How to Live a Life of Grace?

What does it mean to live a life of grace? We’ve been studying the mysteries of godliness and iniquity, the mysteries of good and evil, the truth revealed about grace and the law. The question was raised by Michael last week: How do you live a life of grace? 

We have seen that in the garden of Eden, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil represent living a life of grace and living a life under the law, respectively. They represent the difference between a life in the supernatural and a life under natural law. With the fall of Man, natural laws that had been hidden and obscured became visible and operative, which opened the eyes of Adam and Eve to things they had never seen before: To degradation, de-creation, and death. 

It was God’s intention that the consequences of evil, or a loss of oneness with God, should not be visible to humankind. It’s curious that the snake was in the garden from the beginning; confined, it seems, to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. So the cause of evil was visible but we were blinded to its effects, as if they were obscured behind a curtain which, when we fell, opened up to reveal the natural laws of degradation and death. 

What was visible and obvious was the Tree of Life, the tree of grace, the source of God’s creative and sustaining power. But Adam and Eve may have been blinded, as well, to the concept of grace. Although the serpent was in the garden, consciousness of evil was absent. This consciousness became obvious once their eyes were opened and they ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They were exposed to the natural laws of pain and suffering. 

Their eyes were opened to degradation and they saw what it meant to be living life under natural law—what Paul calls a law of “sin and death.” Pain and suffering are a result of natural law. But they came to see that evil is a condition, not an act. We are evil because we are out of oneness with God. We think we are good, law abiding people who have standing before God because of our piety; not realizing, as Revelation 3:18 tells us plainly, that we are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. 

In the garden, living a life of grace was to eat of the Tree of Life and to be blinded to the consequences of evil. What occurred immediately after the fall was fear and guilt. Adam and Eve’s shame at their nakedness is a statement of their guilt. They hid because they were afraid and guilty (Genesis 3:10). To live a life of grace, I believe, is to live a life free from guilt and fear—free of guilt before God and free of fear from the consequences of evil. 

In the garden, evil is present in the form of the serpent, but evil and particularly its consequences are blinded to us. Without a consciousness of evil, the garden is good. God even says it’s very good. When the curtain is drawn back, the consequences of evil can be seen. The eyes are opened. Man enters a condition of guilt and fear.

Before this, they did not see the sustaining power of God’s grace in operation They simply ate from the Tree of Life, blind both to the consequences of evil and to the need for grace. But when their eyes were opened, they saw the consequences of evil, which were degradation, de-creation, and death. They also saw the effects of the natural laws of life, and were horrified. Most importantly, grace became operationalized when the Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and Eve and clothed them (Genesis 3:21). This is actionable grace on display. This is a garment of grace, a robe of righteousness to allay their guilt and fear. 

To live a life of grace is to live free of guilt and fear. Much has been written and said about the message and the mission of Jesus. But what comes through clearly as an overall overarching theme of the Gospels is that Jesus has a message of grace, and that message is that you can live free from guilt. In his book Guilt and Grace, Paul Tournier defines the extent and the overwhelming degree of guilt we live under as sinners. He defines guilt in two ways: True guilt and false guilt. He writes: 

“The true guilt of humans comes from things which they are approached by God in their innermost hearts. Only they can discover what these things are. And they are usually very different from the things which are reproached by men. False guilt is that which comes as a result of the judgment and suggestion of people. True guilt is that which results from divine judgment. What matters is not the knowledge of whether a particular line of conduct is judged as blameworthy or not by society, but whether or not it is ordered by God. 

“What is considered as culpable in one society is not in another. What is considered as culpable at one period of time is not at another. Real guilt is often something quite different from that which constantly weighs us down because of our fear of social judgment and the disapproval of others. We become independent of them in proportion to how much we depend upon God.”

After outlining our false guilt from real guilt, and from assumed pleasures that provide guilt he goes on: 

“I ought to complete this survey of our daily guilt by including the blatant guilt that everyone thinks of: True evil, violence and cruelty, hate and betrayal, deceit, injustice, adultery, and all other kinds of evil. But that is without interest here. What is of more importance for us is the feeling of guilt which every person experiences not for the evil, which he or she has done, but for the good he or she has not done. This is the theme of the Last Judgement as Christ as depicted in his passage in Matthew 25, the sheep and the goats, ‘doing things unto the least of these my bretheren.’ 

“Contrary to moralism, which always imagines that we shall be reproached for the faults we have committed, Jesus Christ refers to the kind actions which we have omitted to perform. Here is guilt, which is singularly more extensive, even unlimited. It is in the face of God that we feel guilty at not having become what he expected of us, of letting ourselves be paralyzed by fear, fashioned by our environment, petrified by routine, sterilized by conformity, at not having been ourselves and having copied others instead of taking advantage of the particular gifts which God has entrusted us. Here is the opposition between false guilt suggested by society and the responsibility for oneself before God.” 

This notion of faithfulness to oneself is deeply felt by everyone, whatever their belief. It is a universal source of guilt, for no one feels always faithful to himself or herself. It is a universal guilt but hardly conscious, for it is indeed so painful to us that we have much difficulty in confessing it to ourselves. We have 1,001 excuses that come to mind to exonerate us from it. Cowardice, it seems to me, is one of the most common and the least conscious of our sins. With guilt surrounding us, false guilt and true guilt, guilts of omission and guilts of commission, how are we to lead a life of grace, a life free from guilt and from fear? 

John 8 tells the story of the woman caught in adultery. Tournier expands again: 

”In the Bible message taken as a whole, there is a kind of extraordinary, paradoxical inversion of things. The story from the Gospel of John is particularly illustrative of this, the narrative of the woman taken in adultery who was dragged before Jesus. This woman symbolizes you and me. All of the despised people of the world. All of those who we see daily crushed by judgments which weigh heavily upon them, by 1,001 arbitrary or unjust prejudices, but also by fair judgments based on the healthiest morality and the most authentic Divine Law. 

“She symbolizes all psychological, social, and spiritual inferiority. And her accusers symbolize the whole judging, condemnatory, contemptuous humanity that we live amongst. It is as if the presence of Christ brought about the strangest of inversions: He wipes out the guilt in the woman who was crushed by it, but arouses the guilt in those who felt not at all. He does not deny her guilt—he blots it out. He delivers her from her position of inferiority and of culprit before those who denounced her. “Has no one condemned you?” he asked. “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.” God blots out conscious guilt, but he brings to the consciousness repressed guilt. 

“To offer grace only is to cut off half of the gospel. Grace is for the woman trembling at her guilt, but her accusers will be able to only find grace by discovering for themselves the shutter of guilt. But it is in the person of Jesus Christ that this inversion of values bursts upon us. There is indeed a reversal: God does prefer the poor, the weak and the despised. What religious people have more difficulty in admitting is that God prefers sinners to the righteous. 

“From one end of the Bible to the other, the answer is clear and unambiguous; unconditional and without restriction to those with feelings of inferiority and guilt. At the same time, grace frees us from social contempt, which burdens us from without, and from remorse which gnaws at us from within. God is with the weak, the poor, the humble, and sinners who recognize themselves as such. Their adoption by God delivers them both from self contempt and from the contempt of others, because as Paul says: “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31)

Grace is for the humble, not for the self satisfied. So a setback, a serious check, or even the crumbling of a whole majestic world may be necessary to understand grace better. To live a life of grace we must begin with humility, recognizing that we are sinners in need of grace.

“He has showed you, o Man, what is good . And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God.” (Micah 6:8)

But from our infancy, we are conditioned to moralism, to legalism, and to law abiding. No child is raised with the admonition: “You are a sinner. You are evil. You need God’s grace.” We need boundaries, limits, and guardrails, but moral guardrails will not prevent evil because evil is a condition of the heart and not of the hands. These limits introduce false guilt and drive us further to self justification and self satisfaction and self defense. 

To recognize yourself for what you are, and to plan to place your reliance on a power outside of yourself or help is to live a life of grace. Like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, we need a Sinners Anonymous meeting and an essay which begins with: “Hello, my name is Donald, I am a sinner. I need God’s grace.” 

The mystery of godliness, the mystery of iniquity, is that we are all sinners in need of God’s grace. None of us is good, except God, as Jesus told the rich young ruler. We all need grace. To live a life of grace is to be free from guilt and from fear, to recognize that we are all evil, that we who are called to grace are called to share grace with others, and that we must see others as we see ourselves. 

The story is told in Philip Yancey’s book, What’s So Amazing About Grace, of a theologian who said that grace is like a string that connects us with God. When we sin, the string is cut, but God takes the two ends and ties them together. But every time he does that, the string gets shorter. With every failure, grace brings us closer to God. 

What are your thoughts on grace and guilt, on good and evil, on the secrets and the mysteries of godliness and iniquity, on natural and supernatural law, and on how to live a life of grace, free from guilt and fear?

David: It seems to me that what Don has quoted today helps explain grace really well. But (to me, at least) it brings us no closer to understanding the fundamental problem of good and evil. Yes, there is conscious guilt and repressed guilt, but in the garden, before the fall, guilt was unconscious. 

We know there was evil in the garden, because the serpent was present and the serpent represented evil. Since there was good and evil in the garden, Adam and Eve were not only perfectly capable of consorting with both but also, because they were unable to discriminate between the two, it seems to me likely that they would commit acts both good and evil, all while living in God’s good grace! 

It seems we need grace because we are sinners no matter what, whether we can discriminate or not, whether our guilt is conscious, repressed, or unconscious. 

The problem of evil is that it is destructive, it hurts people; so we are still left with the question of how to explain that God allows this, unless we accept that evil, just like good, is a fundamental component of the universe, albeit not quite as powerful as good—which is why we have a universe at all?

Donald: Am I right in my understanding that when Christ returns and sin is destroyed the devil will be destroyed at the very same time? That, literally, evil will be no more? Is that correct? So it’s not that evil is still an option. Evil will not exist, as I have come to understand it.

Don: I think that’s accurate, and we did mention last week that in the new heaven and new earth there is no Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, there is only the Tree of Life.

C-J: I would interpret that as having no authority, that evil no longer has authority. God is the ultimate authority, but we wouldn’t be able to recognize good without evil, because we have a binary mind, our brains are wired that way. If you take away the balance, then you don’t appreciate the grace. So I interpret that as even Satan comes under the authority of the Divine.

Bryan: That there is no Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the new heaven makes sense to me, because by then evil will have played itself out. The universe will have seen the effects of good versus evil, will have vindicated God’s character, and will have seen that Satan is a destructive, unjust, and unloving liar with an ulterior motive. So there is no reason for heaven to have a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, in my mind, anyway.

In Eden, I’m not even sure if Adam and Eve really fully understood what evil was. I’m not sure they were taught to know evil. They knew what good was, but did they really know what evil and its effects were? I agree that they may have been blind and equally capable of doing good and evil, not really understanding what evil was. 

Fortunately, in the new heaven, we won’t have to go through that because it will have played itself out.

Donald: My faith isn’t really based upon understanding these things that seem so complex, and I’m grateful for that, to be honest! But I have been given to understand that there are other universes that are observing us in this conflict. If you play that out, when the Second Coming happens we will end up going to heaven with Christ… but what happens to the other universes? Are they still out there? Or is there going to be one heaven for all universes? I don’t know, and I don’t know that it makes much difference. 

Does God want me to feel guilty? Is guilt like pain—without it, there’s nothing to balance it with? As C-J said, there’s nothing to let one know that one thing is proper and another is improper. Should I feel guilty? I’m grateful for grace in the end. 

C-J: I think the problem is that we put a value on it, instead of seeing it as a tool. When we raise our children, we try to not punish them with guilt and shame, but as an opportunity to educate them, to enlighten them, to expand their awareness. And maybe that’s taking God down from being the divine and all-knowing and omnipotent and making him more human. 

The garden, for me, is a pedigree. Adam and Eve were an example of the pedigree of Bedouins that were chosen. The lineage that comes out of that union and that relationship with God is part of the story. I believe they do know the difference between good and evil, not because they partook of a tree because they were tempted, but because they had been exposed to it. I think the story is about coming into relationship and in the shelter of God’s teaching. He didn’t say: “You will never have problems.” It’s how you approach the problems and where you find wisdom and truth and shelter.

Jay: I think we’re very quick to say there’ll be no evil in heaven but we’re not as quick to say there’ll be no good. If the tree is the knowledge of both good and evil, and you take it away, it is convenient for us to say there’ll be no more evil but there will be good. It may just mean that what is good and what is evil doesn’t matter anymore. In heaven, what matters is the Tree of Life. It’s the only thing that matters, 

At some stage in the unfolding of the universe, good and evil have an important influence on it, but in heaven, where there is only the Tree of Life, it must be good alone that is important. I don’t know how you have good without evil. I don’t know how you separate them. If one is gone, isn’t the other gone too? We say that no evil means all good, but I’m not sure that that’s what’s going on here. It may be a shift in focus, in importance, in what we see as sustainable.

With regard to guilt: I think it’s important to remember that guilt is what happens after a mistake or after sin. Guilt doesn’t happen before that. Guilt happens after that. I think \we can discern right from wrong without guilt. I think that’s what conscience is. You don’t feel guilty for doing something before you do it—you feel the guilt afterwards. Grace is what’s needed after we choose to utilize the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. 

After we’ve utilized the discernment power that we have now (and most likely utilized it incorrectly) the only thing left for us is grace, the Tree of Life. If guilt comes after utilization of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, then the Tree of Life, which is what’s left, is the nullification of guilt. It has the power to remove guilt, to move us beyond guilt.

C-J: Somebody did an injustice to me this week and I can tell you I went from surprise to rage. If I had acted on my rage… I had guilt the minute I considered it. I didn’t have to go through with it. So I think the tension that God allows between good and evil is critical to revealing our true hearts—what we are capable of. It also keeps us mindful. People who do drugs are completely oblivious to anything other than euphoria. If I’m in heaven, and there’s only euphoria because I’m in the presence of beauty and grace, I can’t really evaluate a relationship of any kind. I’m just looking for my high and it doesn’t matter how I get It. 

I think the tension is important. It brings me to my knees when I say: “Lord, forgive me that I don’t trust you to be present in all things. I didn’t see it as a test. I didn’t see it as my lacking. I saw it just as this person’s willfulness to do harm and not take any responsibility for it.” 

I think we cannot expect heaven to be another dimension that will give us utopia because we experienced so much discomfort in this reality. There’s a lot of discomfort here, at least where I live! When I look at policies and politics and greed, and just the unfairness of some people being healthy and some getting sick…. They did nothing wrong. So I think the tension is very important.

Donald: If I even think about committing a sin I feel guilty about it. Acting upon it is another level, but to even have it enter my mind as a possibility makes me feel guilty. I’m just so grateful for grace. If we focus on guilt, it takes us down. My responsibility is to share grace.

David: Raymond Smalley, an American mathematician, magician, concert pianist, logician, Daoist, and philosopher [whom I wrongly identified in class as a Jesuit priest, but he obviously had all the qualities 😉 ], wrote a beautiful little book called The Tao Is Silent which I think is very relevant to what we’re discussing—guilt and responsibility and so on. In it, he includes a discussion between a mortal and God, which I have paraphrased as follows:

Mortal: God, I’m tired of the burden of moral responsibility that comes with having free will. Please take my free will away. 

God: Well, why don’t I just absolve you of the moral responsibility, then, and let you keep your free will? 

Mortal: No good. Without moral responsibility, I might hurt people and end up in Hell! 

God: I’ll promise not to send you to Hell, no matter how badly you treat people. Satisfied? 

Mortal: No! I don’t want to treat people badly! 

God: Here, swallow this pill. It’ll stop you feeling bad about hurting people. 

Mortal: But by choosing to take the pill while knowing I’m likely to hurt people afterwards, I’ll still be morally responsible even though I won’t feel it! 

God: I see what you mean. OK, then I’ll grant your original request! I’ll take away your free will then make you take the pill! 

Mortal: Fat lot of help you are! If I keep my free will, I have to bear moral responsibility for hurting other people, but if I accept your offer to remove my free will, we both know I’ll still hurt other people (even though I don’t want to—we all do) therefore I’ll still be responsible for my present decision to accept your offer, since I know what the consequences are now even if I’m unaware of the consequences later. I can’t win! 

God: Neither can I! I try to please you by giving you a choice of free will or no free will, and you get mad at me! What more can I do? 

Mortal: If you had not given me free will in the first place, when you created me, then I wouldn’t have this problem! You’re the One responsible for all the hurt. 

God: Alright, here’s what we’ll do. I’ll create a parallel universe, like this one, except in it I’ll create an exact copy of you but minus your free will. Then at least that version of you is absolved of all moral responsibility for the horrible acts it will commit. Happy now? 

Mortal: No! Same problem! By agreeing to your proposal, I’d still be responsible for my other self’s sins. 

God: But I’ve just made my own decision as to whether to create the parallel universe with your other self (minus free will) in it and I’m not going to tell you what my decision is, so you have no responsibility for it. 

Mortal: Well, I hope you’ve decided not to. 

God: Why should you care? It’s not your responsibility. 

Mortal: I just don’t want people to get hurt. 

God: Ah. We’re making a little progress.

Reinhard: There are totalitarian countries and democratic countries. People who live in democracies can express their will to the government, so they appear messy and disunited. People in dictatorships cannot express their will unless it conforms to the dictator’s will, so there appears to be unity, but it is not healthy. I think God wants us all to express our will, so free will is the key. 

To me, free will is God’s plan in the universe for humans. It seems to me that evil has to exist when there is free will because without evil, free will doesn’t function. Free will is eventually going to filter out the evil. I think the people who are going to be saved in heaven are going to appreciate what God did. 

Maybe there are people on some other parallel planet who never fell because they obeyed God’s commandments. God ordained and allowed evil to exist. Natural evil, such as disease or natural disaster, is out of our control. But human evil, moral evil, stems from people’s minds and is the most dangerous evil. 

The third evil is supernatural evil. Satan deployed it against Job, but (paradoxically) God also deployed it, against Egypt. God has the capability to create evil. God is righteous, but he may deploy or employ evil to straighten up his laws for humans. 

The ultimate punishment is death. That’s the only thing we cannot overcome by ourselves. Christ died on the cross to crush sin so we can get back our relationship with God. Evil exists to highlight the righteousness of God. The death of Christ makes manifest his righteousness.

Guilt and fear are healthy. People who never feel guilt, who never introspect, may already have violated God’s law, while people who feel guilt want to go back to God’s law—they repent. I think that’s a good thing about guilt. After all, we cannot satisfy God’s law—that’s why grace came. It trumps everything. We cannot control it. We don’t have the power. We cannot achieve salvation except through grace. 

We are afraid about the consequences of committing evil. As children of God, we know that, but we need to keep learning to get right with God. The grace that God provided us is our salvation, because only by grace do we get to heaven.

Carolyn: We sometimes need to distinguish what is a sin, and we go right to the 10 Commandments. But as you break each one down, if it isn’t for the close walk with our Lord, we have been trained to focus on the little things that cause guilt. We lose the joy of grace because of these little things that we don’t classify. Are they really sin? Or if we weren’t trained about them, would they still be sin? 

It’s not about the big picture. We all know murder is wrong. We all know that we must love the Lord thy God. But it’s part of our little daily lives to have to distinguish the difference between sin and the joy of grace. I think it’s our daily walk that will show us these little sins that we have been muddling around with for so many years: What is good and what is bad, and is it really bad? 

C-J: It may be just a little sin, but in our relationship with ourselves, with God, with others, it is death by 1,000 cuts. The big sins are really easy to identify, but folded in those that you mentioned in the 10 Commandments are these little sins. A thought that flashes across is that it comes in and goes out—we don’t dwell on it. The one that comes in and we do dwell on it, and then just let it go. The things that we don’t know that even exist in us. It’s a flashpoint. There again, is it the value or the response? I think God is looking for the response. When we see it, then we can come before God and examine it within us. 

Where did this come from? Why did it happen this way? Why now? What is God revealing to me about my relationship with myself and how I engage with others? Our relationship with God is very vertical. I think God gives us clarity pretty quickly about sin. I don’t have to say to God: “Well, I don’t think it was that big a sin, Lord, I mean, I didn’t dwell on it.” It’s like a table: If my mind is the table, and I don’t pick up the table, and I say, “Well, just gonna lay this here for now,” or “I’ll do these dishes later,” the next thing I know, my table has three days’ worth of dirty dishes. 

Whereas if I’m habitually being mindful of right thinking, right choices, there isn’t much room on that table for dirt to gather. If I’m constantly sweeping, God is constantly revealing—by reading the word of God, by staying in fellowship with like-minded people, by not walking in places where my clothes and my feet are going to get dirty. Now, some people, that’s their job: They work with people who are high risk. It’s very difficult for people who work in industries where they’re going to get dirty. 

But for us who have the ability to create our own environment, we’re not really walking in mud puddles. We’re always close to sin. We are always close to a deception. Because we deceive ourselves, but it’s the Holy Spirit in us that reveals. “Do you see this? Do you see what happened here?” Whether we’re observing it, or God reveals it in ourselves.

Jay: If God said, “What do you want? Do you want to know what’s good, or do you want my grace?” What would we pick? Take the evil part out. I think we very much link (and even equate) grace with good, but I’m not so sure that good and grace are the same thing. I think a lot of us would choose grace, but I don’t know that that is why we act. Do we act like all we want is God’s grace, or do we act like all we want is to know what is good?

Don: In that regard, as presently understood guilt is associated not with bad but with good. To say that guilt is good is to say that it is aligned with discrimination between right and wrong. In some ways, it is the opposite of grace. 

Donald: I don’t think there’s a need for grace unless there’s evil. If it was all good, what is grace needed for? Is grace actually covering up or even abolishing evil? I could be wrong. 

Jay: I just keep going back to how does Satan fall? How does that happen? Is he in heaven?

Donald: He wanted knowledge of Christ.

Jay: Is he in heaven?—Yes. Is there evil in heaven?—No. Then how does Satan fall? How does Satan fall from a place of no evil? That’s not congruent, to me.

Donald: He wanted to be God.

Bryan: He invented evil.

C-J: I don’t think he invented it. He moved out from underneath the headship of God. We talk about that as being very important. Those in leadership (meaning God, the divine) have this profound thing, going back to “If I do that, then this will be the consequence.” Really, the whole time God is bringing us back to the need for headship and that it may not be what you think. But headship is important to be in place, like law. 

There is a lot of gray in the law. But that’s the beauty of the law. It allows for growth and examination. And what happened, I believe, when we use the term evil, is somebody moved out of it and said, “I can decide that for myself.” And God says, “No, you need to be tempered. I’m not saying you can’t consider, but you need to be tempered. You need to find out how do we come to what right thinking is without me telling you.”

If there’s one thing we see about God, it is that it is ever changing. This earth is a living planet. Our relationship with God is living, it’s not just lockstep. It’s taking a different path. “Have you noticed this today?” The sun comes up every day, but it always looks fresh to me. It’s not just the colors. It bursts within me. It’s a new day.

That’s relationship. We don’t tell our child, “You should have done this!” We say to the child after explaining the choices: “Is there another way you could have done it better, now now that you know this new information?” We want maturity, we want responsibility. Because as we raise our children we’re passing on a legacy, a legacy of right thinking, of training, of practicing in a safe place, and as old as I am I learn something every day—about spirituality, about humanity about this dimension.

David: The Bible presents us with a process that begins with a flawed heaven (a contradiction in terms?) and ends with a perfect heaven (a redundant expression?) It begins, in Genesis, with a heaven that has the devil in it, that has evil in it. But it ends, in Revelation, with a new heaven that has no evil and no discrimination in it. 

It is a mystery and I think it’s ever going to remain a mystery. We cannot figure out how God can allow evil, and we also cannot figure out the point of a good place with no evil to show it as good. How would you know that what you’re doing is good and how good good feels if you’ve got nothing to compare it with? To me, it boils down to faith. You just have to take it on faith that God has a plan, but there’s simply no way that we can understand it.

Reinhard: All goodness comes from God. Man can do good because God taught us. All our earned righteousness is God’s righteousness. All the good things come from God and not from Satan. 

Of course, we cannot create grace. We can be good to other people but grace comes from God. That’s the goodness of God given to Man. So there’s some goodness that we can only receive, and some goodness—reflecting God’s goodness to us—that we can share with others. 

But God still has the capacity to dispense evil for his purpose. God used evil to punish and help his remnant people, the Israelites, to survive. Satan’s evil is always negative. Goodness only comes from God and only God can give grace to humans.

Don: We have much more to think about and more mysteries of God to discuss.

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