Growth
Anyone can see that people grow. This growth is not limited to physical bodies, but extends to the mind and soul as well as civilization.
Physically, people’s diets change as they grow, going from milk for infants through soft food to the full diet of adults. This development of the physical diet is also paralleled in the spiritual diet and extends far beyond simple skills like language.
Developing a child’s moral and spiritual self must be done incrementally. For example, a child must start by memorizing the Ten Commandments, taking them as simplistic orders from God which must be obeyed without question to establish the basis for their moral framework. Once the child matures enough to start thinking about the commandments critically, he is ready for the next step in his moral journey and able to understand the reason behind these simple rules, deepening and strengthening his moral framework. Finally, once he has matured enough to understand the flawed nature of the world and seen how evil people abuse these just rules to exploit the good, he will be ready for the final phase of growth as he builds his understanding of necessary evils by seeing where commandments must be violated to protect God’s Just Society.
This growth takes time since each step must be mastered before the next can begin. Failure to build this moral understanding from the proper foundation can be catastrophic. In this example, children who do not understand the importance of the Ten Commandments will misuse the higher-level concept of necessary evil as an excuse to indulge their animalistic impulses, bringing harm to themselves and those around them, and, if not effectively corrected, become the evil they claim to oppose.
This also applies at a larger scale with God progressively teaching people how to be civilized. First came the Old Testament and other early religions which taught us how to grow from tribal bands little better than animals into proper civilizations. Once we had fully learned about civilization, Christ taught us compassion, elevating civilization from its early, brutal form to a more compassionate, logical system capable of developing beyond the boot of authoritarianism. Most recently, God sent the Founding Fathers to teach us about government and justice, allowing us to move beyond the arbitrary rules and turbulent emotions that governed Christian societies.
The problems associated with trying to push children into higher level concepts before they are ready also applies to cultures at a larger scale. Some cultures are simply too primitive to achieve a just government, and attempting to force it on them only results in them voting for chaos, much like the problems we have seen when we allowed immature people to vote with universal suffrage. This too requires learning, and unlike childrearing, we have precious little successful experience to draw from when it comes to teaching cultures how to rise above primeval chaos.
God will undoubtedly teach us more lessons once we as a species have mastered government, achieved a Just Society, and spread his teachings throughout the world, but that will be centuries from now, if not longer. Our earthly focus must remain on mastering government and pushing back against the false religions which seek to drag us back into barbarism while we raise our children to carry the torch into the future.