VERY NEAR TO GOD - BUT MISSING THE MARK 

4. Similarly a man may be very near to God and may be unrighteous. He will eventually fall away from Christ.

Since God is the only self existent being from the start, it is possible for us to say that evil is created by God.  It is the price God pays for having Sons of God instead of the  machines.  

But it is a tool in the hands of God in the process of maturing every Son into his own fullness.  There is a dynamic process of growth which involves a learning process.  It can often be painful, but necessary for the purpose.    Clement taught that God ruled the world with both hands, the right hand being Christ, the left was Satan.

Thus evil was permitted by God in the growing process.  The question is will God’s plan work out?  The might of God depends not on the brute force as we normally come to think of when we say God is Omnipotent.  God’s power lies in Love because God is Love.  Love’s expression is in Service and Sacrificial Redemption.  It is this we see is Jesus.  Hence the redemptive power of the cross is beyond comprehension and there is nothing that can escape the power of this love.  If an unresolved dualistic world with all the righteous in Heaven and all the unrighteous in Hell is not a solution the problem.  God has not solved the problem thereby.  That will prove the impotency of God not the Omnipotence. Paul at least believed in it.  

1 Cor 15:24-28  Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.  The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For he "has put everything under his feet." Now when it says that "everything" has been put under him, it is clear that this does not include God himself, who put everything under Christ.  When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all. (that may be God all things in all – Greek word by word)

The dominion includes “everything” with the exclusion only of God.  Does that include Satan?  The scripture speaks for itself. 

In fact there is much more than that, because the redemption goes beyond the consciousness.  The nature of consciousness determine the nature of cosmos wherein they exist. According to Paul:

Rom 8:19-21  The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed.

   For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. 

For a full treatment of the  purpose and evolution of cosmic redemption  in the context of the presence of evil we will have to look into the chaos theory and the implications o fthe fractals.