The question could immediately be asked: Does the Holy One, blessed be He, want to rectify everything through man’s free will or through His own power? If you say He wants to rectify everything through man’s free will, how can it be that “from the beginning He tells the end” (Isaiah 46:10)? Surely, He knows the future, and since He knows that in the end they will need Him, should He not have rectified everything from the very outset?
The point is that Eyn Sof, blessed be He, wanted to remove from the hearts of His creatures the mistake of believing that there are two domains, one of which brings about good and the other evil. Accordingly He first laid down the Sefirot, in which He does not use His unity and perfect power. On the contrary, the power of the Sefirot is like the power of a strong man who submits himself to a test against a rival power – the Other Side – which the strong man himself put in possession of a power that is contrary to his own.