B4. Why is there such Grief in this world?
Here’s a summary of some of my beliefs about the Plan of God and how He will realize His ultimate dream of a happily-ever-after relationship with His Created, Free-willed beings:
1) I don’t believe in hell as an everlasting punishing, but rather an everlasting punishment. I can make a strong case against theories that would have the Creator God creating thinking beings only to punish them in some torturous way for everafter. This is not the character of God that was revealed in the Life of Christ. John 15:13 tells us that there is no greater love than for a man to give up his life for his friends. This is what God did via His Human Image, Jesus Christ.
There must be some reason why God loves us and certainly there ought to be some pretty definite reasons behind why we are experiencing such enormous grief in this world. Why for example wouldn’t a loving God just create everyone perfect and immediately experience the perfect kingdom of heaven?????
I dealt with this topic pretty thoroughly in my on-line book. See sections Appendix a10 and Appendix a10d. Also read, section 6. The Sin Drama and Why God Created Man in the First Place. And after that you might want to read, section 3g as well.
2) I believe God did give us some insight into His Big Picture Plan when He gave us the Bible. See section 4. Why is the Bible a valid source of truth? For some thoughts on this. For me this Big Picture Plan is extremely logical:
- The First Cause (God) had to be all alone at some point.
- The First Cause wants “companionship” so He creates thinking beings, who He can communicate with via thought.
- Thinking beings have infinitely more experiences to share if they have free will than if they are merely “robots”.
- Free willed beings cannot remain perfect unless they understand both good and evil. They can be created perfect (without sin), but they must learn about “evil” to know they are choosing “good”.
- They can learn about evil either by doing evil (sin) or by watching others do evil. The wages of doing sin are eventual death via self-destruction.
- God must set up a scenario where the angelic beings He created can learn about evil without doing evil. Then He can realize His plan of a happily-ever-after existence in the perfect kingdom of heaven for His created beings. There they would enjoy experiencing an endless variety of wonderful things and relating their feelings to Him.
- The scenario requires Him to create a surrogate universe of humans, a little lower than the angels, who would elect to sin and then pay the eventual consequences, while all the angelic beings watched and learned all about “evil”.
- Over time these humans would fall away from trusting their Creator God and would put their faith in anything else. This tendency will cause them to devolve over time, creating a more and more self-destructive character and a world that doesn’t work. Along the way their lack of trust in God prevents them from resolving their problems. Their trust in any of the many alternatives proves to be futile. There is only one Creator God and none other is like Him.
- The scenario for mankind in general is destined to self-destruct. This will demonstrate the nature of evil in all its aspects, so that those who have seen it play out on our Earth will never need to experience it and die themselves. As long as they “remember” what happened here they will know good and evil yet live happily ever after.
- However, a loving God needs to have an escape plan for these free willed humans, before He can implement this salvation plan for His angelic beings. Even though we die, yet He can give us individually everlasting life in heaven with the angels, if we individually choose to have a relationship with Him. We must each choose “Life” over “Death”.
3) There is grief in this world simply because it flows from sin. God, like a loving parent, wants nothing but good for His created beings. Anything that we could think of that He would not want us to experience first hand, is self-destructive. In order to understand these things and know that we are indeed morally free, He must have the consequences of sin play out to their bitter end. To end it sooner would only leave doubts that perhaps we could solve our problems without God, given more time. The final end must be realized for all to see the complete picture in all its ramifications! Then and only then will there be no further doubts. [Note that humans, who are finally re-created as angelic beings on the “last day” must spend some time (1000 years) observing the archive of human history, so that they will understand the entire sin drama as all the other angelic observers have had a chance to witness. Then it will be necessary that all of us “REMEMBER” the lessons learned. This is the reason why God instituted the 7th day Sabbath, and why all His thinking beings in heaven will one day remember it, to keep it holy.
4) On the question of God’s Omniscience: God knows everything because nothing exists until He thinks of it. He knows all the choices we can make and all the possible outcomes. However, He must elect to not know which path we will take. See section e. Does God really Know Everything? The Bible confirms that God is surprised by choices we make. Yet, the end is inevitable – we will be happy; we will die; etc., that sort of thing. We still have to choose the paths we will take, from which we will generate our own experiences that we can share with our Creator. He does not already know how we will feel so we need to tell Him. That’s what it must be like for free-willed beings. If God had wanted only robots, He would have made more grass.
5) On the question of God’s Omnipotence: God is All-powerful, because He can do anything as easily as thinking about it. Yet He has been around forever, so He’s had enough time to do everything Himself already. What God needs now is to have others do their thing, without His control. He can keep them alive by thinking of them, and yet not pull their strings.
6) We now need to understand the key to our own everlasting happiness as we go through this vale of tears. God creates thinking beings only to have them experience His other creations and then tell Him about their feelings. Yet they must want to do that. For now in this world, we need to learn to talk to God when we’re good or bad, happy or sad. If we want to do this then we’ll develop a relationship with our Creator now and we will love being in heaven. If we don’t like this idea, then we will try to hide from God and He will “Not know” us. The only way He can grant us that wish, ie to be apart from Him, is for Him to stop thinking about us. He must stop thinking of us in any active scenario. He will always “know” us but He must close the folder and never open it again. But in heaven we will be able to experience God’s creations without the grief, disease, and waiting in line. We will have the awesome additional capabilities that the immortal angelic beings have, to experience God’s limitless imagination and talk to Him about it.
Praise God.
25 February 2002
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