How We Lost It

We could blame our flaws on God. That would be easy. The nasty people of this world are the result of a defective plan in creation that gave us some people who are lemons, though most of us, undoubtedly, are good.

Blaming it on God is easy and very common. If he's the all-powerful Maker of everything, then bad things shouldn't happen and "bad people" should be an oxymoron. A God truly in control, and who defines the very essence of mercy, shouldn't allow any unhappy thing to enter the paradise he made.

But what if he made us truly free, so free that is was possible not to do his will, not to live according to the pattern for which we were made? Then it would be possible for us to break ourselves out of the pattern and become something other than what we were made for. It would be possible for us to embrace evil, which, by definition, would be that which God is not.

Genesis 3 says that's exactly what we did. Hitler or the BTK killer are the product of human choices. If God is to be blamed for anything, it is that he made us free. The result was that some, by free choice, made themselves monsters, Hallowe'en without the fun.

More on this later. But in my next post I'd like to look at this whole creation thing again from a different viewpoint.