Re:non-story? (Score 1)

Explicit instruction is absent because of the necessary requirement that the world be morally ambiguous if people are to truly have free will. The presence of moral ambiguity in the world and the problem of evil is to give all people a choice. God wants humans to love God by choice, and to be free from compulsion. Such is the significance of the story of Christ resisting the three temptations in the desert.

I think that Dostoevsky puts forth the most succinct and beautiful understanding of this difficult concept in The Brothers Karamazov in the chapter The Grand Inquisitor.