Why does a perfect God allow evil people like us to continue to mess up His creation?
Why didn't He just make it and us perfect all at once?
Author Daniel Paavola uses seven biblical themes to explore why God chose to send His Son and patiently build relationships with flawed humans rather than destroy the whole human population and start all over again.
1. Instant Perfection-Patient Relationship. God often chooses to walk with us in a patient relationship of faith and grace.
2. It's the Second that Counts. In the Bible, God often chooses the second over the first. The first is not a mistake, dead end, or waste of time, but God telling us the best is yet to come.
3. One for Us All. Adam stood for all of us and dragged us into judgment; but Christ stood under ultimate judgment to restore all of us to God.
4. Grace Upends Our World. We stubbornly resist God's grace that would lift us out of our past, but God perseveres to raise us by the very grace we resist.
5. Greatness Ought to Look like Greatness. We expect God to show His greatness in spotless grandeur, but He often hides it beneath humility and things that seem foolish and weak.
6. Curing with the Illness Itself. We flee it, but God harnesses, directs, and transforms illness into the cure.
7. Perfection Welcomes Failure. Instead of driving our failures away in fear, the perfect God draws us to Himself while we are yet sinners.
