“Who made me? Surely it was my God… How then do I come to possess a will that can choose to do wrong and refuse to do good?”
Since I was seven, and I chose to accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, this same question has been running through my head. Like Augustine, I do not understand the origin of evil; if God, who is inherently good, created us as beings, then why didn’t he create us to be fully good? Because of our free wills, the first sin was committed and therefore sin became part of our nature. Had this not occurred, then God would not have had to send his son to die for the sins of humankind. How are we supposed to be gracious to God for forgiving our sins when he was the one who gave us the choice to sin, who placed the temptation of the tree of knowledge of good and evil before us in the garden? Don’t get me wrong, I love the Lord and I am unfailingly thankful for giving his life for our sins on the cross, because we, in the end, did make the choice to sin. However, couldn’t God have avoided the death of his son if he had made us without a free will or making us make the right decision and choose not to sin. Why didn’t he? I think that without evil, we as humankind wouldn’t be able to recognize that God was good because there would be no comparison. Without free wills, we would be forced to turn to God and worship him; however, because we have a will, we can choose to turn to God when evil is present. When bad things happen, like genocide or family deaths, people ask how God could do this and I am not claiming to have an answer but I do find it interesting that in the midst of these crises, people either tend to turn towards God and ask for help and mercy or they turn away from God because they believe him to be nonexistent or uninvolved. When my grandmother passed away last year, I asked myself and God how death was something that God allowed to happen. I did cry when she died because we were not very close, but I did feel the emptiness of knowing that she was gone. Like Augustine, I often wonder whether grieving is not worth our time because we should know that what is mortal will die, and what is immortal will remain. Why does it come as such a surprise when someone dies then? Should we rejoice when someone we love dies because they may have gone to live with the father in heaven or grieve because they are like a possession that we as individuals have lost? Is death a punishment for sin or a gift of God because it is a gateway into eternal life? Wasn’t the world originally supposed to be a paradise but man chose to disobey God and therefore evil entered the world? If so, then how do we know that heaven will not be the same way, are we not given free wills in heaven? When we die, will the temptation of evil no longer haunt us?
I really like the question you are asking here. How could a Christian be saddened knowing that a friend, family or stranger died? Although we are told that once deceased, we become immortal, their is still a deeper meaning of mortal life. (Isiah 25:8) He will swallow up death in victory: and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off faces. This indentifies the value of human life to God.
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