For the human mind, pain is the most difficult reality and the most contradictory concept regarding divine presence. Yet there is genuine meaning to pain if we think with the always-renewing, creative mind of God, rather than with the old, emptiness-consumed understandings perpetuated in human tales and stories.
But how can we think with the mind of God on this most important question? Our Heavenly Father gives us birth in the holy fount of baptism as His own children and instills in us the powers of faith, hope, and love, enabling us to think, live, and love like God. After our initial encounter with our Heavenly Father, we must grow in accordance with the commandments of this new life, not with obsolete human laws.
Since the very first moments of our consciousness, as we studied our human nature, we have tried to define and measure the principles by which we explain our human condition and its rules. In the very first pages of the Bible, we exonerated ourselves and held the principle we called “evil” the one responsible for abusing our spiritual-material constitution and its ability to choose, because of which we lost our friendship with God; and we haven’t ceased jeopardizing this reinstated friendship through the salvation which our Lord Jesus brought to us. We say we are sinners, understanding it to be using our capacity to choose the good embedded in us as the image of God to choose the not-so-good instead. And it is precisely this very point that puzzled Jesus.
Luke concludes chapter 12 of his gospel with Jesus’ teaching on recognizing the time of salvation. “When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, ‘It is going to rain’; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat’; and it happens.” To these words, Jesus issues a stern judgment, “You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time? And why do you not choose for yourselves what is right?”
We must choose for ourselves what is right and should not blame some ‘evil’ for our shortcomings in correctly using the great power we received from God, which makes us similar to Him and makes our human nature in His image.