The World and the Word

                                     The Difference between Sin and Evil

The sin offerings of the priests symbolizes God's higher form of salvation which is by His grace. All living humans who will trust in the shed blood and water that flowed from Jesus on the cross to cleanse them of all sins while they are still alive in the flesh will receive God's forgiveness and an immediate new birth into the family of God. John 5:24; John 3:3. God will give them the perfect righteousness of Christ Himself, wash them in His blood and recreate their souls and spirits, and make them joint-heirs with Christ so that they can live with Him in Heaven forever. II Corinthians 5:21; I Corinthians 6:11; Romans 8:14-17. But God does not, at the time of their salvation, completely cleanse and recreate their physical lives. Sins of weakness will still adhere to their fleshly nature which means they must confess and repent of them every day to be cleansed by the water that flowed from Jesus on the cross. John 13:1-17; I John 1:9. The Holy Spirit transforms the blood and water that flowed from Jesus on the cross into a spiritual power that can cleanse and forgive the believer saved by grace. John 6:63; I Corinthians 6:11.

God will thoroughly cleanse His Church with the water of His Word, and He will bring created, spiritual bodies with Him to give His Church at the Rapture. Ephesians 5:25-27; II Corinthians 5:1-5. God has left His Church in the world until the Rapture as a witness of His gospel so that others may get saved by hearing the gospel. Romans 10:17. The Holy Spirit preaches the gospel to every human who ever lived, but God allows His Church to participate in carrying the Holy Spirit's message so that He can give His Church great rewards in Heaven for its obedience. Acts 1:8; Matthew 5:10-12.

Believers saved by grace never lose their higher form of salvation. Romans 11:29; Numbers 23:19. But believers who backslide on God and refrain from confessing and repenting of their sins every day, upon their physical deaths God will temporarily cast them into the bottomless pit to punish them until they thoroughly repent. After they repent, Christ will raise them, thoroughly cleanse them with the water of His Word and restore them to His Church in Heaven. Matthew 25:30; Matthew 24:48-51; Matthew 5:23-26.

God will cleanse and forgive all sins of weakness upon repentance and faith in the sacrifice of Christ, but God has a different requirement for presumptuous sins. Numbers 15:30-36. These willful and deliberate sins come straight from the evil, spiritual nature of humans, and God never forgives them because they never repent. Matthew 12:31-32. The Holy Spirit calls on every living human who ever lived to repent and believe in the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ for their salvation whether alive in the flesh or confined to the regions of death. John 1:9; Colossians 1:23. God annuls the spiritual deaths of all believers saved by grace the moment they believe. John 5:24. God will also use His fiery wrath to extract the dead and evil natures from all living humans confined to the regions of death upon their repentance and faith in the Lamb of God as recorded in Revelation 5:11-14. I Corinthians 3:11-15; Numbers 21:8-9; John 11:25. God will cast only the extracted, dead and evil natures of humans into the lake of fire. Revelation 20:15; Revelation 21:8.

Numbers 15:32-36 records that the people arrested a man who picked up sticks on the Sabbath, and Moses put him in a holding tent until he could be tried. This man had plenty of time to ask that the priests offer a sacrifice for him for his forgiveness, but he did not ask. He committed that which people would consider to be a slight sin, but because it became a presumptuous sin in that he refused to repent, God ordered that he be put to death. This man's story symbolizes the fact that God will extract the evil, spiritual deaths of all humans from them for Him to cast into the lake of fire. Revelation 20:11-15. God will cleanse and forgive even the worst sins that any human can commit because His Love and compassion will be opened to their repentance and faith and their desire to be reconciled with Him. Colossians 1:20-23. But God will not cleanse and forgive the least sins of humans if they refuse to repent and believe. Those sins adhere to the evil, spiritual deaths of humans which God will separate from them for Him to cast into the lake of fire. Revelation 20:15; Revelation 21:8; Matthew 13:36-43; Matthew 13:47-50. The tares and the bad fish are thoroughly evil and useless.

The World and the Word

                The Difference between Sin and Evil

Numbers 15:24-36 records a perfect description of the difference between sins of weakness and deliberate sins. In these verses, the Bible (KJB) informs about "sins of ignorance" which also means sins caused by weakness. The presence of evil within the beings of every human inevitably causes living humans to sin and leaves them ignorant of how to overcome their sins and evil. God's Word tells them how they can. If the entire congregation of the Israelites trusted in the sacrifices that the priests made for them, then God would forgive them. Verse 29 extends this trust in sacrifices to strangers which includes the entire human race. Every sin, no matter how terrible, that any living human can commit, God will forgive if that sinner will trust in the sacrifice of Christ that He made for him when he confesses that he sinned because of his weakness and believes that only Christ can save him. He must believe that Christ has taken his sins away from him. This confession amounts to both repentance and faith which are inseparable. The difference between sin and evil is that sin carries within it the possibility of repentance and faith which will always reconcile a living human with God, whereas evil, which is spiritual death, never repents. All living humans will eventually repent of sins of weakness and come to faith that only Christ can take them away. But deliberate sins, which never repents and are totally evil, God will separate from all living humans for Him to cast into the lake of fire. John 5:24; I Corinthians 3:11-15; Revelation 5:11-14; Revelation 20:11-15; Hebrews 2:9.

The burnt offerings that the priests made symbolize God's lesser form of salvation achieved by Christ's descent into Hell for all living humans whom God had to consign to one of the three regions of death because they did not repent while still alive in the flesh. But God will cause them to repent and believe of their own free will in the sacrifice of the Lamb as recorded in Revelation 5:11-14. When these living humans repent and believe, God will use His fiery wrath against evil to separate their evil, spiritual deaths from their cleansed, living souls and spirits, and He will cast their spiritual deaths into the lake of fire. I Corinthians 3:11-15. God will be able to separate their living souls and spirits from their spiritual deaths because Christ left all of their sins and evil that He bore for them on the cross behind in the regions of death when He rose immaculate from the dead. Psalm 16:10; Hebrews 2:9. God will provide His lesser form of salvation for all these living humans when He cleanses them of all remaining sins of weakness with the blood and water that flowed from Jesus on the cross and recreates them with new bodies to live righteous lives on His recreated earth. Revelation 21:1-5; John 5:28-29. God will save with a higher and lower form of salvation all living humans because of His Almighty Love for them. I Corinthians 13:8. The Bible teaches in many passages of scripture that God will reconcile everything to Himself that has been stained by sin. Colossians 1:15-23; Romans 8:18-23; Romans 11:36; Psalm 36:6; I Timothy 4:10; I Timothy 6:13; I Corinthians 15:22; Revelation 21:5; Revelation 22:11-12; John 5:28-29. 

The World and the Word

                                        The Difference between Sin and Evil

God based His entire higher and lower forms of salvation of the whole human race on the perfect life, suffering death, descent into Hell, and immaculate resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. God gives the perfect righteousness of Christ to all living humans saved by His grace so that He can accept them into Heaven to be with Him forever. II Corinthians 5:21; John 17:23-24. God initiated a symbolic representation of salvation by grace when He killed an animal and made coats of its skin to cover Adam and Eve. Genesis 3:21.

God will use His fiery wrath against evil to cleanse all living humans confined to the regions of death of all their sins and separate their spiritual deaths from them for Him to cast into the lake of fire. I Corinthians 3:11-15; Revelation 20:15. All living humans confined there will repent and believe in the Lamb of God as recorded in Revelation 5:11-14. Hell and the lake of fire happen to be the same as the fiery wrath of God. Deuteronomy 32:22; Matthew 25:41. Jesus left all of the sins and evil of all living humans not saved by grace behind in God's fiery wrath when He rose immaculate from the dead. Psalm 16:10. God initiated a symbolic representation of salvation by His fiery wrath when He gave the burnt offering sacrifice to Noah in Genesis 8:20-21. All living humans confined to the regions of death will be restored to life and recreated by Christ's resurrection from the dead. I Corinthians 15:22; Hebrews 2:9; I Timothy 6:13; Luke 20:38; Revelation 21:5.

The Devil counted on the weakness in human free will being able to cause humans to choose to sin which would allow Satan to inject the evil of spiritual death into them which would eventually annul their living souls and spirits which, in turn, would cause God's Love to fail. Job 1:11; Job 2:5; Job 2:9. But God's Love cannot fail, and God never repents of the gifts that He provides. God never loses His gift of life to humans. I Corinthians 13:8; Romans 11:29; Ecclesiastes 3:14; Luke 20:38.

God devised a plan, through the death, burial, and resurrection of His Son, which will eventually cause all living humans to choose of their own free will to return to repentance, faith, forgiveness, and reconciliation with God. Colossians 1:15-23. God will prove that He can, and will, change every evil system that affects living humans into a good one as He has proven He can do in stories throughout His Word. God has defeated all of the Devil's plans to completely ruin God's creations. Revelation 1:17-18; Revelation 21:5; Romans 8:18-23. God proved to the Devil and all of His creations that His gift of free will to humans was not a mistake. Christ has conquered the world, the Devil, Hell, and Death, and He has taken back absolutely everything that was controlled by the god of this world, including all living humans. John 16:33; Revelation 1:17-18; Luke 20:38; I Corinthians 15:22; Psalm 36:6; Revelation 21:5.

The World and the Word

                                       The Difference between Sin and Evil

After Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, they gained the knowledge of their inner goodness and of their foreign evil that Satan had injected into their inner beings. God planned it that way. They realized that they could either choose to adhere to the goodness that God had put into them, or they could choose to adhere to the spiritual death within them and become cruel and evil. Romans 5:12.

All good works come from God. Ecclesiastes 9:1. God gives to every human in His image all of the good works that He expects them to do in their lives. Many people choose to ignore their good works, and they choose to do evil instead, but every human cannot avoid doing at least some of the good works that God has given them to do. Before they sinned Adam and Eve were good to each other but they did not have any ideas or language that would allow them to describe that goodness. They gained an intellectual knowledge of goodness only after they had sinned.

All of these events mean that God had a twofold purpose when He allowed Adam and Eve to sin. First, God meant that they would become so weakened by sin that Satan would be able to inject total evil, which is spiritual death, into their inner beings. This evil would cause them to be able to commit deliberate sins such as atheism or the worship of false gods. This evil is foreign to humans because it is incompatible with the good image of God in them. But God allowed this evil to infect humans to prove that His Love will never permit evil to completely blot out His good image in all humans. I Corinthians 13:8; Romans 11:29. This fact can only mean that over time God will be able to cause every living human to recognize that evil happens to be so nasty and cruel and destructive that they will all use the free will that God has given them to choose to cry out to God to save them from total destruction. Satan thought that God had made a mistake in His gift of free will, and he believed he could use free will to cause humans to choose to become totally evil and lost from God forever. Job 2:9. Satan believed that if he could prove that God's Love is not Almighty, then he would eventually find a way to murder God and take His place. John 8:44. But God knows exactly how to cause every human to choose to return to the repentance and faith that He puts into His image in them when He creates them. II Peter 3:9. Who can thwart the will of God? God will cleanse all living humans still in the flesh of all sins and spiritual death by the blood of Jesus the moment they repent and believe. John 5:24; Revelation 1:5. God will use His fiery wrath against evil to cleanse all living humans confined to one of the regions of death of all sins and spiritual death when they choose to return to repentance and faith in the Lamb of God. Revelation 5:11-14; I Corinthians 3:11-15; John 11:25.

God's second purpose was that all future humans would sin because of weakness. Humans would become so weakened by the influence of evil within them that sin would become unavoidable. But unlike deliberate sins which are wholly evil, some good usually adheres to sins of weakness. Judah recognized that Tamar had been more righteous than he. He did not order her to be burned, and he allowed her to have her babies. King David truly loved Bathsheba. The goodness within sins of weakness demonstrates that God's Love still adheres to fallen, living humans. God's Love for fallen, living humans means that He will be able to remove all the evil from man's false systems called sins and replace it with goodness to the extent that He will eventually replace all false systems with good ones. Once God has thoroughly cleansed all false systems, He will then be able to extract all spiritual deaths from all living humans for Him to cast into the lake of fire. Revelation 20:15; Revelation 21:8.

The seeds of goodness within all sins of weakness that allows God to cleanse it all is called repentance and faith. Repentance and faith in the Lamb of God will eventually reconcile all living humans to God's Love. Colossians 1:15-20; Revelation 21:5; Romans 8:18-23; II Peter 3:9. God's Love is Almighty and cannot fail. I Corinthians 13:8. Repentance and faith changes all deliberate sins to sins of weakness which God can cleanse and forgive because it ignites God's Love and compassion. God uses the blood and water that flowed from Jesus on the cross to cleanse and forgive the sins of all living humans saved by His grace. Once cleansed and forgiven, God will then be able to annul their spiritual deaths which are foreign to them. John 5:24. God will use His fiery wrath against evil to cleanse and forgive all living humans confined to the regions of death upon their repentance and faith so that He will be able to purge their spiritual deaths from them for Him to cast into the lake of fire. I Corinthians 3:11-15; Revelation 20:15. Living humans saved by grace go to Heaven. John 17:24. God recreates living humans saved by His fiery wrath to live righteous lives on His recreated earth. Matthew 5:5; Revelation 21:1-5.

The World and the Word

                                                 The Difference between Sin and Evil

Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This means that they came to be conscious of the good as well as the evil. One can only be conscious of the one if one is conscious of the other. Before this happened, they led blissful, innocent lives that they did not know were good. They both took their first bite of the forbidden fruit in the weakness of their free will, but they became conscious of the difference between good and evil after Satan injected evil into their inner beings. God had put some seeds of goodness in their disobedience. Eve desired to become wiser, and a better person, which happens to be a good system. Adam desired to sacrifice himself to fall to Eve's level in order to comfort her and protect her as best as he could. His action had to be good because it was symbolic of the sacrifice of Christ Himself. Romans 5:14. But their seeds of goodness within their sins did not mean that their disobedience was right. God had told them not to do it. Their disobedience allowed their lives to become open to Satan who would take advantage of their weakness in order to inject spiritual death into their inner beings which would ensure that they, and all of their descendants, would not be able to avoid sin throughout the entire history of mankind until the end of the world. God had warned them. Genesis 2:17. Evil would also ensure that the history of mankind would be one that contained tremendous suffering and pain. Genesis 3:16-19.

Had Adam and Eve eaten of the Tree of Life first, they would have immediately come to know God's majestic Holiness and His infinite Love for them. They would have instantly been able to completely reject the Devil and all evil. They would have entered into a state of grace and everlasting life with God. They would have experienced a natural transition from their earthly lives to their heavenly lives after over 900 years on the earth. Psalm 116:15. Jesus and the Apostles often referred to the deaths of God's saints as being asleep. After 900 years, Adam and Eve would have simply gone to sleep and awakened in Heaven. Adam and Eve were not in a state of grace before they sinned. They were simply in a state of innocence. They entered a state of grace after God killed an animal and clothed them in its skin. Genesis 3:21. No one ever falls from a state of grace. Romans 11:29. God also had a plan to bring some of Adam and Eve's descendants into a state of grace, and all others into a state of restored righteousness on earth through His sacrifice and resurrection for them. John 5:24; Revelation 5:11-14.

Some seeds of goodness reside in every sin of weakness. All through the Bible, God displayed His power to change sinful systems into wholly good ones by His ability to eliminate the false combinations of His elements and consistently add good elements until He had completely purified a false system. God changed Adam and Eve from a state of spiritual death into a state of being in God's grace. Genesis 3:21. God changed the story of Judah's sin with his daughter-in-law Tamar, who bore a son called Phares, into the ancestors of humanity's Savior. Genesis 38:29; Matthew 1:3. God converted the idolatrous Moabite Ruth to Judaism, and she became one of the ancestors of humanity's Savior. Ruth 1:16-17; Ruth 4:13-22. King David sinned with Bathsheba but they became two of the ancestors of humanity's Savior. Matthew 1:6. Samson led a life of sin and then deliberate disobedience of God, and God put him into hard labor in darkness which symbolized the bottomless pit, but he repented, and God gave him back his tremendous strength so that he could destroy a lot of evil people. Judges 16:21; Judges 16:27-30. God severely punished Jonah for his disobedience, and he never completely repented in his earthly life, and yet God took care of him. Jesus forgave Simon Peter when he repented of denying his Lord. The Bible is full of such stories.

But after Adam and Eve sinned in weakness, they also deliberately sinned because of the influence of evil within them. Eve knew that she had become ruined by spiritual death, and she very selfishly and cruelly desired to ruin Adam as well. Adam became selfishly afraid that he would lose his physical love with Eve. Unimaginable cruelty and horror entered into the history of the human race because of their deliberate evil. Many a person has turned his life over to practice evil because he does not understand that he can practice goodness because of the image of God within him. Luke 17:20-21; John 10:33-35. Spiritual death is totally evil. God cannot forgive total evil because it never repents. Matthew 12:31-32. God sends His Holy Spirit to call all humans who hear His gospel to repentance and faith in Christ who can save them by His grace. Romans 10:17. God sends His Holy Spirit to call all other humans to adhere to the goodness that He has put into their living souls and spirits. Those who reject the loving call of the Holy Spirit do so because they adhere to the evil, spiritual death within them that God will extract from their systems for Him to cast into the lake of fire. Revelation 20:15.

Nevertheless, God has devised a plan to save what happens to be left of the good souls and spirits of even the worst humans. Psalm 107:10-14; Revelation 5:11-14. Jesus called His disciples "friends" in John 15:15, and He even called Judas Iscariot "friend" in Matthew 26:50. Judas Iscariot refused to repent and probably went to Hell. But in the great worship service as recorded in Revelation 5:11-14, Christ will cause that which is left of his good soul and spirit to choose to repent and believe, and he will obey. As recorded in Revelation 20:5, God will resurrect even whatever happens to be left of this friend's good soul and spirit for Him to recreate with a new body to live a righteous life on His recreated earth. Revelation 21:1-5. God holds the power to change sins of deliberate evil into sins of weakness which He can forgive upon repentance and faith in Christ because one's desire to be reconciled with God engenders His Love and compassion for them. Colossians 1:15-23. But God will extract all evil which refuses to repent from the systems of all humans for Him to cast into the lake of fire. I Corinthians 3:11-15; Revelation 20:15.

The World and the Word

                The Difference between Sin and Evil

God planned that all living humans who would believe in Christ's power to save them while they were still alive in the flesh, He would wash their living souls and spirits clean with the blood and water that He would shed on the cross and annul their spiritual deaths the moment they repented and believed. John 5:24; Revelation 1:5; John 13:1-14. God would give those whom He saved by His grace the perfect righteousness of Christ Himself by means of which He could accept them to live with Him forever in Heaven. II Corinthians 5:21; Romans 8:14-17. All of the Old Testament blood offerings for sin symbolized salvation by grace.

God also planned that while He walked the earth He would not judge those who would not believe in Him, but He would consign their living souls and spirits to one of the three regions of death following their physical deaths. Hebrews 9:27; Revelation 20:13. In the end of the world, Christ will judge their evil, spiritual deaths which He will have separated from their spiritual lives. Their spiritual deaths are foreign to them because it was injected into them by the Devil. Revelation 20:11-15. God planned that when Christ descended into Hell, He would leave behind there all of the sins and spiritual deaths of all living humans consigned there so that He could rise immaculate from the dead. Psalm 16:10. Christ's descent into Hell represented God's fiery wrath against evil expressed by His will to dissolve the individual systems of every living human there in order to extract their living souls and spirits from their spiritual deaths. I Corinthians 3:11-15. In order to accomplish this separation, God will cause every living human within the regions of the dead to return to the faith that He put into them when He created them. Romans 12:3; Revelation 5:11-14. All of the Old Testament burnt offerings for sin symbolized God's salvation of all living humans whom He would have to consign to one of the regions of death. Genesis 8:20-21. Because the blood had to be shed before the burnt offering could be made, God will also cleanse all of His living humans with the blood and water that flowed from Jesus on the cross. Hebrews 9:22.

God will only be able to save those living humans confined within the regions of death if they choose of their own free will to return to repentance and faith in the power of Christ to save them. None of them will choose to remain within the horrors of spiritual death. They will all choose to repent and believe when they see the tremendous Majesty and the everlasting Love of the Lamb of God in a great worship service as recorded in Revelation 5:11-14; Luke 3:6. Christ, who has gained all power over Hell and Death, will prove to the Devil, as well as all of God's creations, that His Love can never fail and that His sacrifice will cause all living humans to choose to return to faith in His Love for them. Revelation 1:17-18; I Corinthians 13:8. The Devil will have utterly failed to cause even one living human to "curse God and die." Job 2:9. God will resurrect all living humans from all of the regions of death and recreate them to live righteous lives on His recreated earth. Revelation 20:5; Revelation 21:1-5.

Jesus would not judge anyone while He was on the earth because He specifically represents the Love and compassion of God. John 8:15; John 12:47. But Jesus did prophecy that He will judge by His Word in the last day, which can only be the last day of the present earth. John 12:48. The Father represents God's fiery wrath against evil in His Word. Since Christ and the Holy Spirit and the Father are One, then they all agree as to the contents of God's Word. I John 5:7.

Jesus will judge the spiritual dead by His Word. Revelation 20:11-15. Before Christ's judgment, God will have already raised all of His repentant living souls in Revelation 20:5. Living humans can sin as they are influenced by the evil within them, but only the spiritual dead can commit deliberate acts of evil expressed by their hatred of God. Luke 23:34; John 8:28; Matthew 12:31-32. God can cleanse and forgive all sins of living humans upon repentance and faith because of His compassion for the weakness of their living souls and spirits caused by the foreign presence of evil. But God must use His fiery wrath to extract all evil from all living humans for Him to cast into the lake of fire. Revelation 20:15; Revelation 21:8. In the entire Bible (KJB), God always directs His fiery wrath against evil itself, never against living humans whom He creates and loves. Exodus 19:9-24; Deuteronomy 32:21-22. Whenever God destroyed living humans with His fiery wrath, He never said it would be forever. Luke 10:11-12; Luke 20:38. Jesus came to destroy the Devil and all of his works forever, not living humans. I John 3:8; Hebrews 2:14-15; John 12:31-32; II Peter 3:9; I Corinthians 15:22.

The World and the Word

           The Difference between Sin and Evil

God decided to test His Love by creating intelligent, but innocent, humans with free will and putting them into the Devil's territory on earth. The Devil thought that God had made a huge mistake in doing that. The Devil believed that he could use the human's free will against them to the extent that he could cause them to disobey God which would allow the Devil to inject evil into their beings which, over time, would so thoroughly corrupt their good souls and spirits that they would become totally evil and lost from God's Love forever. Satan thought that he could gain eternal control over the human's evil souls and spirits in eternal death forever. Job 1:11; Job 2:5; Job 2:9.

Satan reasoned that if he could prove that God's Love can fail, he would also prove that God is not Almighty. Satan could then use God's supposed weakness against Him so that Satan could eventually find a way to murder God and take His place. Isaiah 14:12-17. Satan must have been pleased when he saw that God had actually given Adam and Eve a choice between obedience and disobedience. Genesis 2:15-17.

After Adam and Eve sinned, God could not then allow them to eat of the Tree of Life because that would cause both the eternal deaths and the eternal lives of all humans to persist forever. God expelled Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden, and He put the Tree of Life into a place called Paradise next to Hell where He would send all Old Testament saints saved by His grace to dwell there until Christ would come and preach the gospel to them, cause them to believe, cleanse them of all their sins by His shed blood, and translate them all to Heaven when He ascended. Genesis 3:23-24; Ezekiel 31:16-18; Matthew 27:52-53; Ephesians 4:7-10.

But God knew exactly how to thwart the Devil's plans to annul the living souls and spirits of humans by causing every one of them, at a given time and place, to repent and return to the faith in Christ that He puts into every one of their good souls and spirits when He creates them. Romans 12:3. Humans could not save themselves from sin and spiritual death, so God would come to them in human form, live the perfect life that they could not live for them, and in His great Love for them, He would sacrifice Himself and take the sins and spiritual deaths of every one of them on Himself on a cruel cross to suffer the eternal effects of sin and their eternal spiritual deaths for them so that He could rise from the dead to cleanse and purge all sin and evil from every human who would ever live. Christ would first cleanse them of all their sins because sin causes spiritual death, and then being cleansed, He would be able to separate their spiritual deaths from them for Him to cast into the lake of fire. I Corinthians 6:11; I Corinthians 3:11-15; Revelation 5:11-15; Revelation 20:5; Revelation 20:15. Since God's Intellect and Love are Almighty, then He would certainly be able to plan a way to cause every living human whom He has created and loves to choose of their own free will to return to the faith that He put into them when He created them. Ecclesiastes 3:14; I Corinthians 13:8; Romans 11:29; Numbers 23:19; John 11:25-26; John 5:28-29.

The World and the Word

               The Difference between Sin and Evil

God inspired the Jews to write the spiritual history of the human race. Because humans pass through time, they had to write God's Word in the past, present, and future tenses. But to God, His Word exists in an eternal tense; that is, an eternal and infinite present. This fact can only mean that the eternal Word of God cannot fail. Matthew 24:35; Numbers 23:19; Psalm 119:89. Since God is Almighty, then His Love has to be Almighty. God's Love for His living humans cannot fail. I Corinthians 13:8. God must rescue them all from eternal death. Revelation 20:5; Revelation 4:11; Revelation 21:5; Ecclesiastes 3:14. Whatever God said to Adam and Eve, He has said to the entire human race. Genesis 3:20. Luke 20:38 is God's eternal Word.

That which happens to be most important about the spiritual history of humanity happened at the beginning when God prophesied to Adam and Eve that He would send humanity a Savior, and the Great White Throne Judgment at the end of the world. The absolutely most important event in man's spiritual history became the perfect life, suffering to death, burial, descent into Hell, and resurrection of the Savior of all living humans. All of the rest of the Word of God simply unfolds the details of man's spiritual history from beginning to its end. Revelation 1:8; Revelation 1:17-18; John 16:33.

Satan believed that God had sown the seeds of His own eternal destruction when He gave free will to Lucifer. Satan believed that Lucifer succeeded in destroying a part of the good elements that God put into his system when God created him. But God's Word relates that He used His fiery wrath against evil to dissolve Lucifer's system and separate and recover all of the good elements that He had put into Lucifer's system from all of the totally evil, rebellious, and empty being called Satan whom God exiled to earth as an empty, negative consciousness; that is, a type of demon. Ezekiel 28:14-19. But Satan still believed that he had weakened God and had gained some power over Him, at least on the earth. Job 1:6-7; Matthew 4:1-11. Satan would not have bothered to tempt Jesus if he had not believed that Jesus had some weakness in Him. Only after the resurrection of Christ did Satan learn that he had been defeated and that he had but a short time on the earth. Revelation 12:12.

Satan knew that doubt about the power of God's Love had entered into God's creations because of Lucifer's rebellion. Satan also knew that this doubt would persist, and that in the future more angels might rebel against God because of it. God had to prove to His creations that His Love remained Almighty and that His gift of free will to Lucifer had not been a mistake. God had to allow Satan to do his worst to humanity to fully and completely test His Love. God could not allow Satan to claim that God had only partly tested His Love. When God gave free will to Lucifer, He had no idea that evil even existed. Actually, evil does not exist, at least to creative and positive consciousness, and yet it can produce negative consciousnesses that the Bible calls devils. Evil is wholly destructive and empty, and in that sense, it does not exist. Isaiah 40:17. That which has a positive existence tends to be destroyed by that which does not exist. Every false system, when all of its positive elements are subtracted, becomes reduced to the idea of nothing which, in turn, indicates an absolute nothingness. But God has determined to recreate everything that has become destroyed by evil. Revelation 21:5.

The World and the Word

              The Difference between Sin and Evil

When God assigned His punishments for the sins of His living humans, He mentioned only toil and sorrow in their earthly lives, and temporary separation from Him in the "cursed ground" for unrepentant sinners. God mentioned no eternal punishment in any form for His living humans that He created and loves and can never lose. Genesis 3:16-19. If God had an eternal punishment in a lake of fire for unrepentant sinners, then He would certainly have told humans about it at that time. God never withholds His truth from His people that they are capable of understanding. Titus 1:2. Revelation 20:11-15 clearly teaches that God will cast only the dead and evil nature of humans into the eternal lake of fire. Many of Jesus' teachings and parables reflect this same fact. In Matthew 7:17-19, Jesus taught that only a corrupt tree with no fruit whatsoever is cast into the fire. In Jesus' parable of Matthew 13:24-30, He taught that in the harvest, symbolic of His Judgment in the end of the world, the tares, symbolic of the useless and evil nature of humans, would be separated from the wheat, symbolic of all living and useful humans that He has created, and only the tares would be burned in the fire. In Jesus' parable of Matthew 13:47-50, Jesus taught that the good fish will be separated from the bad fish which He meant to be symbolic of the evil and useless nature of humans that will be cast into the lake of fire. In Matthew 15:13, Jesus taught that only the plants which His Father has not planted will be rooted up, symbolic of the evil that the Devil has planted into the inner beings of humans, and Jesus implied that the good plants that His Father has planted will be preserved, meaning all of the good lives of living humans that God has created. Psalm 36:6. In John 12:31-32, Jesus taught that only the Devil, and by implication all evil itself, will be cast out of His world. Jesus further taught that when this happens, all humans will be drawn to Him which happens to be a clear reference to Numbers 21:5-9. God did not order Moses to make a serpent of brass for the people to look to to be saved until after some of them had died which symbolized God's separation of total evil from all living humans that He created. I John 3:8; Hebrews 2:14-15.

God had Adam to call his wife's name Eve which means "the life giver." She would be the mother of all living humans whom God would create and love. Genesis 3:20. Living humans never become permanently dead to God. Luke 20:38. Because of this truth, God will raise all living humans, whom He had to consign to one of the regions of death, back to life in the end of the world. Revelation 20:5; I Timothy 6:13; John 5:28-29. God knows exactly how to cause every living human confined within the regions of death to repent and return to faith in the Lamb of God of their own free will. Revelation 5:11-14; Colossians 1:20; Revelation 21:5; Romans 8:18-23; Romans 11:29; Romans 11:36; Revelation 4:11.

Genesis 3:21 records that God killed an animal and covered Adam and Eve's nakedness and shame with its coat of skin. God shed the blood of an animal which symbolized the fact that the future Savior would shed His blood to save by His grace Adam and Eve and all future living humans who would repent and put their faith in His power to cleanse them of all their sins and evil with His shed blood while they were still alive in the flesh. Matthew 26:28; John 5:24; Revelation 1:5; I Corinthians 6:11.

The World and the Word

             The Difference between Sin and Evil

When Adam and Eve sinned, then the entire future human race became subject to the danger of their good, spiritual lives becoming annulled and replaced by their evil, spiritual deaths, and their good lives becoming lost from God's Love forever. Spiritual death was far too strong for them to overcome it on their own. They needed someone to rescue them. Romans 7:21-25.

Adam and Eve became ashamed of their nakedness and hid in the garden when God came to visit them in the evening. Their shame resulted from their awareness of their spiritual deaths that the Devil had injected into them. Revelation 3:17-18. When God had found Adam and Eve, He sentenced them and the whole human race with temporal punishments for their sins, but He did not curse their good lives that He created and loved. Genesis 3:16-19. God can never lose anything that He has ever created and loves, not to eternal spiritual death or to the Devil. Ecclesiastes 3:14; Romans 11:29. God cursed only the Devil and the ground that would hold the three regions of death. Revelation 20:13; Genesis 3:14 and 17. In the future, God would have to consign to one of the three regions of death all unrepentant sinners according to how they lived because of the sins and evil that still adhered to their good, inner beings. Hebrews 9:27. But God meant for this also to be but a temporary punishment because Christ would descend into Hell and use His fiery wrath against evil to burn it and separate all spiritual deaths from all living humans whom He would raise from the dead. I Corinthians 3:11-15; Genesis 8:20-21; Leviticus 5:10; II Peter 3:10-13. But all the good and living souls confined to the regions of death would have to return to their faith that God had given them that only the Lamb of God had the power to save them. Revelation 5:11-14 records their repentance and faith. Revelation 20:5 records their resurrection. John 5:28-29.

God made sure that Adam and Eve would hear Him curse the Devil. God informed the Devil that hatred would always exist between the Devil's "seed" and the woman's "seed." The Devil's seed can only be the spiritual death that he has implanted into all living humans. While some humans may desire physical death if they think that it will annul their consciousness, they certainly would loathe and eternal spiritual death in a lake of fire forever. The woman's seed can only be the entire living human race that God loves and will forever save. Genesis 3:20; Luke 20:38. But God also prophesied about a particular seed of the woman who would come to crush the head of the serpent. This prophecy clearly reveals that this Savior would come to completely destroy and annul the serpent and all sin and evil itself, not living humans. John 1:29; I John 3:8; John 12:47. The Devil would be allowed to torture this human Savior in his attempt to murder Him, but the Devil will only succeed in wounding Him. This Savior would gain a complete and absolute victory over the Devil and all his works when He would rise from the dead. I John 3:8; John 12:31-32; John 16:11; Hebrews 2:14-15; II Peter 3:9; John 5:24; Revelation 5:11-14; Revelation 20:5; Revelation 1:17-18.

The World and the Word

           The Difference between Sin and Evil

God decided to test His Love in order to remove from all of His creations all doubt about the Almighty Power of His Love. God created two special, intelligent humans, gave them both a soul and spirit, put them into a blissful garden, and allowed them to choose to disobey Him by eating the forbidden fruit or to obey Him by eating of the tree of life. God already knew that because of their free will that He had given them and their inherent doubt, they would choose to disobey Him. Genesis 2:15-17. God had to allow a fall to prove that His Love can cleanse all sin and doubt and evil from all of His creations. Romans 11:36; Proverbs 10:12. Had God allowed doubt to remain, then evil would have also remained forever.

Eve listened to the lies of the Devil and sinned against God by eating the forbidden fruit. Eve chose to sin because of the influence of evil from the outside, but as soon as she became weakened, the Devil became able to inject spiritual death into her inner being. Venomous snakes are symbolic of this power of the Devil. Genesis 2:17; Genesis 3:14. Since Eve had been created in the image of God, then part of her motivation for eating the forbidden fruit formed a good system. The desire to learn and become wiser happens to be a good system, not a false one. Genesis 3:6. But the Devil's injection of evil into her being caused God's good image within her being to become subject to the danger of eternal, spiritual death and separation from God forever. The Devil counted on the evil within her becoming so powerful that it would eventually completely ruin and annul God's good image within her to the extent that she would be lost from God's Love forever, and in this way, the Devil could prove that God's Love can fail. Job 1:11; Job 2:4-5. The Devil would have succeeded if God's Love had not sent His Son to save the entire human race. Genesis 3:15.

But the Devil's plan could not be completed until Adam sinned. I Timothy 2:14. When Eve presented the forbidden fruit to Adam, he panicked and became confused which caused him to forget to call on God for help. Adam did not think or pray. If he had, then he would have realized, as humans now do, that when a totally innocent person, like a child and like Eve, does something wrong because they were misled by a knowledgeable adult, then the child cannot be blamed. If Adam had only prayed, then God would have come to their rescue, absolved Eve of all blame and banished the Devil from having any more influence over humans. Adam was also innocent, but God could blame him because God had put the knowledge of his disobedience into him so that he knew exactly what he was doing. I Timothy 2:14. If Adam had only called on God to save Eve, then God would have instructed Adam and Eve to eat of the tree of life, gain everlasting life and a natural transition from mortal bodies to spiritual bodies with a rapture to heaven after having lived over 900 years in a blissful garden on the earth. Psalm 116:15; Matthew 18:3; Matthew 19:14.

When Eve presented the forbidden fruit to Adam, she sinned in a deliberate and cruel way because of the influence of evil within her. She knew that she had become ruined, and she selfishly desired to ruin Adam as well. But she also sinned because of weakness. She became afraid that she would be left alone if Adam did not sin and fall to her level. Every sin contains an element of weakness but also an element of deliberate evil. Jesus recognized the evil nature of sin by what He said in John 8:28, but He also recognized the weakness in sin by what He said in Luke 23:34. Since all sin and evil nailed Jesus to the cross, then could the Father have failed to answer Jesus' prayer in Luke 23:34?

When Adam forgot to pray and ate the forbidden fruit, then the Devil injected spiritual death into him as he had done to Eve. But there was some good and some evil in his decision. He sacrificed his own innocence and good standing with God to fall to Eve's level so that he could protect her and comfort her. Romans 5:14. His loving sacrifice symbolized Christ's sacrifice. But he also deliberately and selfishly sinned when he fell to Eve's level because he became afraid that he would lose his physical love with her. I Timothy 2:14.

The World and the Word

            The Difference between Sin and Evil

Some of the fallen angels followed Lucifer because they began to doubt the Almighty Power of God's Love. They reasoned that if God's gift of free will to Lucifer could cause evil to enter into one of God's creations, then there must be some weakness in God's Love that can be exploited to eventually cause God's downfall. They came to believe that Lucifer could win. They never loved Lucifer. They were simply afraid of him. They came to believe that Lucifer would find God's weakness. Even the angels who remained loyal to God began to have some doubts about God's Love. After God defeated Lucifer and his fallen angels, God chained these fallen angels in the bottomless pit except for four of them whom He chained in the river Euphrates. Jude 6; Revelation 9:14.

But God still had a problem. Unspoken doubt about the power of God's Love still persisted within His creations. John 20:24-29, Matthew 28:17, and Matthew 11:2-6 provide examples of this kind of doubt. God had to prove to His creations that His Love is Almighty and can never fail. I Corinthians 13:8. Christ's proof of His Love to John the Baptist and the Apostle Thomas provide prophetic examples of how He will provide proof of His Love to all of His creations. Revelation 21:5.

God has been and will always be wholly innocent. Christ was completely sinless and innocent when He walked on earth. Innocence has to be a part of God's Holiness. For this reason, God cannot be held responsible in the least for His gift of free will to Lucifer which caused evil to enter into His creations. Lucifer alone must be held responsible for his downfall and the entrance of evil into God's creations because he misused God's gift of free will. God gave this gift in innocence and love, but Lucifer misused it. Lucifer took God's eternal basic elements and ideas which He uses to form good systems and misused them to form false systems of rebellion. Evil has no original ideas. False systems are always invented by misusing true ideas. They are never created. Psalm 99:8. False systems are, or can become, evil and destructive. For example, 2+3=6 although formed of true ideas and signs, may not be destructive in itself, but it forms an example of how a mistake in mathematics can cause an engineer to build a bridge that can collapse. All false systems of sin and evil stems from a lack of faith in God's Love and His Word which comprises an Infinite Set of basic Ideas within His Infinite Mind, and His Good Systems formed from those basic Ideas which He can extend into His creations. Psalm 147:5.

Nevertheless, God, being Good and Holy, feels guilty about having allowed evil to enter into His creations although He remains completely innocent. In Isaiah 45:7, God took responsibility for the creation of evil and the darkness that hides it. Feeling guilt is a good system, never a false one. Only the good feel guilt. Total evil never does.

The World and the Word

                                         The Difference between Sin and Evil

All evil is sin, but not all sin is wholly evil. All sin is definitely wrong because it is disobedient to God, but God knows exactly how to bring goodness out of sin in that He will eventually cause every living human to choose to repent of their sins, believe that the Lamb of God can cleanse them of all sins, become forgiven by God, and reconciled to Him. John 5:24; Revelation 5:11-14; Colossians 1:15-20. The Devil injected evil, which is spiritual death, into Adam and Eve when they chose to sin against God when they ate the forbidden fruit. Romans 5:12; Genesis 2:17. Sin causes evil and evil, in turn, causes sin.

One of the attributes of God is that He possesses free will. God can choose to create any good system that He desires. God creates them from an infinite set of eternal ideas in His Mind. These eternal ideas are the same as the Word of God of which His written Word is a limited part. John 1:1; Psalm 119:89; Psalm 147:5. God always chooses to create only holy systems of which some are life giving and sustaining, and all of them are good because they are ordered and beautiful. God is Omniscient in that He possesses an infinite knowledge of all that is good and beautiful. Psalm 147:5.

But God is also wholly innocent. In all innocence, God gave free will to His best creation called Lucifer because He believed that he could only use his free will to create good systems. At that time, God knew nothing about evil. God had no idea that His gift of free will to Lucifer would link him to a nonexistent region outside of His universe called the bottomless pit. God had no idea that when He created His positive universe, He also accidentally left a kind of nonexistent hole in His universe that, in a very mysterious way, generates negative consciousnesses that are wholly evil and destructive. God did not know that the darkness He created for rest also concealed this absolute nothingness. Isaiah 45:7; Ezekiel 28:13-19. Positive consciousness can never be directly conscious of evil or absolute nothingness. Its nonexistence can only be suggested to positive consciousness by the use of the idea of nothing which is a useful and creative idea. If one tries to imagine absolute nothingness, one will quickly find that one can only think of the idea of nothing. One can never directly see destruction, only the results and effects of destruction.

How an absolute nothingness could generate negative consciousnesses that are wholly evil and destructive remains a complete mystery to all positive consciousnesses, including God's. II Thessalonians 2:7. God could not have known about the bottomless pit with its negative consciousnesses because it embodies a kind of anti-knowledge. Demons seek to utterly destroy; that is, annul, all of God's creations and all positive knowledge.

Demons somehow gained access under the cover of darkness to the consciousness of Lucifer and caused him to realize that he could use his free will to choose to rebel against God. When Lucifer learned this, he swelled up with excessive pride and decided to try to murder God and take His place. Isaiah 14:12-17. Pride is a good and useful idea in God's Mind, but excessive pride is a false system that indicates vanity which is the idea of nothing that suggests absolute nothingness. Some of God's angels followed Lucifer in his war against God. God used His fiery wrath against evil to dissolve Lucifer's system, recover all of God's good ideas that He had put into his system, and exile him to the earth as a totally empty and evil, negative consciousness called Satan. Ezekiel 28:13-19.