continued:
We have to understand that God wants man’s will involved. There’s nothing good or noble about continuously dwelling on what a bunch of worthless worms we are. That’s not God’s opinion of us-and certainly not what He wants for us-or who He created us to be. To the extent that God draws even a weak “yes” out of us rather than making that yes for us-even as His grace is required to move us to that point- our justice or righteousness begins. And He wants nothing more than for us to grow that “ownership” into full-on love of Himself and neighbor, to the exclusion, incidentally, of sin or anything that would harm neighbor or offend Him IOW. And love is always a choice-or it’s not the real thing. He ultimately wants beings who, semi-autonomous from Him while in a willing subjugated union with Him, freely love Him above all else-because He’s the highest good- and loving and worshipping Him is our highest good.
If God wanted to simply end up with some people in heaven and some in eternal torment, He could’ve just done that. He could’ve prevented Adam from sinning to begin with-or sent him to hell, aka “eternal death”, immediately after his sin. But instead God deemed it worthwhile that man have a reprieve, so to speak, and spend some time here in relative exile from Him: dead, asleep, sick, lost, with little or no desire for Him and no means to find or reach Him even if man wanted to. And yet here man might just develop a hunger and thirst for truth and righteousness in a world that so often has little use or value for either, and no desire for the God who might interfere with their worldly desires. Here we might begin to sense that something is missing. Here we might grow jaded of the evil that we witness, participate in, and/or fall victims to. And here we might be prepared as God graciously never abandoned man but began to patiently work with him, revealing Himself little by little as man was ready, teaching man by the experience of the law that man possesses no real righteousness on his own, allowing man to directly experience- to know-good and evil so that he might be all the more ready to embrace the good alone when He finally sees it in front of him. This world is a schoolhouse, an institute of formation, to help man recognize his need for God when God comes calling, to impress the will of the need for something more, something bigger. It’s always been about God patiently seeking to elicit from man a “yes”, reversing Adam’s “no”.
