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.