1. A Tale of Two Kingdoms

If God is Good, Why Does Evil Exist?

A common objection to belief in God goes something like this:

“If there is a God who is good and loving, why is there so much pain, distress, and trouble in the world?”

This is a very important question, and it deserves a serious and reasonable answer.

That answer is that there is another kingdom and another ‘god’ who is in control of this world, and he is NOT good and loving. In fact, he is the opposite of everything that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is.

In the Bible, this other king is called “the god of this world”, “the ruler (or prince) of this world”, and “the prince of the power of the air”.

His is also called “Satan” (which means “accuser”), or “the devil” (which means “slanderer”), or “the evil one”.

You may have heard of him.

Here are some passages of scripture which refer to him:

Who is this Other God?

So who is the “god of this world”, and where does he come from?

Unfortunately, the Bible tells us very little about this, but there are two passages of scripture which give us a few clues to allow us to piece the story together.

The first one is in the prophetic book of Isaiah, chapter 14:

This chapter addresses “the king of Babylon”, who is a man of great power and authority who has been brought to nothing by God; but the verses quoted above clearly deal with a spiritual being (“Lucifer” in the KJV, or “Day Star” in the ESV) who has “fallen from heaven” (In Luke 10:18 Jesus seems to refer to this event), as if God has turned His attention to the spiritual power working behind and through that human king.

Note how Lucifer makes five “I will” statements that indicate his ambition not only to get back into heaven but to make himself “like the Most High”. This is a direct challenge to the authority of God from a being who was created by God, and whom God could dispose of in a moment as easily as you might swat a fly (see Revelation 12:9, quoted above). And yet he clearly seems to believe that what he is planning is achievable.

The second passage is found in the prophetic book of Ezekiel, in chapter 28:

(Note: ‘Son of Man’ is a term that God uses often in addressing Ezekiel. Jesus used the same term when referring to Himself, but this should not be seen as an indication of equivalence between Ezekiel and Christ, except in so far as they were both servants of God, and both were prophets.)

The first half of the chapter, not shown here, addresses “the prince of Tyre”, who is obviously a man; but, in similar vein to the passage in Isaiah, this portion addresses “the king of Tyre”, who is referred to as “an anointed guardian cherub” – i.e. an angelic being similar to those who flank the throne of God (see Exodus 25:22; Ezekiel 10).

So, how are we to understand this?

We can, perhaps, piece together a picture of a glorious angelic being who was “in Eden, the garden of God” – i.e. on the earth at the time of Adam and Eve, as “an anointed guardian” – whose divinely appointed responsibility was to watch over the earth, to guard it, to make sure everything went according to God’s plan.

However, at some point this glorious being began to make the serious mistake of looking at himself rather than looking to God, and he began to think of himself more highly than he ought, to the extent that he began to contemplate the five “I wills” of Isaiah 14.

An obvious question is, “how could any created being, no matter how powerful and glorious, ever think that he could usurp the throne of Almighty God, his creator?”

The Bible does not give us a clear answer to this question, but it seems to me that there are three possible answers to it, which are:

1. In his pride, his wisdom was corrupted (verse 17). Although he is, by all accounts, extremely intelligent, yet because of that corruption that has set in, it may be that he became vulnerable to believing some things about himself that are not only inaccurate, but entirely irrational.

2. If God appointed him to oversee the earth (verse 14), it may be that God designed him to see the earth as the be all and end all of the universe, so that when he talks about ascending to the throne of heaven, he really means having full control of the earth (if heaven is seen as being no more than an extension of the earth). If God’s throne in heaven is there only to allow Him to rule the earth, then it should not be beyond the realms of possibility to supplant Him.

3. God may have hardened his heart, as He hardened the heart of Pharaoh during the ten plagues of Egypt (Exodus 9:12; 10:1, 20, 27; 11:10; 14:8), so that he would be deceived by his own self-centredness and become the author of his own destruction.

Here is another important question which also demands a serious and reasonable answer:

Why did God not simply zap Lucifer when he began to go astray, instead of allowing him to proceed with his scheme and corrupt the whole of creation?

The answer to this is key to our understanding of the reality, which we all experience, of a world where both good and evil are integral parts of our everyday lives. And it’s actually very simple:

If God had done so, then at a later time someone else would have rebelled in a similar way; and if He simply zapped them, then at a later time someone else would have done the same thing again; and so on.

The reason for this is that there are only three things that are needed in order for anyone to commit an evil act:

(a) free will, (b) capability, and (c) opportunity.

God has allowed the long-term effects of rebellion and sinfulness to be on display for all to see as a constant reminder to all of us of the foolishness of rejecting God.

The problem, of course, is that, as someone has said, “we learn from history that we learn nothing from history”.

This is not God’s fault. This is our own fault. He is trying to teach us, but are we trying to be wiser than He is!

God has a Kingdom – and so does Satan

Jesus spoke continually about the Kingdom of God, and demonstrated the power of that Kingdom over the power of demons; but in one conversation He made reference to another kingdom, a different kingdom:

Jesus is acknowledging here that Satan has a kingdom, and that the demons that are afflicting so many people are evidence of the prevalence of that kingdom.

In fact, Satan’s kingdom extends over the whole earth (see Matthew 4:8-9; 1 John 5:19). He even holds the power of death (according to Hebrews 2:14-15)!

So, how did Satan come to be ‘the god of this world’, the king who rules over all of the earth?

To answer that, let’s go back to the book of beginnings and see what took place in the Garden of Eden:

Clearly, God gave man dominion over the whole earth and everything in it. He appointed man to rule the earth.

But all was not well with the world, even at that early stage:

This is one of the most important passages of scripture. If we miss this, we will never understand what is going on in our world, but if we can grasp this, we will have a clear understanding of it.

At this stage, evil already existed. We know that, because otherwise there could not have been a tree of the knowledge of good and evil, since you cannot know something which does not exist. So before God made man, Satan had already rebelled and evil was already in the world.

At this stage, Adam had a knowledge only of good. This is the knowledge that comes through personal experience, not through receiving information from someone else. He had no experience of anything evil, so he had no knowledge or understanding of evil. He did not even know what it was.

Why did Adam not eat the fruit of the tree of life? He could have done so, and lived forever (Genesis 3:22).

When the serpent tempted Eve, why did she refer to “the tree (singular) in the midst of the garden” (Genesis 3:3), when there were obviously two of them?

Could it be that the two trees were intertwined in some way, so that they looked like a single tree?

Why then was the serpent not afraid that Eve would take fruit from the tree of life by mistake?

Could it be that the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil were hanging low and easy to reach, while the fruit of the tree of life were on the higher branches and not easily reached?

We do not know the answers to these questions, but we do know that there are three important aspects to Adam and Eve’s sin, namely:

1. They disobeyed a specific commandment of God, which opened a gap between man and God, so that they were no longer in open fellowship with each other (see Isaiah 59:1-2).

2. They obeyed the voice of the serpent, who was Satan in disguise (Revelation 12:9 confirms this), and this had the effect of bringing them under Satan’s authority (as Romans 6:16 makes clear), which brought the earth under his authority as well, since he was now in authority over them and their descendants.

3. They ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which meant that from that moment on they would not only experience good, as they had done up until now, but they would also experience evil. So the experience of good and evil, in varying degrees, has been the inheritance of every human being from that day to this.

So we can summarise the human condition of the natural man and woman as being:

• a) Separated from God
• b) Under the dominion of Satan
• c) Exposed to both good and evil in varying degrees

However you look at it, this is a recipe for brokenness!

Compare the Two Kingdoms

Because he rebelled against God and, therefore, rejected God and all that God stands for, the kingdom of Satan must of necessity be the opposite of the Kingdom of God. For example:

In Summary ...

• God made man to rule the earth (Genesis 1:28), but when we obeyed Satan and disobeyed God we put ourselves under Satan’s authority and Satan became the ruler of this world.

• So Satan’s kingdom is the established order on the earth, which means that the Kingdom of God is seen as being a hostile foreign force.

• The Kingdom of God challenges the kingdom of Satan, and the kingdom of Satan resists the Kingdom of God.

• By nature we are born into the Kingdom of Satan and live in his kingdom, under his authority, and will remain so unless and until we decide to change sides and come over to the Kingdom of God.

• God gives us the power to choose which kingdom we want to live under (see for example Deuteronomy 30:19; Joshua 24:15; John 1:12; Acts 17:30-31) and calls us to make that choice.

• God’s Kingdom comes to the earth when a man or woman turns from Satan and yields to God (Acts 26:18 for example).

• Just as we are born physically into the kingdom of Satan, we must be born again spiritually to enter into the Kingdom of God (as Jesus tells us in John 3:3,5).