God Made the World for Man’s Good, Not for His Harm
The World: What reasoning leads you to consider me worse than any evil? For my own maker and God, after forming me perfectly, said: „It is good” [Gen. 1:31]. See, then, that I am good.
After the Fall, the World Changed into Evil
The Wise Man: Indeed, according to this word of God, you are good, for the all-good God makes nothing evil, but makes all things good — and so you are good. And so you truly were for man, before he let himself be deceived by the beauty and sweetness of that death-bearing tree, whose fruit the first-created man ate and at once became mortal (for God had made man immortal). After that, you, world, became man’s evil and turned into bitterness. But God, in His rich mercy, unwilling that the work and creature of His hands should perish and vanish forever, promised man on that occasion another earth and a new heaven. On that earth flowers never wither, trees and their fruits never spoil, but bear abundantly in every season. In that heaven the sun’s warmth and the cold’s chill are perfectly measured, and above all, there will be no scorching heat or drought, no winter, and the sun will not set, for there will be no night. In a word, no good will be lacking there, and no evil will touch anyone. But these things were promised to men as an inheritance on the condition that, renouncing you and hating your useless vanities and deceptions, we seek and strive after heavenly things and our eternal inheritance.
The Wise Man’s answer resolves a tension the unspiritual mind cannot untie: if the world is corruption, how could God call it „good”? The answer lies in the difference between created nature and nature’s fallen state. God did not create corruption; He created goodness, as everything from the hand of the All-Good is good. Man, through disobedience, did not change the nature of things — he broke the bond between man and God, and through that rupture, the bond between man and the world broke as well. St. Maximus the Confessor teaches that every created thing bears within it a logos, a purpose placed there by God, which remains steadfast even when man no longer reads it rightly. The world did not become evil in itself; it became an occasion for wandering for a man who now sees in it only food for desire, rather than a step toward its Creator.
This is why St. John Chrysostom calls the present age a „place of passage,” not a lasting home: whoever settles his whole heart in passing things is like one who builds his house upon a bridge. And the promise the Wise Man recalls is no comforting tale, but the very foundation of Christian hope: „We wait for new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13). St. Paul teaches that creation itself groans and eagerly awaits the revealing of the sons of God, for it too will be set free from bondage to corruption (Romans 8:19-21). The world will not be discarded, but renewed — just as man himself will not be annihilated, but raised.
One task, then, remains for the one who understands this: not to hate the world as creation, but the passion with which the fallen heart embraces it — and, hating vanity, to turn one’s longing toward the new heaven, where, in the word of Revelation, „God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more” (Revelation 21:4).
