If it is easy to end evil, why hasn’t God done it yet?

Hey, thanks again for sending in questions related to our recent sermons. We have been continuing our Christmas prophecy series. In this last week, we saw a prophecy where uh Jesus, the Messiah, when he comes to destroy the wicked, uh he will do it simply by the breath of his lips. The New Testament repeats almost exactly that same phrase. Second Thessalonians, when the lawless one is revealed, Jesus will come and destroy him with again, the breath of his mouth and just the radiance of his appearing.

So he shows up and breathes and evil is over. That’s all it takes. There’s no real battle. Of course, if God is who he says he is, has created the entire world just with his voice, um holds all the cards, evil has no uh card to play. It’ll just be completely over. So the question this week is if that’s all it takes to end evil, just Jesus showing up and breathing, why doesn’t he go ahead and do that?

Why is there still evil? If there’s no real cosmic battle, if there’s no real struggle between, you know, good and bad, right and wrong, um, why don’t we just end wrong? Like right now. Um so it’s a great question. Uh we’re given a couple of hints in scripture. Romans 11:25 and uh second Peter 3:9. Romans 11:25 talks about that God is waiting for the full number of the Gentiles to come in.

That’s in relation to uh Israel’s hard hardness of heart against the Messiah. Um but he’s waiting. There’s more people out there who will repent, receive Christ. And so he’s continuing world history until that full number comes in. Second Peter 3:9 repeats really the same idea. In the context there, it’s talking about the day of judgment. And it says, but the Lord is patient, wanting you to come to repentance.

And so God is waiting for our hearts to turn toward him um before he comes and ends all evil. If he didn’t wait for many more hearts to turn to him before he came and ended evil, then then there would be many more of us who he would end because we have aligned ourselves with evil, not aligned ourselves with him.

And so if he comes before we have a change of heart, before we repent, before we trust in Jesus to save us, before we are part of him, um then when he comes, we wouldn’t be saved. So he’s waiting. He’s waiting for us to repent until the full number of us come in. Um and once the full number of us come in, then he will show up and evil will end and we will step into a perfect eternity with him uh where there where there is no more sin, suffering, uh or sadness.

And we rejoice in the goodness um in which we were originally created um to participate in. So, thanks for the question. We’ll see you next time.