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.