Commentary on the Book of Job part seventy six

                                      Job 29:1-25

God gives free will to every human, but no human can use that free will to thwart the will of God forever. God knows exactly how to return the lives of every human to renewed faith in Him of their own free will. II Peter 3:9.

Evil emerged from the chaos that still remained in darkness, of which God knew nothing, to touch the free will that God had given Lucifer and make him realize that he could choose to disobey God by inventing false systems of excessive pride and pleasure. Lucifer refused to repent which caused God to have to strip him of all the goodness He had put into him and exile him to earth as a totally evil negative consciousness called Satan. Ezekiel 28:13-19.

Satan believed God had made a mistake when He gave free will to mankind. Satan thought he could use God's supposed mistake to get an advantage over God. Satan knew that he could use the weakness in man's free will to cause him to disobey God which would put evil into man's being. Satan expected that evil in man to become so foul that it would eventually annul the image of God in man and thereby prove that God's protective Love cannot be Almighty. Satan further believed that he could use this supposed weakness in God's Love to obtain an advantage over God so that he could one day murder Him and take control of His universe as he had already partly taken control of the earth.  John 8:44; John 12:31.

But Satan did not know that God had given free will to man in order to test His Love to prove that His Love can never fail. God possesses Infinite Wisdom, and therefore, He certainly possesses the capability to devise a plan whereby He can rescue His image in every human by causing them to return to repentance and faith in Him of their own free will. God saves some humans by His grace while they are still alive in the flesh and all others in a great worship service as recorded in Revelation 5:11-14. I Corinthians 13:8; Ecclesiastes 3:14.

Doubt about God's Love had entered God's creations because of Lucifer's rebellion. Because of this doubt, Lucifer had been able to persuade one third of God's angels to follow him. As long as doubt remained in God's universe, evil would also remain. But God devised a plan to dispel all doubt from His universe and all the evil that results from it. John 20:24-29; Revelation 5:11-14.

God had allowed the Devil to put the image of God in man in danger of eternal separation from Him in spiritual death. But God outwitted the Devil by devising a plan to rescue the lives of all humans by His loving sacrifice of Himself on a cross and His descent into hell followed by His resurrection. God suffered the eternal spiritual deaths of every human in their place in order to liberate all of them from that horrible fate and return them to fellowship with Him. Hebrews 2:9; John 12:47; Colossians 1:15-20.