God is the creator of all things. He created both good and evil for his purpose:
Isaiah 45:7 (KJV) - I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.
That quote comes from the Old Testament, which is the Jewish Torah, and is written exclusively for Jews. The writers were referring to one of their gods, which is not the god of the New Testament.
The one true God created the natural world, and evil derives only from the minds of men. You will not find anything inherently evil in any of God's natural creations. It is only the breaking of God's rules that Jesus taught that leads to evil.
the Old Testament, which is the Jewish Torah
The (instructions) is the first 5 books or the Books or Moses of the Old Testament. Those would be Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Isaiah is the 23rd book of the Old Testament.
Still Jewish texts.
So how do you reconcile this with the fact that Adam and Eve brought evil into this world and God didn't want them to know evil?
God gave them free will to choose. If He had simply created them to be obedient with no choice their love and worship of Him wouldn't mean anything. That's how I and many others see it. Keep in mind God knows all things, both future and past, and He created all things. That means He also created Satan knowing that Satan would fall from grace along with one third of the heavenly hosts (angels).
The story of Adam and Eve are Jewish concepts, as are all the stories from the Old Testament. The Levite priests wrote the books of Moses in order to subjugate the Jewish people with their manipulative lies, creating a false history of them that would lead them to go along with the strict rules that were required by the Levites in order to carry out their ageless master plan for world domination as the 'chosen' people.
Evil originates in human thought and nowhere else. The story of Adam and Eve was designed to keep the Jewish people (and later others) from using their minds and brains to think for themselves and thus break free of the hold their leaders had over them.
The story of Adam and Eve is God's story handed down to Moses.
Satan was created in the minds of men -- a concept to embody the illusion that evil is some physical 'thing' that exists out there in the real world. The one true God didn't create anything that is inherently evil, and you will not find anything in his creations that is. It's only how you perceive something that determines whether it's evil. Man was given the ability to think for himself and have free choice, and this is where the concept of evil comes into play. Not respecting God's creations and the rights and freedoms of others leads to evil thoughts and acts. Thinking only in terms of yourself and not considering the effect you have on others is where evil creeps in. God gave us the freedom to think and choose as independent entities who experience his creations, but it is up to us to learn how to live in balance with those creations that's important. Evil is what we've determined through learning and experience what works against that balance. Satan is one of the false gods that the Jews created out of their minds to represent evil. Satan is merely a mental concept. Allegorical tales are a very ancient means of conveying ideas, and they were very popular during the time when the stories of the Bible were first conceived. Satan came to be seen as a physical entity because of this, being a reference to that in man that causes evil thoughts and actions, but the deeper meaning of many of the tales have been lost through misunderstanding and are taken to refer to real things and events. If Satan is just a concept that embodies the idea of evil, then the fall from grace might more easily be understood as man's lost purity of mind as he began to develop his ability to think for himself using the higher intellect rather than always be driven by the lower intellect of the emotions and instinct, which is what all less evolved creatures rely on. Given that we have been evolving on this planet for 3.5 billion years, and the fact that there is more than just a little evidence of past civilizations as advanced as we are now, it might even be that this fall from grace is an allegory for a tragic end of a once great past civilization that threw us back on the evolutionary scale when it collapsed, causing our higher intellect to atrophy from lack of use before it began to develop again. If you consider the fact that without widespread knowledge and education and our technological tools to help us learn and advance from them, as a scattered people we would quickly lose what we know and have to start with the next generation at a huge intellectual disadvantage, and this would continue for a very long time, causing us to revert back to the baser mental capacities of emotion and instinct, and all understanding that we had learned about civility and humanity would be lost. The thoughts and actions that we consider evil (having learned through long experience) would have nothing to keep them in check. They would have to be relearned. Jesus Christ represents the teacher, the one who carries those lessons and rules that hold us together as civilized people. Satan represents the thing he seeks to keep at bay, knowing that it's the minds of men that develop the thoughts and actions that are to be avoided if we are to live in peace and enjoy God's creations.
Proverbs 14:12 There is a way which seem right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.
Best book ever written on the subject of good vs. evil is the Great Controversy.
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