Error says God must know evil because He knows all things; but Holy Writ declares God told our first parents that in the day when they should partake of the fruit of evil, they must surely die.  Would it not absurdly follow that God must perish, if He knows evil and evil necessarily leads to extinction?  Rather let us think of God as saying, I am infinite good; therefore I know not evil.  Dwelling in light, I can see only the brightness of My own glory.

Error may say that God can never save man from sin, if He knows and sees it not; but God says, I am too pure to behold iniquity, and destroy everything that is unlike Myself.

Many fancy that our heavenly Father reasons thus:  If pain and sorrow were not in My mind, I could not remedy them, and wipe the tears from the eyes of My children.  Error says you must know grief in order to console it.  Truth, God, says you oftenest console others in troubles that you have not.  Is not our comforter always from outside and above ourselves?

God says, I show My pity through divine law, not through human.  It is My sympathy with and My knowledge of harmony (not inharmony) which alone enable Me to rebuke, and eventually destroy, every supposition of discord.

Error says God must know death in order to strike at its root; but God saith, I am ever-conscious Life, and thus I conquer death; for to be ever conscious of Life is to be never conscious of death.  I am All.  A knowledge of aught beside Myself is impossible.

If such knowledge of evil were possible to God, it would lower His rank.

With God, knowledge is necessarily foreknowledge; and foreknowledge and foreordination must be one, in an infinite Being.  What Deity foreknows, Deity must foreordain; else He is not omnipotent, and, like ourselves, He foresees events which are contrary to His creative will, yet which He cannot avert.

If God knows evil at all, He must have had foreknowledge thereof; and if He foreknew it, He must virtually have intended it, or ordered it aforetime,—­foreordained it; else how could it have come into the world?

But this we cannot believe of God; for if the supreme good could predestine or foreknow evil, there would be sin in Deity, and this would be the end of infinite moral unity.  “If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!” On the contrary, evil is only a delusive deception, without any actuality which Truth can know.

Rectifications

How is a mistake to be rectified?  By reversal or revision,—­by seeing it in its proper light, and then turning it or turning from it.

We undo the statements of error by reversing them.

Through these three statements, or misstatements, evil comes into authority:—­

    First: The Lord created it.
    Second: The Lord knows it.
    Third: I am afraid of it.