Commentary on the Book of Job part seventy four

                                    Job 29:1-25

God learned about evil when Lucifer rebelled. God also learned that somehow evil emerged from a dark chaos that nonexists nowhere and at no time, called the bottomless pit. Through God's creation of the history of mankind, He is in the process of learning the mystery of how negative consciousnesses called demons could have emerged from the bottomless pit and through the darkness to corrupt His creations.

Evil seeks to annul everything it touches by reverting it back to chaos. Lucifer became corrupted by this mysterious evil, and God recovered all of His goodness He had put into him so that he became Satan who is totally empty and vain. God used His consuming fire to separate His goodness in Lucifer from his evil. Ezekiel 28:17-19.

But Satan has no desire to annul himself. Satan seeks only to gain power over evil so that he can use it to annul God's creations, and eventually God Himself so that he will be free to invent his own universe based on invented systems of excessive pleasure and pride. Both pleasure and pride are good ideas that God knows how to rightly use to create good and useful systems. Satan has no power to create anything. Satan seeks only to murder God and co-opt all of His good ideas in order to misuse them to invent evil systems of excessive pleasure and pride. Satan openly revealed his evil plans in his temptation of Christ as recorded in Matthew 4:1-11 and Luke 4:1-13.

God admitted in Isaiah 45:7 that He created both light and darkness. He also admitted that He created all good systems such as the one called "peace." But God also revealed that He feels guilty because he feels responsible for the creation of evil even though He knew nothing about it. Guilt is a good system. It causes one to avoid evil. But God's feeling of guilt only serves to prove that He is absolutely Holy and innocent. He absolutely rejects evil. For this same reason, parents, created in the image of God, often feel guilty about bad things that happen to their children even though they had no knowledge of or control over the hurtful event.