Willing vs. Allowing

What we're struggling with here is this logic:

"God created all things. Sin exists. Therefore, God created Sin."

Somewhere deep in the explanation for this -- an explanation, incidentally, I won't try to really elaborate on too much -- is the question whether God allowing something to happen is the same thing as God causing it to happen.

When I consciously decide to sin against God, am I doing his will when I do that? I would argue not. If God truly is Holy as we're led to understand, then his willing me to do something that runs opposite his very nature is a contradiction. If we allow God the possibility of contradicting himself, then we diminish his Holy nature. He ceases to be God.

But if I allow that when I decide to sin against God I am doing it of my own free will, then God is not causing the sin, nor is he creating it. It is a violation of my own accord. God, being omnipotent, is certainly capable of stopping me from doing it. His not stopping me is an element of my free will (after all, if I were not permitted to do what I wished to do, I would not have free will). Therefore, God allows sin; God does not cause sin.

So this world is not perfect by his divine will; it is corrupt by our freely chosen disobedience. The "mire," as I alluded to, is of our making, not his.

Note: look, I'm as uncomfortable with that formulation as you probably are. I've never understood the Book of Job, from which this general formulation comes. To say that the earth's processes -- tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis -- are all a result of sin corrupting the natural order (as I've heard some preachers say) begs the question whether all of created matter is sinful, or just some of it. If only some of it, where's the dividing line and why? If all of it then we have a fundamental problem -- Jesus was made of matter, and if all matter is inherently evil (as the Gnostics believed) then Jesus himself was not perfect and therefore the atonement structure falls apart.

This is why, incidentally, I do not like discussing the issue of predestination vs. free will. I don't think 1 person out of a 1,000,000 can comprehend the tiny slice where it's not contradictory.

* * *
Will man still be around in 500,000,000 years? No. I think Zager and Evans in their classic song "Exordium & Terminus" ("In the Year 2525") sang:

In the year 9595 / I'm kinda wonderin' if man is gonna be alive

Now, wonderin' is something short of certainty, therefore if the probability is less than 100% it might just be 0%. Let's assume the chances of 100% certainty implies "miracle," then what we see is that a "miracle" is equal to 9595 - 1969 (the year the song was written) = 7626. The number of times 500,000,000 can be divided by 7626 is 65,565 ... which is eerily close to the hex 'FF'. Hex 'FF' sounds a lot like x'F5C3' which is the 3270 "erase/write" command string. It's a prophecy! We're all just characters on a big green screen and we're about to be erased in favor of another byte stream!

Therefore, I think it can be concluded beyond a shadow of a doubt that no, man will not be around in 500,000,000 years.

The logic is flawless.