Your Choice Determines

Good without evil is good untested.
Angels were made to be good, but some failed;
For God's own throne, these boldly contested,
But there was no chance they could have prevailed!
Even higher than angels do men stand;
In His own image God created them,
For friendship and to aid His ruling hand;
God will share with good men His diadem!
Not with all men; just those good while on earth,
Who resist Satan's vile beguiling tricks,
And choose Jesus' high road, to prove their worth;
Most, though, will join with Satan's eternal fix!
To part good men from bad, evil abides;
The free choice each man makes is what decides!

In an important way Lucifer (or Satan, as he was named after expulsion from heaven) actually serves God by providing a choice for every person that lives. The choice each of us has is to choose God or to choose Satan; choosing God requires a conscious effort to live according to the teachings of Jesus (See Matthew 5-7); to choose Satan requires nothing but to live according to the customs and mores of the culture in which you live. Unfortunately, many fail by never consciously deciding; that is, by default.

The reason evil is necessary to God's plan is that it provides a tough test for any person to follow God; His road is difficult, while Satan's path is one of least difficulty. All a person has to do is to go along with popular opinion, because Satan has perverted it to run counter to the precepts of the Bible. God created the angels before He created men. Though He foreknew what would happen, ostensibly angels were expected to be subservient to His will. Unfortunately (yet in accordance with His plan), Lucifer persuaded one-third of the angels to rebel against God. The traitors failed, of course; instead of exterminating them, God cast them out of heaven to earth, where they continued their antagonism by subverting men from God; Satan was in the Garden of Eden, and he turned Adam, the first man, against God; that's what he's still doing today.

The problem of why a loving God would allow evil to snatch a majority of men from being adopted into God's family only to live eternally in torment with fallen angerls has preoccupied philsophers for hundreds of years. It really isn't a tough problem. Before the beginning of time, before anything was created, God prepared a book, called the Book of Life (See Psalms 87:6, Phillipians 4:3; Revelation 3:6, 20:15, 21:27) in which the name of every person that would be saved by entering heaven and being adopted into His own family was written, God knew everyone of us who would be saved thousands of years before the first man was created! BUT, God gave every one of us complete freedom of choice; HE doesn't decide for us; WE decide, each one of us, whther to choose God or not. KNOWING who will be saved is not CHOOSING who is to be saved! He also knew that like the angels before us, if there was no testing of our choice to be good, there was the possibility that we would turn to evil AFTER getting into heaven! So He, a loving God, allowed Satan to test our choice to be good here on earth. That is why evil exists, and it makes perfect sense. Only a perfect mind could have planned it.