If God is good and all-powerful, why does he let people do evil?

Genesis 2:15-17The Lord God placed the man in the Garden of Eden to tend and watch over it. But the Lord God warned him, “You may freely eat the fruit of every tree in the garden—except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you eat its fruit, you are sure to die.”

Genuine love requires the freedom to choose. From the beginning, God desired a loving relationship with us, so he gave us this freedom. But with the ability to make choices comes the possibility of choosing our own ways over God’s way. Our own ways inevitably lead to sin because every person is born with a sinful nature (Romans 3:23). This breaks God’s heart, but the alternative for God was to make non-thinking, non-choosing robots, not humans. And what kind of a relationship can someone hope to have with a robot? Evil still exists and people continue to do what is evil, but as believers we can choose to do right. And when we do so, God rejoices, good prevails, and Satan loses ground in our lives.