John Ball writes:
When we talk about the third person of the Trinity we talk about the Holy Ghost or the Holy Spirit. By using this name we declare God to be holy. We are saying that his actions are perfect, and that they are also morally good.
How can the perfect holy God create a world and a people that seem to be flawed, full of disaster, destruction and death?
Throughout the ages Dualists such as the Zoroastrians and the Cathars have declared the physical world to be the work of the Devil, or of some Demiurge, a lesser god. For them only the spiritual world is good, created by the supreme god.
The Christian faith denies this life denial. We declare the physical world to be good, and that the resurrection is physical, that the body will be resurrected in the life to come, and that Jesus Christ reconciled the material and the physical, being wholly man and wholly God.
Food, drink, physical love, physical beauty - creation is good if done right.
Dualist religions, those that separate the material and the physical, are ultimately little more than death cults. For them the answer for sin is obliteration.
But Christianity sees life as good. God is the Living God. There is sin, but God is not the author of sin. That privilege goes to man. Man is made in the image of God, and it is his nature to reach for the privileges of God. Man's selfishness and pride in trying to usurp the power of God is both his glory and his sin, the image trying to supersede the reality. It is the vanity of the creature that has brought sin into the world.
Man has brought sin into the world and it is from the slavery of sin that man needs redemption.
Then man can know the great love of God, and his salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, so that God may be given glory for all eternity.
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