"We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers,
against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places".
--- Ephesians 6:12-18 ---
If God is so good, why does He allow the meanness and horrors of this world to exist? It's an old question. Satan knows the answer. He prefers humans remain in the dark. Satan's preference is made easier when humans think of him as mythical. All predators manage better when the prey doesn't know they're being stalked.
The disastrous world we live in now, begin when Adam and Eve defied the will of God.
Satan convinced Eve that a little bite - out of just
one fruit - from the Tree of Knowledge wouldn't be so bad.
Just one little-bity bite, surely God wouldn't mind. Eve convinced Adam to try a bite, too, using the same reasonable argument Satan had used. Satan's arguments are always reasonable, that's why they're so effective.
Adam and Eve gained knowledge, exactly as Satan promised.
They lost Paradise.
They lost Paradise when they broke the only rule God commanded: Thou shall not eat of the Tree of Knowledge! Nothing else in Eden was forbidden to them. God granted them Free Will to do whatever they wanted - except for God's single commandment.
As punishment for their original sin they were cast from the Garden of Eden to manage on their own. God withdrew his protection. The fallen angel, Satan, was now allowed to work his will as: Master of this World; Lord of the Air; and Scourge of Mankind.
The meanness and horrors of this world are of Satan, not of God.
God withdrew His protection, He remained Omniscient, Omnipresent, and Omnipotent. His blessing
of Free Will to the humans he created is still in effect.
When the righteous pray for God's help, God will sometimes intervene with Satan's malevolence.
More often He will not intervene.
God's ways are beyond human understanding.
I don't know any more than any other human, but
I suspect God's reluctance to intervene has something to do with God's greatest hope for His favorite creation - us.
I think God hopes we will use our Free Will to unfailingly choose Good and reject Evil.
I think our ability to choose, is the real meaning of the Biblical assertion that God made us in his own image. Satan, his minions of fallen angels, and even the good angels, do not have Free Will. They are automatons. They do what they were programed to do.
Only humans were given Free Will.
The Bible instructs us to bring the Gospel to all who have ears. Many will resist, some others may be incapable of hearing. Even so, I suspect that when some unknown, critical mass of mankind freely chooses God's Will, the world will change, in that instant, to a new Paradise.
Satan and his cruelty will be banished. Jesus will return as King of Kings.
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Most of what I've said is Biblical orthodoxy. Some is my own explication. I don't know that my wonderings are true. I do think they're likely.
Secular skeptics dismiss the story of Genesis as a folk tale made up by primitive desert nomads to make sense of a world they couldn't understand. That's partially true. Humans, then and now, are incapable of understanding
the complexity of God's design. They can understand the morality of a clear metaphor:
People (Adam & Eve) once lived in Paradise (carefree) in a world created by an unknown force (God) - both people and world were without of cunning or suspicion. No one knew how to worry. Nor did they
need to.
Then, somehow, in some unknown way, corrupting ideas of Self, Mine, and More, (Satan) crept mysteriously into this world that did not know worry (Paradise). Now, worries about Self, Mine, and More deceived people (Adam & Eve) into unnatural ambition.
People ambitiously decided to plough the earth and plant seeds to get more of the food they once plucked without effort in Eden.
Eden was closed to people. Was it because of Divine punishment from an unknown force (God), or did they do it to themselves with their ideas of Self, Mine, and More?
The story of Genesis explains the course of early human history. So too, do theories of anthropology, but anthropology doesn't explain God to Man.
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Science is limited to what can be measured. Science cannot explain the daily meanness and horrors of the world. Human technology, though powerful in many ways, is helpless before incorporate reality.
The Satanic powers that confuse and torment us are incorporate and invisible.
New discoveries of sub-atomic physics confound traditional certainties. The centuries-old search for the smallest particle has led to scientific certainty that there are no particles. People who haven't followed the latest science will find the idea of no particles unbelievable.
"What"? Are you insane"? "There's nothing here but stuff and us".
Sorry. There's no anything, anywhere, but strong quantum entanglements of energy that masquerade as hard reality. The hard stuff you see around you is empty space in which the illusion of, stars, planets, and everything else, is created by impenetrable force-fields of energy. The illusion is overwhelming realistic, but it isn't real.
Some things are real: God is real; Angels are real; Souls are real. Nothing else is real.
Science has acknowledged that the astonishing complexity of everything can't reasonably be credited to random events. They're not ready to acknowledge a Creator God, instead they've settled on an Intelligent Designer.
I suppose if science authorized a Bible it would proclaim, "In the beginning an Intelligent Designer created the Heavens and the Earth".
Science has gotten ever better at discovering what, and how. It's clueless about, why.
No human will ever know the fullness of God's intentions, but God's Word in the Holy Bible does tell us what we need to know. The passage in Ephesians tells us about the war we're in, whither we know it, or not. You can fight the good fight for God, or go down as ignorant cannon-fodder for Satan. You have a choice.
The certain path to right action, in this world and the next, is as simple as these words from the Book of Micah: 6:8, "Act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God".
God blessed you with Free Will. Satan cannot deceive you without your permission.
Amen.