God’s Purposes Cannot Be Thwarted | Meridian Magazine

In a world so full of evil and chaos, it is easy to feel outnumbered
and overwhelmed by the powers of the adversary that seem to thwart good
efforts on every hand. Sometimes it is easy to feel just plain afraid of
the tsunami of evil that is sweeping the earth. We recoil from the
suffering of innocents, and may dread the fulfillment of the most
dreadful last-days prophecies.

What gives us the courage to carry on is the recognition that the war
in heaven was not a simplistic choice between freedom and coercion, or
risk vs. the assurance of salvation. In the book The Crucible of Doubt, authors
Terryl and Fiona Givens suggest that Satan’s forces won so many because
they were shown how unthinkably terrible the consequences of unfettered
agency would be. They suggest that when the very real, vivid,
inevitable pageant of warfare, genocide, infant mortality, anguish for
sin and personal bereavement was unfolded to our eyes in celestial
councils, it threatened to derail the entire plan. That foreknowledge
made it possible for Lucifer to draw away a third of the heavenly hosts,
convincing them there had to be a better way, a less painful way (pp.
112-113). But our Father made it clear that there is no other way.
We can know for sure that if there had been a less painful, less
grief-filled way to accomplish all the purposes of mortality, God would
have known and would have implemented it.



God’s Purposes Cannot Be Thwarted | Meridian Magazine