I believe that God is good. Even though the universe itself sends me mixed signals, and is full of suffering and evil, I believe that God is the good God, the creator of infants and the many wonderful things we see in the natural world. It is truly out of the mouths of babies that comes the greatest of all praise for God.
Now anyone who has ever experienced the full force of the wrath of Yahweh would have a lot of trouble believing that it was God who was the creator of evil. I know the wrath of Yahweh because Yahweh has put it on display before me. There is an enormous amount of pain and suffering that went into producing that awe inspiring display of anger. The level of passionate hatred and intense pain and burning rage that evil has succeeded in arousing in God is all that I need to convince me thoroughly that whatever evil is and wherever it might have come from, it certainly didn't come from God.
Therefore it follows that while for all practical purposes Yahweh is more than omnipotent enough as far as we are concerned, Yahweh is not all knowing and all powerful as described by traditional religious doctrines of omnipotence. With this in mind I thought I would share a story, and that it is all it is, which describes what I believe most likely happened based on whatever accumulated experience and insight I might have developed.
Now as I mention in telling my story, I was approached by a bright luminous craft in Banff when I was fifteen. First it was wrapped in a cloud and then it reappeared surrounded by a shimmering rainbow. This was an allusion to Revelations Chapter 10. A few months later I turned sixteen and when I received my first driver's licence the number on it was ‘0 9 0 6 6 6 0 6'. The sudden appearance of that ‘666' on my driver's licence I interpreted as evidence that there really did exist another person out of there whom our ancestors would have known by the name of Satan the Devil. It was an evil thing to do a person and not something you would expect from an angel. I won't speculate on the attraction of evil or why Satan the Devil might want to do evil, but I will note that if ‘666' is an evil number and Satan the Devil wants to make an attempt to ruin someone that would seem to be a logical choice among so many other possibilities in evil. I am sure that if Christ was walking the earth today that Satan the Devil would certainly try that ‘666' thing and that would indeed probably be the very first thing that Satan the Devil would try.
Now given that it would Satan the Devil who loved evil, and given that Yahweh hates evil with a very impressive, thoroughly convincing passionate fury, it seems most logical to me that the very first idea of evil probably came from Satan the Devil. Based on what I have experienced Satan the Devil continues to do these evil things right to this very day, so it isn't simply a purely wild speculation on my part to extrapolate backwards and assign the origination of this concept of evil to the one who practices it today.
What probably happened is something like this. Now God is good, gentle, loving, peaceful, generous and kind and full of merciful compassion and affections. Now evil is a truly filthy and disgusting thing that causes much pains and sufferings, and I am not going to attempt to explain the allure of evil or what ever would have attracted anyone to it in the first place. Evil exists. Somehow this happened. For what we call some unknown and highly perverted reason the idea of evil was found to be highly desirable.
Now perhaps the attraction to evil, disgusting as it was, lay in the fact that evil was so much more powerful than good. After all, God was gentle and compassionate, harmless and loving. Now evil is going to be a source of suffering for many created beings, but in order to destroy evil God would have to do evil by destroying created beings. Destroying created beings was the one thing God would find difficult, and one must assume evil reasoned, even impossible to do. Therefore evil would take over this known universe. If God wanted another good universe, well then it would be up to God to leave this universe and go and start another some place else. Evil could not be defeated and thus evil would prove to stronger than good in that only by doing evil could God destroy evil and God could not do evil without also becoming a source of evil and proving that after all is said and done, evil really does overpower and destroy good. I offer this as one possible explanation of what must have been going through the mind of Satan the Devil when the concept of evil was first being formulated in his mind.
Now that evil is disgusting to say the least, and I am not going to even try to explain the get popularity of that evil concept seems to have enjoyed among some people on this or any other planet. Let's just say that somehow it happened, and then evil became popular. The more evil spread the more it could become entrenched, and the harder it was going to be for the Good and Loving God to do anything about it, because that would mean destroying even greater numbers of created beings, the more that evil spread. Evil could also use the evidence of its own popularity to argue for the ‘freedom of choice of evil,' even though it was obviously disgusting, and by using these ploys and other such things, evil could put God on the spot once again, because who wants to look like an oppressive tyrant? The spread of evil could then be viewed as political move as part of a power play.
Now when the began doing this evil they were faced with a good compassionate God, and if as Yahweh says, empathy is a required element to understand the consequences of a course of action, it was at this point that evil would have erred right from the beginning. You see, evil might see only that Good helpless compassionate soft hearted God who was impotent before evil, but evil, having no empathy, this being a requirement to being really vicious and cruel to another human being, would not have looked into the future and see the results of long ages of torment, pain and suffering would have on God. Now as evil approaches the end of the path they are on evil finds itself confronted with a creature they had not anticpated. They are faced with Yahweh.
Now it might have been true that back in the days before God became Yahweh, God was helpless before evil. However nothing is impossible for Yahweh. All things are possible for Yahweh. It would take many ages of time, and many thousands of years as humans measure it, but by being subjected to a grueling ordeal of incredible suffering and evil it would finally become possible for God to become Yahweh and gain the ability to destroy evil. It is a terrifying thought, because you always have to wonder if during the voyage when God must become Yahweh and shed every other vestige of being God, Yahweh might become dangerous. This might help to explain the story of Joshua, who died, and rose from the dead. They killed him, he rose, he loved them. This is a very reassuring message, a reminder that although yes, Yahweh is now God, there is another side to God that we would not be so familiar with, the original God who lived long ago and was full of love and goodness.. Our ancestors also talked about Joshua as a mediator, and if, like me, you have been given the honor of witnessing the Wrath of Yahweh, you would understand why people would feel a lot safer with a mediator to stand between themselves and Yahweh. And who knows, when Yahweh has finally come into full power and is finally fully capable of destroying created beings and ridding the universe of evil,, Yahweh might also be unpredictable, and it might take someone to stand in the breach as a mediator, because you wouldn't want to be getting in the way of Yahweh at the worst possible time.
As I said, this is what I believe probably happened.