John 3:17
[17]For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.

My kids think I am funny that I always seem to care more for John 3:17 than I do for 3:16. In honesty, it’s not that I care more for it but that it was actually that verse that taught me the lesson I needed to know after running from God for 20 years.

When I first left my parents home and went off to war, I was truly a baby Christian. I say baby even though I had been saved about nine or ten years at that point. I have learned that as a child, you coast on your parents’ faith. You go to church because your parents do you read your Bible because your parents do you even go soul winning because your parents do.

Side note as Christian parents it is your job to train them up in the way they should go. You make your kids eat and drink water. Why not make them go to church and read their Bibles. You make your kids take medicine when sick. Why not make them memorize verses (really memorize not just say). You are told to be disciples and teach those around you, and this especially includes your children. It is not a child’s choice to go to church because they will choose not to and don’t be surprised when they grow up and choose not to still go because you didn’t instill the need to go as a child.

Back from that, I was off for  the first time in the world, making my own decisions and choosing what to do, and at first, I started to experiment with worldy things, out of curiosity. I then started to fall back to God because this world stuff was fun but scary to me, and then it happened. I was confronted with a question I couldn’t answer. Why does God allow war? Honestly, this was something my young soul was not ready for, and if I had read my Bible better and studied harder, I would have known the answer.

Being young, I was still pretty nieve to understanding portions of the Bible. Take, for example, the story of Jonah. He did not want to witness to those people  not  because he was scared of them or scared to witness. It was a hatred of the people. His hatred continued in his depression after the city was saved. He did not want to tell them because he knew God was merciful and would save people he did not want to be saved. I, as a young man, could not understand this, but now, having been indoctrinated into hate for a people as a Marine fighting a war I for many years could not even imagine telling a single one of the people I fought or battled against that Jesus loved them and they to could go to heaven. I still struggle with it and have been working on myself to remember that God wants the entire world to come to him, not just people I like.

I saw war and said Why, if God is all powerful? Why is this a thing. It took me many years to understand that God did not make man as a thing to control and force His will upon. He has the angels for that. He made man so they could voluntarily give their lives to Him and serve and worship Him with free will. If God were to intervene every time we did something bad, we no longer have free will. Without free will, can we actually be saved then because it’s our free will to accept Him that leads to salvation?

John 3:17 taught me that God does not want the evil of man to be anywhere on earth but that we all might be saved. We must first accept Him and push off the evil, though. With a devil out there tricking people, we will never get rid of the evil, but we Christians need to give it our all to help bring as many to the Saviour as possible until the Lord says Okay last one let’s go get my children and judge the evil of this world.