You were perfect in your ways from the day you were created, Till iniquity was found in you (Ezekiel 28:15). God created the one that is the evil one, but created him perfect in all of his ways. God did not create evil. God created and saw that it was good (read all of Genesis 1). God created mankind with a freewill; with the capacity for good and evil but man was not created evil. Man used their freewill to sin against God by taking of the knowledge of good and evil. Everything God created and gave to man was good (read all of Genesis 1). The evil one introduced himself to mankind and tempted man to sin.

All who dwell on the earth will worship him, whose names have not been written in the Book of Life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8). Him, being delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God, you have taken by lawless hands, have crucified, and put to death (Acts 2:23). Jesus is the Lamb slain, and God had foreknowledge of Him being slain for our sins; God had foreknowledge that mankind would sin and would need a savior. God has a prophet gifting that mankind cannot even begin to understand. God has foreknowledge – knowledge in advance of it being manifested. Man was not predestined to sin, but was allowed to sin. Man was created walking with God, but turned away. Evil is turning away from God; that is why we say to repent (turn) from sin. Man has turned to sin and must turn back, but man was created walking with God. And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden (Genesis 3:8).

If God created evil, then evil is God’s will; but evil is the turning away from God. I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish (Luke 13:3). The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9). It is God’s will that none should perish. Then it cannot be God’s will that mankind turn from Him to sin – evil is not in God’s will, but mankind has turned away from God’s will – it was not God’s will but the will of the evil one that mankind should fall. God having foreknowledge of the fall had a plan for redemption.

First there was Jesus known as being slain before sin was introduced to mankind. Then when He ascended back to His proper place with God; He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head—Christ— from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love (Ephesians 4:11-16). And none of the minister gifts are the head, but Jesus is the head. We shall no longer be children – when we are no longer fooled by the trickery of men – no longer tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine – then we may grow up; when we know God (Christ), and not any of the 5 ministries, to be the head. It is when we come in the unity of faith with the knowledge of the Son of God that we return to the place that God created us to be – to a perfect man (dwelling in the perfect man Jesus the Christ – the only head). We are united with God by faith through the Christ – what man can do that?

© 2008, Tim D. Coulter Sr.