What it’s all for

[Kguess (Kevin Guess)]

@adamjedgar

I would suggest that before one starts making claims thst God created evil, in order to test us, one should study the Old Testament Sanctuary service…particularly the day of Atonement.

The correct biblical theology on evil is that there is but one source for it…Lucifer/Satan.

God created Lucifer, right? Any capacity Luther has/had was created in him by God, right? God allowed the serpent to enter the Garden of Eden and tempt Eve, indeed, God put the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden and called Adam’s and Eve’s attention to it.

God then allowed them to make the choice to disobey him and eat the forbidden fruit.

God could have prevented all or any of this. He surely knew what the serpent would do and how Eve would respond.

How then can it not be that God intended for the Fall to happen?

And if it is, then it must have been a necessary part of God’s overall plan, or else God is neither omniscient, omnipotent nor in control of Creation. I don’t know how to get around this conclusion unless Lucifer was able to create evil contrary to God’s desire and against his will.

[adamjedgar (adam james edgar)]

@Realspiritik

In fact, there are two – that’s 2, as in the number that comes after 1 – uses of the word αμαρτια anywhere in the Syntopics. Sure, there are passages in the Synoptics in which the idea of sin can be inferred, but do these passages mean exactly what you mean by the theology of evil?

I am going to provide a simple, comprehensive, and authoritative response to you on this…its simple to understand and follows biblical themes.

Start with matthew 1.21.

Then go and study the Old Testament Day of Atonement Service in leviticus,

Then read revelation 21

Now to remind yourself where all of this is authoritatively told to us is the beginning…read genesis chapter 3.

From the above it is very clear that sin came into this world…the world was not created with sin. That is biblical fact because its an overall biblical theme. No amount of straw plucking of texts will support a contrary theology. Strongs concordance also supports this view comprehensively when cross referencing bible texts in both testaments regarding sin, its origins, and how it will be removed from this world.

Unless you are willing to accept that sin brought physical death to this world, you will never understand or appreciated the significance of salvation. Jesus died “physically” on the cross to save us from “the wages of sin is death” (romans 6.23). This is the very same death God warned Adam about in Genesis chapter 2!

If genesis 3 is an allegory and death via sin is only spiritual, why christs physical atonement/death on the cross, its inconsistent with the historical facts.

We need to stop plucking texts out of context and consider biblical themes so that we do not make interpretations that are outside of scripture.

I would suggest that one studies the theological meaning of the word RESTORATION

and whilst contemplating that thought…take special note of the image below

[St.Roymond]

@Realspiritik

In fact, there are two – that’s 2, as in the number that comes after 1 – uses of the word αμαρτια anywhere in the Syntopics.

Sorry, but it occurs at least seven times in Matthew alone. Mark has it at least six times and Luke eleven. It’s actually sparse in John. These don’t count the verb form.

Though Romans has it twenty-four times.

@Realspiritik

It’s to John and Paul that we look for theologies that involve curses and semi-incarnate forces of evil and other theologies that show a lack of trust in God’s infinite capacity to know us and heal us and forgive us.

I don’t know what you’re reading, but that is a totally erroneous statement about both John and Paul!

[St.Roymond]

@klw

I’m not a formally trained theologian so take my words for what they’re worth. But I’d say that God did not create Lucifer as an evil being from the start (and did not create evil per se), but created all supernatural beings initially with freewill choice (just as he subsequently did humans), and that some such beings subsequently chose their own way, in contravention to God’s will

I was surprised to learn that there were theologians who maintained that angels didn’t have free will. This was common enough that Thomas Aquinas wrote a refutation!

One argument he doesn’t use that I consider useful is that the higher angels at least were meant to function as God’s heavenly council – and a council isn’t much good if its members lack free will.

@klw

So, if you mean by “Omnipotent” that God is all-controlling, I would agree with you that God is not THAT.

The Greek word translated as “omnipotent” doesn’t mean what that English word suggests, i.e. that God can do anything He pleases; what it means is that all power that exists is His, and all other entities’ power is just “on loan” so to speak. The mere fact that God loans His power to others seems to me to be sufficient to show that He is not all-controlling.

[St.Roymond]

@Kguess

I don’t know how to get around this conclusion unless Lucifer was able to create evil contrary to God’s desire and against his will.

God doesn’t just have a single desire: He desires that all His children, angelic or human, be in unbroken fellowship with Him; at the same time, He wishes that all His children exercise the freedom He has given them.
The second desire trumps the first since fellowship is meaningless unless chosen, and for that to be a real choice there has to be the possibility of choosing otherwise.

So Lucifer “created” evil contrary to God’s desire, but Lucifer’s exercise of his freedom was in accord with God’s desire.
Of course God knew it was going to happen, so He already had a plan to remedy the problem.

[Realspiritik (Jennifer Thomas)]

@St.Roymond

Sorry, but it occurs at least seven times in Matthew alone. Mark has it at least six times and Luke eleven. It’s actually sparse in John. These don’t count the verb form.

You are correct. I didn’t look at all the forms of αμαρτια, and there is no excuse for such sloppiness. I apologize.

The emphasis in the Synoptics is on the forgiveness of sins. This is the message that resonates with me – that God’s Love and Forgiveness are greater than all the laws and covenants.

I see a different message in John and different message yet again in Paul. I’ll be sticking with the Synoptics.

Merry Christmas!

[Realspiritik (Jennifer Thomas)]

@adamjedgar

I am going to provide a simple, comprehensive, and authoritative response to you on this…its simple to understand and follows biblical themes.

Thanks. I think I’ll stick with the message Jesus demonstrated throughout his ministry of God’s Love, Forgiveness,and healing towards us, along with our responsibility to answer God’s gifts with our own free will sense of personal responsibility, humbleness, and non-Platonic ideologies.

[Kguess (Kevin Guess)]

@St.Roymond

So Lucifer “created” evil contrary to God’s desire, but Lucifer’s exercise of his freedom was in accord with God’s desire.
Of course God knew it was going to happen, so He already had a plan to remedy the problem.

Doesn’t this mean that God saw the corruption of his Creation as inevitable and therefore necessary? And doesn’t this mean that he intended it to happen? Not out of cruelty or indifference, but out of wisdom and love, knowing what the end result would be (our spiritual maturity, the building up of the Body of Christ in Love, the absence of any form of separation from him in Heaven, a place without sin or death).

Like anything, evil must have started as a seed, presumably in Lucifer’s heart. Perhaps the seed was simply free will, but it seems to me there must have been something else that led him to use his free will to rebel against God. For Lucifer could have had no desire to rebel until that desire formed in his heart. Yet forming it would have been, in itself, an act of rebellion, wouldn’t it? So how could he have formed that desire without first having it? Thus, mustn’t it have been planted there in some way, either incorporated into him in when he was created or put there afterwards?

We know that God is capable of affecting peoples’ hearts, because he said he hardened the heart of the Pharaoh, to give one example.

So mustn’t God have been the one to plant the seed of rebellion in Lucifer’s heart? If not, how did it get there?

In Genesis, the only explanation given is that the serpent was the most wily of all the creatures. Is that not because God created him that way?

So we can say that God didn’t do create evil, that Lucifer/Satan/the serpent did it. Yet, this just poses a new question of where it came from. How did it get into Lucifer?

And every answer to the question of where evil came from does that until you get back to God, with God being the one and only Creator of all that exists, “…over all, through all and in all.”

Only if God is that and only if he intended evil to exist does the answer of how evil came to exist in the world stop generating a new question and only if the answer is, because God wanted it to.

How can that not be true?

[Kguess (Kevin Guess)]

@St.Roymond

The Greek word translated as “omnipotent” doesn’t mean what that English word suggests, i.e. that God can do anything He pleases; what it means is that all power that exists is His, and all other entities’ power is just “on loan” so to speak.

There’s a Buddhist saying regarding omnipotence: “If God were omnipotent he could make a rock that’s so heavy he couldn’t lift it.”

The intended point, I believe, is that phenomena depend on inherent features that, to exist, rule out certain other potential features and that no amount of power can change this.

[Kguess (Kevin Guess)]

@adamjedgar

From the above it is very clear that sin came into this world…the world was not created with sin. That is biblical fact because its an overall biblical theme.

I agree with this, but I don’t think it reveals anything at all about how evil came to exist or God’s role in that (or lack there of).

Nor does it reveal how sin will be banished from the world. The Bible over all defines sin as rejection of God, driven by coveting God’s position of power over all things. This was the serpent’s sin in tempting Eve, Eve’s sin in submitting to that temptation, Adam’s sin in submitting to Eve’s desire for him to also eat the apple, Cain’s sin in killing his Able, and on and on.

The Old Covenant was not made to banish sin, but to contain it for a time and prepare the way for Jesus and those who would follow him. The New Covenant reveals as much as anything in the Bible how sin will be banished from the world: “I will put my laws in their minds and inscribe them on their hearts, and…every one will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest…. For I will forgive their iniquities and remember their sins no more.” (Jeremiah 31:33-34)

Jesus is the means through which this covenant is to be fulfilled. But the process, what’s going on inside us, how God will put His laws in our minds and inscribe them on our hearts, this is actually not revealed in the Bible at all. The closest I know of is Paul’s discussion of how the whole Creation is affected by sin and awaits salvation.

“18 I consider that our present sufferings are not comparable to the glory that will be revealed in us. 19The creation waits in eager expectation for the revelation of the sons of God. 20For the creation was subjected to futility, not by its own will, but because of the One who subjected it, in hope 21that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”

What is he referring to as “the glorious freedom”? And who can “the One who subjected it” be other than God?

And who are the “Sons of God” but those who, through following Christ, have spiritually matured, grown up “into Christ Himself?” (Ephesians 4:15) That is, having had God’s laws put in their minds and inscribed upon their hearts and having had all their iniquities forgiven and all their sins forgotten?

Our understanding is bound to fall short of complete and true so long as we fall short of having grown up “into Christ Himself.” We have to be careful about believing we know beyond question, because when we do, we block ourselves from further growing in both our understanding and our spirit.

[EDC1]

In the Synoptics, particularly Luke, healing is often associated with the dealing with the demonic (Luke uses similar words re physical healing/exorcisms). So to argue such ideas are only presented in John and Paul is simply untrue. It seems that Jesus had to deal with demonic presences on a regular basis, and that was in just 3 years. I have no doubt they continue to afflict people today.

[St.Roymond]

@Realspiritik

I see a different message in John and different message yet again in Paul.

I have to disagree. The more I read the New Testament in Greek the more I am impressed by how little any differences are and just how much agreement there is.

@Kguess

Doesn’t this mean that God saw the corruption of his Creation as inevitable and therefore necessary?

Inevitable, perhaps; necessary, not in the least.

@Kguess

And doesn’t this mean that he intended it to happen?

No, just that He accepted that it would.

@Kguess

Not out of cruelty or indifference, but out of wisdom and love, knowing what the end result would be (our spiritual maturity, the building up of the Body of Christ in Love, the absence of any form of separation from him in Heaven, a place without sin or death).

This assumes that we wouldn’t have attained spiritual maturity if it hasn’t been for sin. I would suggest that we would have attained it more quickly.

@Kguess

it seems to me there must have been something else that led him to use his free will to rebel against God.

Jealousy: he didn’t like the fact that these creatures made of matter were actually in God’s own image and thus destined to be greater than any angel.
He didn’t have to act on the jealousy, but he did.

Neither angels nor humans are like programmed robots that can only do what their programming contains.

@Kguess

How did it get into Lucifer?

He exercised his capacity for choice.

You seem to be looking at this as though everything was just rows of dominoes so when the first one is toppled they are go down in sequence, and thus as though God couldn’t create creatures who have the capacity to choose.

[St.Roymond]

@Kguess

But the process, what’s going on inside us, how God will put His laws in our minds and inscribe them on our hearts, this is actually not revealed in the Bible at all.

Paul talks about it: our “old man”, our “flesh”, has to die so that Christ can live in us. That death happens little by little as we surrender our desires to God.

[Kguess (Kevin Guess)]

@St.Roymond

You seem to be looking at this as though everything was just rows of dominoes so when the first one is toppled they are go down in sequence, and thus as though God couldn’t create creatures who have the capacity to choose.

No, I’m looking at it as though everything has a source and a cause, except God. Whatever is in God’s creation is in it because God made it so that it could be in it.

Because the seeds for evil were already in the Creation when God created it, there were two possible paths for humans. One, they remain completely trusting of God, doing what he directs them to do and never doing what he forbids them to do. In this path, I agree, spiritual maturity would have been quicker.

Yet, this would mean humans never experienced evil. How then would they know what Evil was? God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost—or the Divine Council, depending on how you interpret “we”—knew both Good and Evil, but Adam and Eve did not.

If the end goal is for us to grow up into spiritual maturity that is defined as “growing up into Christ himself,” and Christ knows Evil, how would this happen without humans coming to know Evil?

But the 2nd way happened, so humans have gotten to know Evil pretty well and become quite good at committing it and even celebrating it.

And this brings back to the start: God knew this could happen. Since it is what did happen, it must have been the thing most likely to happen. And thus, God knew this was likely to happen. And he let it happen.

That means, in God’s eyes, it was at least worth all the Evil. But God wants us to reconcile with him, so he must be quite sure its correctable.

But then, to correct it, he had to send his only Son down to be brutally murdered.

So letting loose all this Evil, in God’s eyes was not only worth all the suffering human beings have gone through, which is increasing every day, but also doing that to Jesus. And what choice did Jesus really have? Refuse to do it and let the suffering escalate for eternity?

This is sounding less and less like the doings of a God who is the source of Peace, Love and Joy, the creator of everything and ruler of everything from the largest Galaxy to the tiniest quantum particle and even that without matter.

Why would he allow all that suffering and the sacrifice of his Son if it was not the only option?

Doesn’t it make more sense that Evil is a necessary part of what needs to be done to create the Body of Christ that we who follow Jesus are doing?

As with anything, when it’s over and we are in a place and state without suffering, without evil, with not even the slightest sin, how quickly will we forget our past suffering. “ 18I consider that our present sufferings are not comparable to the glory that will be revealed in us.”

When we look at evil and suffering in the world, and in our own lives, as a follower of Christ, we see a challenge to grow and learn and overcome it with good, don’t we?

[Kguess (Kevin Guess)]

@St.Roymond

He exercised his capacity for choice.

We’re back to this: Who gave him that choice?

[adamjedgar (adam james edgar)]

@Realspiritik

Forgiveness,and healing towards us, along with our responsibility to answer God’s gifts with our own free will sense of personal responsibility, humbleness, and non-Platonic ideologies.

you are of course welcome to your view…however, might i ask, for what purpose did God give you that free gift? was it not for the plan of salvation…to redeem and to restore?

Again, what is the definition of restoration? Is it not exactly as shown below

You see its all good to make some arbitrary claim of faith, however, its another thing to actually understand and believe in the full message of the plan of salvation.

Christ didnt die on the cross simply to make you feel better about this life…he died on the cross specifically to save people from their sins and to provide a pathway to restoration of all existence back to its former glory…ie the way it was before sin enterred this world when Eve was decieved in the garden. That is the whole point of the bible.

[St.Roymond]

@Kguess

Yet, this would mean humans never experienced evil.

Neither did God.

@Kguess

If the end goal is for us to grow up into spiritual maturity that is defined as “growing up into Christ himself,” and Christ knows Evil, how would this happen without humans coming to know Evil?

The same way Christ knows evil, which is not by personal experience.

@Kguess

Since it is what did happen, it must have been the thing most likely to happen.

No – unlikely things happen all the time.

@Kguess

Why would he allow all that suffering and the sacrifice of his Son if it was not the only option?

Because He wanted a family, not a set of robots.

Why would parents ever let a child play outside, or even inside, for that matter, knowing that odds are high that the child will get injured? Are you arguing that parents intedn for their children to get injured?

@Kguess

Doesn’t it make more sense that Evil is a necessary part of what needs to be done to create the Body of Christ that we who follow Jesus are doing?

No, it merely means that evil was possible – and that in order to have the family He wanted, God gambled on that.

@Kguess

@St.Roymond

He exercised his capacity for choice.

We’re back to this: Who gave him that choice?

That’s not your argument from before; your previous argument was that God had to put evil into him.

[Kguess (Kevin Guess)]

@St.Roymond

That’s not your argument from before; your previous argument was that God had to put evil into him.

“Like anything, evil must have started as a seed, presumably in Lucifer’s heart.” Seed was a metaphor. I never identified nor claimed to know what the seed was.

[Kguess (Kevin Guess)]

Thank you to all who have commented on my post. I hope you have the discussion beneficial in some way. I am going to bow out of commenting. It’s Christmas Eve and I will going on a mission trip after Christmas, so I wish now to focus my heart and mind on these things.

May your celebration of Christ’s birth be filled with Love, Joy, Peace and Hope. Merry Christmas!