Have you ever wondered why the world God created is so wicked and corrupt today? After all, the Bible’s creation account clearly depicts God creating our world beautiful and pure: untainted by sin, death, or pain (Gen. 1:31). The first humans were created to reflect His image, to be like Him in character (Gen. 1:26). However, what we see in the world today no longer looks anything like the perfect paradise the Bible describes. The broken homes, bloody wars, and overflowing prisons that are all a part of life today are signs of an epidemic of evil that has infected our world. What went wrong? Where did all this evil come from, and what role does God play in all this?

Even as far back as the third century BC, people wrestled with these problems, questioning God’s stance on the problem of evil that our world faces. Epicurus, an ancient Greek philosopher, struggled with relating what he saw in the world with what he knew about God, eventually reaching a paradox: saying, “Is God willing to prevent evil but unable? Then He would not be omnipotent. Could He be capable, but without desire? Then He would be malevolent. Is He both capable and willing? Why then is there evil?” (Adapted from Lactantius De Ira Dei, 13)

In his famous paradox, Epicurus identified two possible explanations for the existence of evil. In his mind, either God loves humanity but doesn’t have the power to stop evil, or God has the power to end sin but simply chooses not to. Neither of those options was very appealing to the philosopher, though, because no matter which way he looked at the issue, he saw a God that wasn’t deserving of worship. A God with no power or a God with no love was not a God he wanted to serve, and yet a God with both power and love he did not understand. If God wanted to stop sin and had the power to do so, He would have to have a pretty compelling reason to allow sin and suffering in His perfect world.

Well, when the Bible tells us the story of the origin of evil, it gives us a glimpse into God’s mind to see why He responded to evil the way He did. To begin the story, the Bible reminds us that, for all eternity God has been both perfectly loving and infinitely powerful: the ultimate authority in the universe (Ps. 145:17; Jer. 32:17; 1 Jn. 4:8).

God, who created everything, desires to have a loving relationship with all His creation, so when creating the universe as we know it, He gave each creature the freedom to make their own decisions (Deut. 30:19; Rev. 3:20). He established the universal truth that forcing someone to love you can never result in true love. After all, creating robots that can’t do anything but choose to love you also doesn’t result in a genuine relationship. There is no love without freewill, so God desired to not just deserve their love as their Creator, but to win it as their Father (Jer. 31:3, Hos. 2:19), gladly taking the risk that His creation could choose not to love Him back.

From the very beginning, each created being was given the choice to reciprocate the love God poured out on them, or to focus that love on themselves. For a time, all God’s created beings gladly chose to return the amazing love given them. After all, why wouldn’t they? God was nothing but good to them, and abiding by His commands brought them perfect happiness, blessing, and joy. But then, one day, God’s right hand man, a powerful angel named Lucifer, began to entertain prideful thoughts about his beauty and influence (Eze. 28:17). As his pride grew, Lucifer started to become jealous of the worship God was getting (Eze. 28:14–15). There was no justifiable reason for his envy, but that didn’t stop the angel from coveting his Creator’s elevated position (Is. 14:13–14).

As time progressed, Lucifer sought to stage a rebellion against the government of heaven and set himself up as its ruler. His goal was to create doubt about God in the hearts of his fellow angels, and to persuade them that God wasn’t worthy of their love. By peddling lies about God’s character, Lucifer attempted to persuade his fellow angels that God was cruel and that His law couldn’t be kept (Eze. 28:16). The cancerous thoughts of sin began to spread throughout heaven, eventually causing a third of the angels to side with Lucifer in open defiance against God. It was an all-out war of ideas, and no angel was unaffected (Rev. 12:4, 7).

It’s at this point in the story that we need to emphasize the fact that God did not create Lucifer to be a devil. God never planned for this rebellion to happen: His goal from the beginning was for the entire universe to live in harmony, motivated by self-sacrificing love. Lucifer was created as the very “seal of perfection…perfect in [his] ways from the day [he was] created, till iniquity was found in [him].” (Eze. 28:12, 15) Sin was “an intruder, for whose presence no reason [could] be given.” (Great Controversy p. 493) Lucifer received no less love or blessings than any of the other angels: it was Lucifer’s own choice to rebel against God’s perfect standard of love (Eze. 28:14).

This choice was the same one given to all the angels. Some angels chose to join Lucifer in his rebellion, but there were many more angels that remained true to God and rejected Lucifer’s lies. Even amongst the loyal angels, though, there were still questions about God’s character. You see, Lucifer’s comments about God had began a debate about whether He was really loving or not, and God knew that the only way the truth could triumph in this great controversy was for the entire universe to witness what He and Lucifer were really like. Words and reputation wouldn’t end this rebellion: God needed to demonstrate–not just proclaim–His love and justice and unmask Satan for who he truly was, a liar and murderer from the beginning.

It was for this reason that God did not immediately destroy Lucifer when he first sinned. He needed to show the onlooking universe exactly what Lucifer’s government of selfishness and pride looked like in action. He needed to reveal Lucifer’s true colours–to unmask him as the liar and murderer he’d chosen to be (Jn. 8:44). And at the cross, when Satan felt like he had an advantage over the Son of God: his cold-blooded murder of Jesus proved to all heaven that God really was infinitely loving and that Satan had been a dangerous rebel all along. Lucifer could lie about God no longer. God’s character had been vindicated at the cross, and Jesus’ death opened a way for the problem of evil to be eliminated eternally (Jn. 12:31-33).

However, at the cross God still didn’t enact judgement on sin. Lucifer was not yet destroyed because God still needed to offer sinful humanity the choice to choose for themselves whom to serve. Ever since Adam sinned, we had been under the dominion of Satan, unable in our own strength to break free from his control and powerless to live righteously. Jesus died to give us back the freedom to choose whom to obey. Because of Calvary, we are no longer slaves to sin but have the opportunity to become sons of God, heirs together with Christ (Rom. 8:17).

We can be the recipients of God’s incredible love through the grace given to us by Jesus, because God won’t rest until He’s done everything possible to save us (Phil. 1:6). And as the final moments of earth’s history slowly count down to God’s final destruction of Satan, sin, and all sinners, we can have the hope that we will not be destroyed if we will only listen to God’s call to “choose life, that [we might] live” (Deut. 30:19). God has sacrificed everything and played the long game against evil for thousands of years to make absolutely sure that this great controversy does not end until you have made the decision of who you will follow.

Friend, God loves you, and doesn’t want you to die. Jesus paid the price for your sins so that you can be redeemed to live forever with God. Do you choose to place your trust in God’s character of love and accept His salvation in these final moments of time?

Photo by Norbert Buduczki; provided by Unsplash