Does God know what He is doing? Has he lost control of his greatest creation? Has the Creator's plans been thwarted by his creation through their sin? Why do we, his greatest creation, have all the problems that we do?
It is tiring to hear messages and read articles by people who trash God and all he has created. We humans endure a most rigorous training program know as life. Some believe all our Creator can do is whine about how we should do better and somehow cease to sin. People we love die of cancer, accidents, and thousands of diseases.
We enter into relationships we hope will endure until death, only to end up hating each other and divorcing. We tenderly raise a child from baby to adulthood only to have it rebel and possibly hate us. We crave certainty and get uncertainty. We easily become addicted to all sorts of substances, sins and ideas. Yet, trying to get over an addiction is quite difficult at best. Our best-laid plans often go astray. Sometimes, no matter how hard we try, we cannot make things come out the way we want.
God knows us and appreciates our struggle and knows that we sin. If we are willing to do our best to overcome He says He will reward us for it! He wants us not only to live forever but also to have the same wonderful quality of life he possesses. He will give it to us when we overcome Satan's ways. He created man in his own image and likeness. Man's creation is a process that is not finished yet.
Think about what happened in the Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve's creation. Genesis does not mention our first parents receiving a warning that Satan would try to deceive them. The Bible says that Satan was one of the most intelligent and craftiest created beings. Adam and Eve was no match for the devil. God intentionally "let the gate open" for him to enter into the garden and entire the first couple to sin. It was a setup.
God wanted Adam and Eve to do what they did. He placed a temptation right in front of them. Adam and Eve were set up to take to themselves the knowledge of Good and Evil. He is in the business of teaching us important lessons. He wants us to be wise as serpents by harmless as doves. However, to reach his goals, his plan is for us to learn the wrong way first from his adversary.
God is not as interested, as some think, in preventing us from being fallible. There are eternal lessons He wants us to learn. His plan is to insure that no one will ever create Satan's way again. We will know that it does not work because we will have already tried it. It is through the character built in this life, built in “hell,” that will enable us to create "heaven" for all eternity.
To be smarter and wiser than your enemy it pays to know how he thinks. It is perhaps a cliché to say that God is not finished with us yet. However, it is true. He created us and then gave us to Satan for indoctrination. Then Jesus comes along to rescue us from our mutual enemy. He gave us the ability to think and think about our thinking. Once he inoculates us with His way of thinking, we can compare his thinking with the way Satan thinks.
What is He doing?
God has chosen to allow sin and suffering in the world as a means of teaching all humans, through experience, that his ways are the best. The Eternal cannot create righteous and holy character, which requires countless choices over a period of time, by fiat! If he could, he would have done so with the angels, a third of which turned themselves into his sworn enemies.
It is not enough to merely give us information about what is right and wrong. The angels had such information and yet countless millions of them ultimately decided to attack God's throne! Mankind must learn the consequences of disobedience and the joys of doing what is right. God wants us to build righteous character, while still maintaining our creativity, so that we can live forever with him in peace and love.
God knows what He is doing and his plan is on schedule. It is accomplishing the goals that He set out for it. He loves everyone. It only makes sense that the Creator of everything would love His greatest creation.
It is time we start forgiving sin and loving the people with whom we are going to be spending eternity. God formulated a plan that will give Him the exact results He wants. When we look at this world with all its suffering, we would do well to remember that plan. If you have a choice between Satan and our Creator's way, what would you choose? You see, his plan is working just as He knew it would.