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.