Explanatory Footnotes *0
How did a good and wise creator end up with rebellious (evil) creations?
God did not create humans to have this inherently rebellious nature.
The first rebel among God's initially good creatures was not even a human being,
but a very powerful and intelligent immaterial being, now called Satan.
Satan played a crucial role in the perversion of human moral nature.
But all humans are responsible for their own moral choices even if Satan is involved.
Satan did so because he wanted the human race, all of which God had declared
were stamped with his own image, to carry out Satan's will and not God's will
as a kind of symbolic or proxy attack on God himself.
Thus there is even now a cosmic moral struggle, and humans are caught up in it,
but we are major players only because God's honor (image) is at stake,
not because we humans have the power or wisdom to be anything beyond `pawns in the game'.
Satan is the author and animating force behind `the matrix' deceiving the human race.
We humans are way out of our league to understand how Satan first turned toward evil.
Perhaps we could never understand it; God does not seem to think we need to understand it.
But in response to the human race (the image bearers of God) following Satan's lead
and choosing a rebellious path against God, God declared that Satan's victory
would eventually be overturned, and that a humble human being would one day
decisively defeat Satan's scheme to turn all of humanity against God.
The coming of this man (called the anointed one, i.e. the Christ) has been the subject
of much cryptic communication between God and men until he was actually born
and understood and walked the path that had beforehand been mapped out for him.