I'm not a christian, but I grew up in a Baptist household, so I have at least a passing understanding of the Bible. Lemme know if I got any wrong.
If I'm understanding the bible correctly;
God Created heaven and Earth, Including Mankind and Angels
God is all-knowing and all-powerful
Relevant to this discussion, God created Lucifer and all the angels who sided with him.
God made Man in His image, and ordered the angels to serve them.
Lucifer, prideful of his own beauty, and envious of God's (at least perceived) favoritism of Man, and of God's position, started a rebellion in heaven and was/will be cast down into the lake of fire(aka Hell).
lucifer later tempted/took the form of the Serpent in the Garden of Eden and tempted Eve to eat of the Tree of Knowledge.
my conclusion: God, with full knowledge of what lucifer would do/become created him and set him on the path that led to his downfall, and to the Sin of Mankind.
Or to put it more simply; God created Sin through his foreknowledge of what Lucifer would become.
I'm not trying to start a shitstorm here, but this is the logical conclusion that I find myself at.
Any Christian pedes wanna poke holes in this for me?
Is God all knowing and all powerful in the context of this universe? Could there be a realm above ours in which "God" is merely the author of our "simulation" in the same way a SIMS player controls their own simulated world?
We know very little about our own universe, and many people have a lot more faith in the accuracy and infallibility of the Bible than is frankly warranted, especially when you consider how much was translated and left out intentionally.
I grew up in a Baptist church as well, and while I still believe in the basic tenants of Christianity, I think the biblical worldview is simplified for the masses. "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared." I think the true nature of things has yet to be revealed to us.
The only way for one to know the Biblical text was "changed" is if one knew what the original said. See the conundrum?
The Bible has been accurately recorded and transmitted throughout the millennium. The Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) are an excellent testimony to this truth.
This verse is specifically speaking about the Gospel which was proclaimed to the Nations through the Apostles.
Yes, in Paul's letters to the Corinthians. He is referring to what God has prepared for those who love him- those saved by the blood of Jesus. Do we know what that means in a cosmological or even spiritual sense? Nope. We haven't a clue what heaven will look like, or even what it means to live in the same dimensional plane as our creator, if such a thing is even possible.
My point is that the Bible gives us clues, but we really don't know much about the nature of our own reality, let alone the reality our creator lives in.