Reluctant Demon by Linda Rios Brook Page B

One-third of the angels chose to follow Lucifer. And what did it gain for us?
    Loss of everything we once held dear—loss of our home with God; loss of our purpose for being; loss of our high place; nothing but loss with regret, despair, fear, and hatred becoming our destiny.
    W h y does God insist on imposing free will on creatures who cannot possibly use it correctly? He knows what is best for everything He creates. We would be so much better off if He just eliminated the choices. I would not be wasting my existence sitting on a perch in the service of a tyrant if God had only restricted Satan's ability to defy Him.
    It is that part of God's nature I cannot understand.
    He created all there is and all there will be, and He made it perfect. Then, for no reason anyone can explain, He programmed in a fatal flaw. Into every intelligent life form, God deposited the ability to defy its Creator. Can someone help me understand why this was a good idea?
    Believe me, I know the company line: God wants those who love Him to do so of their free will. He will coax.
    He will woo. He will implore. But He will not force His creation to obey, though He could easily do so. How much trouble would He have saved Himself and how much devastation and misery could have been avoided if the rebellion in heaven had never taken place?
    I can attest to the fact that we who were cast out of heaven would be so much better off today if God were only willing to be a benevolent dictator. Suppose that we had not chosen to rebel because the choice was not available to us. W h a t if we had been slaves in obedience to Him? Certainly we would still be in paradise and never have known the difference.
    Then assume that we annoyed Him in some way and in His anger He cast us out of heaven anyway. If it had happened like that, we would be in the same place where we are right now. And yet, I daresay we would be so much better off. If our destiny would have been the same, what difference would it make how we were thrown out?
    I know I would feel better if I could blame this on God's will and not mine.
    W h e n God said He would give free will to Adam, I wanted to shout, "Don't do it, God! Look at us. Look at what it does to those who are less wise than You." But I dared not say a word. It would have been the end of me.
    When Satan realized that Adam would indeed have the ability to choose, his excitement at what this might mean could not be contained.
    Adam's job description was not that hard. He was given ruling authority over the garden, and if he obeyed and worshiped God, he could count on living happily ever after. How hard was that? As I understood his assignment, Adam was to push the boundaries of the garden further and further into the unsettled land until Eden covered Earth. Should have been a piece of cake for someone created in the image of God.
    That is very well how it might have ended up if God had not given Adam the option of choosing between those two trees. By far, that was God's worst mistake with Adam. But it wasn't His only one. Let me tell you about God's second greatest lapse in judgment.
     

CHAPTER I I
    GOD DECIDED TO separate them.
    She was always in there. I'm not sure
    why God kept her hidden at first, but whatever she was, she was not an afterthought. It may have been because Adam was an experiential learner. If God had surprised him with the concept of a partner before showing him what a partner was for, I'm pretty sure Adam would have missed the point entirely. God was always patient to walk him through the practical appli-cation of a great idea before turning him loose with it.
    God knew He had to lead Adam to the point of wanting a partner before springing the woman on him.
    It was brilliant how God went about it. He gave the man the task of naming the animals. This meant he had to really look at the animals to know what they were before he named them. In doing this work, I believe that he immediately latched on to the comfort that two