Theodicy - The effort to explain or justify the goodness of God while accounting for the existence of evil in the world.
Sergius Bulgakov in THE BRIDE OF THE LAMB offers this thought:
The question of the final destiny of Satan becomes exceptionally acute in the problem of theodicy … Here, it is a question of whether evil in invincible in creation. It might appear that, even though God condemned Satan to expulsion from this world, He could not, or did not want to, create a world that is free of evil, but rather one that defeats it even if only in the end, so that it therefore forever remains the outer boundary of the world, as it were.
Bulgakov’s thought – perhaps God did not want a world where no evil existed; He wanted a world in which evil is defeated.
Consider Genesis 3:15 in which God is cursing the serpent for having deceived Eve - “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise your head, and you shall be on guard for His heel.” God puts the enmity between humanity and the serpent because God wants humans to defeat Satan not to avoid him or be afraid of him or be rid of him. God wants the humans to confront and destroy their enemy Satan.
God wanted humanity to defeat Satan. Perhaps that is the ultimate dominion we are to have over creation. But how was this to take place? As Abraham told his son, “God will provide for Himself the offering” (Genesis 22:8). God does provide the means to defeat Satan – the God-man, Jesus Christ who achieves victory over Satan and death. This gives a stronger sense to the offertory prayer of St. John Chrysostom who says of Christ: “He was given up, or rather He gave himself up for the life of the world.” God wanted humanity to defeat Satan and God in the incarnation provides the means for this to happen. The defeat of Satan through the death on the cross was God’s plan all along. God confronted Satan head on and defeated him, or as Chrysostom says in his Paschal Homily looking at this confrontation from the point of view of Death:
It took a body, but happened upon God!
It took earth, but encountered Heaven!
This was God’s plan all along – to have humanity defeat Satan. The surprise to the whole plan was that God would become human to accomplish the goal.
Christ is risen from the dead
trampling down death by death!
