STAY?

Raymond Broad

 This is a very deep and profound question. To even remotely succeed in answering it we must penetrate the deepest parts of the heart of God. Or should I say, try, because any penetration we make must be extremely shallow. We are human, which is an incredible limitation. Each of us, like myself, will only have one minute view. Like the blind men and the donkey, we must be honest with our view, but in the end this perception will never answer to the full truth. But with all the understanding and all the heart which God has given me, I will try.

God's first great limitation

The first thing we must seek to do with our human minds, is stretch them out, far beyond our little world. The further back we stand, the more we can see. We must step back far enough to view this subject from end to end. This problem began in God's mind before the creation of man, yes even before the creation of angels, because both man and angels are capable of sinning. Before time, way back in eternity, God looked and he saw, and he saw beyond the stretch of time, he saw beyond the judgement settlement of evil, he saw beyond the restoration of everything that sin damaged, he looked way down into the endless eons of eternity, to the end of what will never end. Only when he encompassed that total scope in his vision, could he begin to make sound decisions about how to tackle the sin problem. And our concept of the problem cannot even begin to mature unless we view it in the context of such a time span. If we try to understand this dilemma but leave any part of this vision out of our thinking, then we will always have doubts and suspicions about God. It is these same doubts and suspicions which the enemy exploits in our dark moments. One of the greatest stumbling blocks to belief has always been our doubt of a nice God who can allow this nastiness.

Man always tries to understand God from his finite circumstances, and I don't just mean from the view of the history of mankind. We too often limit our view to our own individual life, even down to one event of one day in our own personal life. God allows our child to die or our business to founder or our disease to remain and we conclude he does not exist or does not care. How can we be so small? That is our limitation, we impose it on ourselves. We don't have to, but we do. Then in this self imposed limitation we try to understand a God who is from eternity to eternity. God is not a prisoner to time, as we are. He is a prisoner to eternity. Stop to think of his limitations. Because he is God he is compelled to think of the whole scene, from beginning to end. It is no wonder we cannot understand each other.

He cannot change his position. He must stay in control of the universe or it will not run. To do this he must stay in control of both time and eternity. But although he cannot change his view we can change our's and we must. If we refuse to stretch out our vision beyond the smallness of our personal circumstances then we cannot see things as they really are. In which case, forget about this article. Stop reading it. You have imprisoned your own thinking. God never imposed those limits on you, you padlocked your own cage.

"Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God." Psa 90:2

"I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done." Isa 46:10

I am writing this article to defend God's case, not ours. "To understand is to forgive." If we can understand things from his point of view, then maybe we can forgive him for the things we don't understand, then if we can forgive him, maybe we can even love him for his peculiarities.

God's second great limitation

In order to understand why God has allowed so much evil, we have needed to understand that his plans are guided by the demands of the eternal interests of everyone involved. The second thing we need to consider before we even start to explain the process, is that God has another limitaion which it is difficult for us to understand. He is a prisoner to love. He is locked into a relationship with love from which he cannot escape. This relationship severely limits the way in which he conducts his great plan. This also means that we find it difficult to follow his logic.

Consider for a moment. "God is love" 1 John 4: 8 & 16 Notice it does not say God has love. It says "God is love." If God had love then it would be possible for him to separate love from himself, get rid of it, pass it on, stop loving. But if he is love, then it is an intrinsic part of himself. To be rid of love, he would have to be rid of himself. For God to act without love is impossible. Whatever plan of action he chooses to follow, it must be loving or he cannot go down that path. It just isn't possible. He and love are chained together and they are chained together forever. But remember, he has these two limitations, not isolated but combined. He must not only act out of love for everyone involved, he must act out of love for the eternal interest of everyone, not just their momentary interest.

Now it can never be said that we are love. If it could be said, then we would be saying we are God. And all too often it cannot even be said that we have love. The world is full of hate and fear and selfishness and self centredness. Because of this, we have huge investments in human activities which are an expensive waste of time and tie up incredible resources in completely unproductive machinery. We need police and armies and wars and judges and legislators and incredible security industries. We have to put boundaries on our nations and limitations on human movements etc. etc. Given that God is love and we are not, then it must not be hard to understand why we cannot work him out. His behaviour is gibberish to us. Our thinking is so distorted that unless he acts in accordance with our present selfish needs we will not allow him to be God. God is limited to eternal interests and the consideration of everyone else. So he cannot be confined to the momentary interests of one individual.

What is love?

I am not interested in human love, it's divine love we need to understand. It is precisely because we are saturated by sin that we find it so difficult to comprehend God's love. I could recite to you 1 Corinthians chapter thirteen for an easy description of love and, by extension, that would be a description of both God and his love. But there are certain other aspects of his love which we need to understand in order to answer our question. God's love is a paradox to us. It is wider than we feel comfortable with, it is more powerful and compelling than we wish and it is weeker and more powerless than we can allow. Love, both powerful and powerless at the same time? How can that be?

God's love drove him to create other lovers and worlds to put them on. He did not need to do that. He just needed to have someone to love. This same love drove him to send his Son to endure and to die to save this world, yet it is powerless against the rebellion of one weak diseased human. If we decide to reject him and his love, he stops, motionless. It is his very love which anchors him to the spot. He will not interfere or overpower or force anyone against their will. His love has become a binding chain, a prison from which he cannot eascape. He must stand quietly still and watch us self destruct, without lifting a finger to prevent it. And this immobility comes from the same heart which drove him through the horrors of redemption for the same person.

God's love needs

We have just reviewed the problems of God's love and it's limitations. These are the boundaries which confine it. But God's love also has needs and there are two of them which we need to know to understand him. Firstly God's love needs to have objects to love. His love needs to go outwards from him to these objects. Because he is love, because his very nature is to love, he must have something to love. His love would remain hungry and empty and his heart forever sad if he did not have anything to love and by extension, the more things he has to love the more satisfied he will be. Torment to God would be to live in a universe without anything to love. Loneliness is an injury to God, it is a painful deprivation.

I am sure every reader can recall at least one woman who loves children, loves to give birth to them, loves to have more of them around her and loves to look after them. It doesn't matter whether she can cope with the work load or not or whether she has to do everything for them or whether they are spoilt, she just loves children. Another woman may love cats, she can never turn a stray away. The authorities may have to intervene because of the lack of hygeine, or the neighbours complaints but she is oblivious to all these factors, she just loves cats. These are distorted compulsions which drive people, they are distant imperfect reflections of God's compulsion to love.

But there is one other love need which drives our God. He needs to be loved, he needs to receive love in return from these loved objects. Love, to him, is incomplete if it does not go full circle and come back to him. God remains hungry , lonely and unfulfilled if he loves something or someone and they do not love him back in return. Like electricity, love is a circuit. If at any point that circuit is broken, then it ceases to be electricity, it is powerless and useless. To cut this circuit is to destroy both electricity and love. And that is a good illustration of how hungry for love God is, and how it hurts if his love is unrequited.

God's power.

Our final requirement to understanding God's attitude to sin is to understand his power. Make no mistake about it, never be in doubt about God's power. He has the power to start anything he likes and to stop whatever he wills. Getting rid of sin at any stage in it's development is a snap to him. He could have snuffed Lucifer out at the moment of his fall, he could have done the same to Adam or Hitler or the Khymer Rouge. Just as God created this world in seven days, so he could undo it just as quickly. There is no practical reason why anything of sin should need to continue for any time at all. So now let's turn to answer the second most profound question mankind needs to answer, where did sin come from? (The first question is, where did everything come from?)

Start at the beginning.

If we go away back to a time before anything was created, there would not even be angels, but God would be contemplating making them and maybe even thinking of man to come in the future. Remember God's two needs. He needs to have someone to love and the more the better. But even more, he needs to have these creatures to love him back in return. The first is easy - for God. The second requirement is not so easy, it may not even be possible - even for God. He could have made us to love and worship him automatically. He could have put this function alongside breathing, eating and drinking so making sure he got his love back. Sadly, that would not be love. Simply ask yourself, would you be happy if the people who surround you were to love you because they were programmed to, would that make you comfortable? You must surely have been in the company of someone who has had a generous amount to drink, who is saying effusive things to you out of the ordinary. If you have had any experience of these things you will say to yourself, "That is only the wine talking." When you reach that conclusion, you will treat their comments as meaningless. It would be exactly the same if friends were programmed by default to love you and it is no different with God. He would simply be playing his own words back to himself. If we remove the switch from an electrical appliance we lose the ablity to turn it off, but we are also unable to turn it on. If we are not free to withdraw love, then we are not free to give it either. It is no longer love when it becomes compulsory and believe me, it is compulsory if there is no alternative.

God longs for people to love him because they love him. He wants to be loved for who he is and what he has done. He cannot be content with loving himself through his creatures, that would be self centred and self serving on his part and selfishness in any form is the opposite of love. He needs to have objects to love but he longs for them to love him back in return. The only love which can satisfy the longing in God's heart is that love which arises spontaineously from within the lover and is expressed outwardly back to himself.

Now consider this text, 1 John 4:19 "We love him, because he first loved us" There are two profound lessons in this reference. Firstly, "We love". We do the loving, no one else. The second lesson is, " because he first loved us". He, spontaineously and feely loves us and he hopes that this will evoke the same response from us. This is not part of our study, but it needs to be affirmed. As we notice all God's expressions of love to us we can only respond one way. With gratitude, thankfulness, worship, praise and obedience to his rules of life.. That is how humans love God. We must stop and contemplate all the things he is and does, as we do this we are compelled to feel grateful and loving. The way we avoid loving him is to ignore his benefits or attribute them to some other force like evolution. God reveals himself to us through his great works of creation and through all that he did in Jesus Christ to redeem us back. We need to spend much time studying and observing these things in order to keep love alive. This reference also highlights the greatest truth to humans. It is an utter impossibility for us to love on our own. Unlike God, we are not love, nor do we have love. Unless we receive it from him, we do not have it - period. It is the greatest impossibility of life - to love without first being loved, whether it be love from God or humans. But, at the same time, when we do open ourselves to appreciate the evidences of his love, we do love in return, we do the loving. Without God it is impossible to love, yet even with him, it is our own willing, love response and no one elses for the very reason that we can withold it. I digress.

Do not under-estimate the importance of God's two love needs. It is because of them and only because of them that creation exists at all and it is also the reason for sin. Woops. Yes, that is right. If God did not need to love then he need not have created - anything, angels or man. If he did not need spontaneous love to return to him, then he need not have created free will. Sin arose out of our freedom to rebel and our freedom to rebel arose out of our freedom to love. It was God's love needs whch created the climate in which sin could grow. God, himself, planted 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil' in the Garden of Eden.

God's most terrible question.

God could have lived alone, forever. He could have gone on breeding new flowers and animals and putting his love of beauty into each one, and recieving no love and companionship back from them, but he could not face this loneliness. So he created creatures who could spontaneously love him back, return his companionship, want him. Now, having designed creatures who would respond spontaneously he had to live with the possibility that they might choose not to respond. If that should happen, then the very purpose of creating beings capable of loving in return would be foiled. What he had set out to create, would not happen. Creatures would be running around designed to recieve and give love but failing to do so. They would be functioning irregularly, out of order. This would mean they could not be happy, they would be miserable, difficult to get on with and troublesome to everyone around them. Ring a bell?

When you are designing a peaceful, harmonius, loving universe you don't need that element. But you have created a situation in which it could possibly happen. This leads to God's great dilemma. How to get that negative out of a positive universe yet still maintain spontaneous love. Can you see that to have the advantage of spontaneity, the messy complication of selfishness must always be allowed. If, at any time, through the eons of eternity, God cleans up the universe by disallowing the possibility of dissension then, at that point, he has disallowed spontaneous love?

Here is the question. How can you remove selfishness and rebellion from the universe yet still retain spontaniety of love - forever? That question has two parts and it is hard to know which is the most difficult. I am inclined to think the second. Spontaniety of love must be maintained forever - right down through the endless ages of eternity, but at the same time the universe must be pure and spotless from rebellion and self-centredness. To human thinking, that is an impossibility.

I am sticking my neck out here, but I venture to say that most Christians believe that God can only solve the question by eventually removing the possibility of rebellion from his creatures. The proposition is, that by agreement with his followers, God will lock them into an irreversible state where they are forever prevented from withdrawing their love. This will be accomplished by God selecting only those who so agree and getting rid of the rest. They will be led to this conclusion by the judgement events at the end time. As they see the end results of wickedness they will decide, once-and-for-all, that they want to have the ability to rebel, removed from their psychies. God's problem with that solution, is that if he does so, he will have immediately removed the capacity for spontaneous love and gratitude. When he removes that capacity then his whole purpose in creating these creature-lovers is destroyed. He may as well have stuck with the animals and plants in the first place. Who wants open-hearted love and appreciation when that is all they are programmed to do. Again he will have machines who will parrot back love by reason of the fact, they can't do anything else.

True, open hearted love, forever and nothing less, is the only future God can contemplate, and that is his quandary. That was his quandary right back in the beginning, way before free moral agents were created. Now we have come to the crux of this study, to discover how God planned to solve this question. The beauty of this study is that when we have determined his plan we will have come one step closer to discerning our own position and purpose in being here.

As we study God's progressive works of creation in the Bible we do not get the impression that he made strenuous efforts to prevent sin. If he spent a lot of time appealing to Lucifer to change his mind, we are not told about it. When he planted the tree in the garden, he was actually providing a door through which man could try the alternative. In his words "but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die." Gen 2:17, there was simply one threat, no discussion, no explanation. He could have reviewed the events of the rebellion in heaven and outlined it's terrible results but no effort to do so is apparent.

All our thoughts so far lead to one astounding conclusion. God decided that sin and rebellion had to be allowed to run their course and the sooner the better. It became God's intention to let rebellion show every horrible face it had to reveal. Only in this way could he eliminate it forever from the desires of his creatures. This would mean that no aspect of sins cruelty, no depth of it's sadism and hatred must be concealed. This revelation must be full and complete and apparent to everyone in the universe forever, not just for today. If he had tried to forewarn his creatures by telling them all the gory details, we may have doubted his story, it would be unbelievable, preposterous, unimaginable. When Satan said, "In the day you eat thereof you will become as God's" how were we to know he wasn't telling the truth and God the lies.

Way back in eternity God saw what he had to do in order to fulfill his love ambitions, he saw the price he would have to pay, the needless carnage, the endless deaths including the death of his own Son and he knew there was no alternative. This was the only path, to reject this path he would need to stay locked in loneliness forever and that would be hell to a loving heart. God is love and this was the price of love and the price must be paid. The only way to prevent rebellion arising again was to establish a wide base of knowledge and testimony about its effects. He needed an incredibly adequate resource of full and complete experience which he could draw on at any time down through the endless ages of eternity.

After the universe is cleaned of rebellion, he may wish to go creating new worlds. What happens when some highly gifted, prominent citizen of such a world, turns from the worship of God and starts to think that there may be another way, that he himself might have potential apart from God, that God loved to be the centre of attention and had deliberately constructed the universe to get it all to himself and no one dared question this arrangement. What is God to do, reconstruct him so that he can't think those thoughts - make him so that he has to love and worship? Never. Yet he has promised " affliction shall not rise up the second time." Nahum 1:9.

A great cloud of witnesses

God will have a resource which he will call on to prevent such thinking again. This resource will be so powerful, so thorough, so limitless as to be impregnable. Millions of witnesses may be called on to give their testimony as to the alternative way, which has been tried. That resource will be us - you and me. That is our ultimate destiny, that is why we are here, that is why we are enduring this stinking mess, that is why we must see it in all its horrible angles, why no aspect of it's effects can be denied to human experience. Through endless time, no doubt about God will ever get a chance because of what we have seen and heard and experienced. The witness which will prevent this, will not come from God. It will come from us. We will willingly, cheerfully and enthusiastically apply the inoculations which will prevent it. There will be so many testimonies, so many stories to tell, that any poor guy who dares to question will be overwhelmed with evidence.

It is for this reason that sin goes on - and on - and on. It needs plenty of time to prove it's point. Six thousand years if need be. For those who need proof that there is an alternative to God, every alternative must be tried and tried to it's extreme. It must be proved that we are not evolving into better people, education will not work, knowledge will not work, technology and science are inneffective. The United Nations, the Red Cross, the best justice systems and welfare programmes have not worked. Technology and knowledge have only increased our ability to kill, torture and impoverish the world. When the prophet Simeon met Jesus' parents carrying him in the temple, he gave Mary a prophecy which included the words "Yea, a sword shall pierce through your own soul also, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed." Luke 2:35. What Jesus endured at the cross revealed what was in the heart of everyone including Satan and evil men. The heart of evil must be exposed, just as the heart of God had to be exposed.

Whatever scenario might be imagined in the future, there must always be the response, "Yes we tried that too, and this is how it turns out." Whatever programme is initiated by the enemy, it must be allowed to run to it's very end so that it can never be said, "It could have been successful but God never gave it a chance - he cut it short." Communism, Fascism, miliatarism, Papism, leftism, rightism, democracy, exporting convicts, total freedom and license, wealth, poverty, The United Nations, all must be given their day and plenty of time to prove their case. And so it must still go on, the free, democratic, wealthy nations are buying enough drugs to torpedo their societies, they are taking the pill untill their populations are going into decline. This is one of the gifts of science, along with abortion and euthenasia. What we aren't killing, we are drugging into stupidity. Even democracy will fail, the protesters will preside over its demise or the politicians will make it too corrupt to work. It only remains to see who gets there first. Although we must always work and pray against evil, I am explaining why, in the larger plan, it must play its hand, but this is not to condone it or promote toleration.

But those are the worlds problems, what about ours?

We have several dilemmas which can be relieved by a healthier view of God's problems. The first and greatest is our need to make sense of what is going on in the world around us. The second great need is to make sense of what goes on in our own lives. What I have written so far should help us to understand the world programme. As we draw near to the heart of God we should find it easier to comiserate with him through the endless litany of evils which unfold on this earth. It has to be, it must be seen and we must know about it.

We are believers, God's children. Why doesn't he look after us better? What great purpose can be served by our endless suffering when he is so able to relieve us? Maybe it is a health problem, a disease or affliction that will not go away, or a relationship torment by someone who makes our life hell. Maybe it is a financial problem, as Tevie sings in "Fiddler on the Roof", "Would it spoil some vast eternal plan, if I were a wealthy man?" The answer is 'yes it most probably would'. To give us what we desire, without receiving the lessons we need to learn, is to spoil us. We are here to learn lessons, to profit from our experience, to be able to speak with authority. We have an eternity to come, of life and health and wealth, but just for this short while there is a training excercise to endure. No one has said it will be easy, but we can make it easier by learning to view it from where God sits. "Confirming the souls of the disciples, and exhorting them to continue in the faith, and that we must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God." Acts 14:22

It is at this point that I wish to introduce a new concept to many Christians. In the middle of the trials of life, how do we know whether they are allowed by God for the purposes of this life or for the next life? I submit, we do not know, but I do think it is high time we stretched our thinking to allow for both possibilities. I believe we are each receiving training for service yet to come, but we are not permitted to see whether that sevice may be rendered here or some place in eternity. But if we can expand our thinking to encompass both, then I believe we may have a little more patience with what is happening.

Let's take a familiar scenario. Some aging Christian who has rendered powerful service for God goes through hell in their declining years and then dies. What is the purpose to it all? It happened in the Bible. Paul and John were confined, the first to house arrest, John to exile. Why this waste of incredible talent and experience in a church scene already declining into apostacy? What about John the Baptist? After an active life in the open air, preaching to large crowds every day, he is confined to a stinking prison for months on end. All this wasted talent in a world which needed his ministry, only to end in having his head cut off. He was certainly not too old to retire, nor was Paul. For my part I can only explain the apparent injustice of the scene by believing that they had more to learn, more training for their next assignment. So, it was back to school.

Moses spent forty years learning to handle power and authority in Pharoah's palace, but before he could be safely trusted to lead God's people he needed to learn humility. Pharoah's palace was no place to learn that, so he was packed off to the wilderness to mind sheep for another forty years. There is no doubt while he was there, he would have thought his great life was over and he had been sidelined for his one act of rashness. But he was in school, that was all, and after that he was trusted to a higher job,. And so with Paul and John the Baptist and the apostle John.

I would like to relate another, more recent experience, which illustrates my point. A missionary couple in Indonesia were in the wrong place at the wrong time and got taken hostage by a group of Islamic rebels. For months they endured incredible hardships all the time praying for rescue. God did not answer their prayers at that point although He could have. This was proved by the fact that they prayed another prayer. They prayed for a hamburger. To avoid capture, the rebels continually moved them from place to place in the jungle. At times they went without food for a whole day, but even on the good days there was never enough to eat. Under the circumstances, such a prayer was rediculous yet, a few days later their captors were able to procure some hamburgars for the whole group. So God was showing them that He could even answer the most impossible prayer yet He did not choose to rescue them. Months on, they were cought in cross fire which killed the husband and injured the wife's leg. Shortly after, she returned to freedom.

The experience taught the wife lessons she freely admitted she needed to learn, but what of her husband? You might wonder what this whole experience had taught him and what was the use anyhow, since he could no longer use those lessons. That is just the point I am trying to make. I believe this excercise was never waisted but that he was in preparation for a greater purpose. A purpose he would never appreciate until the other side.

Those of us who think and observe must have noticed that, so often, the people who render aid to sufferers are people who have been there themselves. Having experienced this particular hell, they are the best qualified to understand other victims and these new victims can tell that their helpers understand what they are going through. We question why God allowed us to endure, alchoholism, child abuse, rape, spouse abuse etc, etc. But tomorrow we find ourselves the best equipped to empathise and to assist others who are now trying to heal their past. Why can't this be true in the eternal future as well

Where God is concerned, everything in life has a purpose. We are all learning lessons, we are all in training, whether for service in this world or in the next, we cannot know. But when hindsight shows us afterwards, we will see exactly what that use will be. My purpose in writing is not just to explain this great question of life, but to urge you to enter into God's plan with enthusiasm, learn all you can, endure all you can and someday the experience will pay off. It doesn't matter if it is now, or in the hereafter. God doesn't distinguish the difference and we must learn to live with the same approach. The sooner we learn our lessons and the more we learn to view life from God's angle, the sooner we will be ready for our next destiny. The hardships of life are not God punishing us, Jesus took all the punishment, they are God teaching us and preparing us. We all have a destiny and it is a very long destiny. From our sojourn on this earth we will be projected into a vast future where our role will be to keep this experiment in evil, from ever asserting itself again. To do this we need a full exposure to all that evil offers and a full exposure to all that God offers. The exposure to God's intentions is ours to choose, the exposure to evil is not. To go in search of evil in order to learn about it, is not our task. God will allow the experiences he deems necessary for our training. But when our training is over, then, and only then, can we speak with authority and from experience. This is our destiny and it is a much much greater destiny than Starwars ever dreamed of..