God lets Satan exist because He wants to show not only you but every creature that He is God, and none is above Him.
For how can you tell where the left is if you are not shown the right?
There is one thing: there is light and there is darkness. But both darkness and light are actually from God! Yet God goes on to term Himself the Light and the other party the darkness.
Why then would He let the devil live this long?
A thousand years is like a day, and a day is like a thousand years. It’s not that God has forgiven Satan—no. The devil’s fate is already decided, and he is bound for hell, but that of humans isn’t until judgment. Now, He who rules on high, the Almighty, is slow to anger but is also a jealous God.
What good would this life be if it had no tribulation, no tension, no wars, no happy moments, no thrills, no dopamine? What a boredom it would be.
The left can only be discerned if there is a right in the first place, isn’t it?
Now, how would you know this is the light if you had not seen darkness in the first place?
It’s not that God wants you to be constantly tempted or tormented by demons, but He wants to show you that He is the one who gives the life you seek. Just like you can’t appreciate food if you are not hungry, so is God distant sometimes—to show you the value He brings into your life.
A broke kid looks at rich kids wearing nice shoes and fantasizes about affording one pair in the future, but the rich kids may care less because it’s their parents who bought the shoes. They feel no remorse or deep desire to afford the fancy shoes. They are not that precious before their eyes; they already normalized wearing them.
And so it is: if God created everything and He was the only one, the human character in you would easily get used to Him. You would take Him as a mere family member and have less or no respect for Him at times.
But when He pulled away—after Adam and Eve had gotten used to Him and they disobeyed His orders (“Do not eat of this tree or you will surely die”)—they ended up getting more lost than ever. The human character in you surely will make you get very used to seeing Him around easily, so that sometimes you will forget He is God!
Sometimes you cannot know the value of someone until they walk away from you.
Even Moses made this mistake, and guess what happened? He ended up missing out on the promised land.
If God left the devil for our own good, why then does He allow us to be tempted?
