Ecclesiastes 7:29 records God created mankind upright, but they have gone in search of many schemes.

The answer to the question about why evil exists in the world always gets pushed back upon God as the culprit. The logic goes that if God were good and loving and all-powerful, He wouldn’t allow bad things to happen to good people.

The Bible portrays a different villain to the age old question; humanity. God made people good, because He is good, and since He made us in His image, male and female, we too were created good like Him (just without all the power).

God also gave us an ability similar to the one He Himself maintains, the ability to choose for Himself.

Humanity had to consistently choose the good to remain good but we have not always chosen the good so evil has come into our world and now, more often than not, we choose evil more frequently than good.

Evil is in the world because humanity thought they liked evil more than good. We still do. The ‘fun’ people sleep around, drink too much, take drugs, ignore responsibility, look out for number one, etc.. The good people are boring, bland, and no fun because fun is always associated with evil or sin or bad behavior, however we wish to modify it.

So bad things happen because people choose to do bad things.

We also find ourselves now incapable of sustaining a consistency in doing good. We have become so broken that we are incapable of always thinking, speaking and doing good to our neighbor. We are not good people who do a little bad, we are bad people who do very little good.

But God does not choose to leave us in this miserable place. God offers us a second chance to be good. Not from doing more good than bad but by asking His forgiveness for our bad and allowing Him to declare us good through an adopted relationship with Him by Jesus Christ the Lord.

Those who can receive His goodness as their own as His gift to us are then empowered by God to do good by His goodness, His Spirit, living with us.

The children of God are being formed into the people of God by the Spirit of God Who is working out His presence within us affecting everyone outside of us for their good and God’s glory.