Why does an all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful God even allow temptation? 

He, obviously, is stronger than Satan and the fallen world, so it would seem that if He could remove temptation from us, it would make our lives so much more simple. 

God is all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful. Because He’s all-knowing, He knows when we’re going to be tempted. 

Because He’s all-loving and all-powerful, and certainly more powerful than Satan the tempter, more powerful than us or a fallen world, He certainly could stop that temptation, you would think. 

And you would think He would want to do that because he loves us.

And so why does He, then, allow a world of such temptation? 

Why do we have to face this, especially as believers? 

You could argue that people who aren’t Christians don’t have the Holy Spirit living in their lives, and that’s different.  But for us, who are temples of the Holy Spirit? 

Why does God even allow this in our lives is the question. 

This is a great place to start a conversation about the existence of temptation and the reality of temptation because it gets to who God is, and who we are.

The Bible says that God made us to love the Lord and to love our neighbor. 

That’s why we exist. That’s our reason for being … to love God and to love others. 

Love requires a choice. You can’t make somebody love. You can’t force somebody to do that. Love requires options. It requires a choice. If you go out to dinner tonight, and there’s only one option on the menu, then you don’t truly have freedom of choice.

So God couldn’t create a world in which we could choose to love… choose to worship…choose to know and follow the Lord… unless we had an alternative option. We would have the option not to choose those things. We would have the option to choose to sin. Unless temptation and sin weren’t a reality, someone could come along and say, “Well, I understand how I couldn’t make a world like that.”

It seems illogical to me that there would be a world with choice and with options, and yet without the option of choosing to sin and to face temptation—but I’m not God. 

I mean, if God is all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful, then He ought to be able to do that, even if I can’t. And He ought to be able to figure it out, even if I can’t.

I don’t have to understand medicine, so long as a doctor does. I don’t understand how to fix my computer, as long as somebody is around who can do that is available. 

So why can’t God do that? 

Just because I don’t understand it isn’t the answer to the question. 

That’s what, in philosophical terms, is known as the Utopia Thesis. It was argued some years ago by Antony Flew and Jael Mackey. It’s essentially the idea that God ought to be able to create a utopia. If He’s all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful, He ought to be able to create a world in which we have freedom to choose, but there’s no temptation or sin. 

If He’s perfect, He ought to be able to do that. The response to the Utopia Thesis is that God is not obligated to do that, which is logically impossible.

It’s not a denial of God’s sovereignty if He can’t make two mountains without a valley in between, or if He can’t make a square circle, or if He can’t tell you how much the color red weighs. 

If you’re asking God to do the logically contradictory, or inherently impossible—logically impossible—then it’s not a denial of sovereignty that He will not or cannot do that. 

And it’s logically contradictory that we could have the freedom to choose without a choice. It’s a denial of the very words themselves and what they mean.

So, long story short, temptation exists because freedom exists. 

And we have to have freedom to be able to love God and love others. 

That’s the reason why we exist.

Part 2 of this article will be continued next week.

Used with permission by Global Media Outreach from Dr. Jim Denison https://www.denisonforum.org/  Originally published March 19, 2021