No. The passage does not say that God has raised up these false prophets any more than God carried out all the torments upon Job. These did not come from God but from the devil. God simply allowed these things to happen and did not interfere.
The evidence for an old earth is the entirety of the physical universe which God created, therefore your suggestion is that God created the physical universe in order to deceive. God is not the deceiver, that is the devil. Which do you worship?
Yes Reggie, God could have invented all the evidence for an old earth to test our faith. And I have even less doubt that God also invented all the Gospels in order to test our faith in Muhammad PBUH.
On a more serious note, Reggie, how on PLANET EARTH do you interpret that verse to be saying that God is doing the inventing? And your answer can be answered with a question. Can a perfectly good God lie?
HaSatan in the OT is a servant of God. Compare 1 Chronicles 21:1 to 2 Samuel 24:1.
No, not exactly. He is originally an angel, and the angels are indeed spiritual servants/tools by nature being a product of the design of God. Furthermore God assigned Lucifer/serpent to the role he has now. He remains a tool, but it is no longer the case that he is a servant of God – that is incorrect. Nor is he any longer a sole product of the design of God. He is now at least partially a product of human choices and he is the personification of evil. But he is not the origin of evil and he is also a bit of a scapegoat. To be sure God can remove the devil from existence and he plans on doing so, when the role he plays is no longer needed. But to say that he is a servant of God is fundamentally wrong.
In fact 1 Chronicles 21:1 shows the basic absurdity of such a claim. For the suggestion in the text is that the people of Israel are the servants of God. But this is only true in their better dreams and ambitions. The same goes for Christians and all the other religious. They may hope to serve God and God may want them to serve Him, but the reality is that more often than not, they do NOT serve God.
But even this much is not true of Satan. He does not seek to serve God, but rather quite the opposite. The most you can say is that His existence serves the plan of God in a rather indirect manner for the redemption of mankind. His purpose just like the scapegoat is to draw to himself the evil within us and among us, so that in the end all evil may be destroyed along with him.
@Reggie_O_Donoghue and @mitchellmckain, I think we’ve discussed this sort of thing somewhere before, but what about 2 Chron 18:21, where God uses a lying spirit to mislead Israel? "
"‘I will go and be a deceiving spirit in the mouths of all his prophets,’ he said. “‘You will succeed in enticing him,’ said the LORD. ‘Go and do it.’”
This is in the same category as the passage where it says God hardened Pharoah’s heart, which I do not believe is anything like interfering with human free will. It is just that sin (bad habits) diminishes free will and makes us rather predictable. When this is the case then I think we are fair game for whatever manipulations God cares to make for the greater good.
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