Adam had said in one of his comments (I guess it is one that was moved) that my poem seemed to be saying that God IS evil, or could BE evil. I don’t remember precisely how worded it. But I wanted to respond.
Adam, I can tell you that I did not mean that God WAS evil.
But what it means to BE evil or to BE good is an interesting question. I don’t think evil and good are things. In a sense, they don’t actually exist. When Jesus rebuked Peter, saying, “Get thee behind me Satan, for you are a hindrance to me. For your mind is not on the things of God, but of man,” I don’t believe he was saying that Peter WAS evil.
Did he mean, though, that Peter was possessed? In the first sentence, he sure seems to be talking to Satan, which would seem to mean either that Peter WAS Satan or that Peter was possessed by Satan. Yet, the 2nd sentence seems to be directed at Peter, defining the evil as being what Peter’s mind was on. And he provided only 2 options for that: the things of God or the things of man.
And he didn’t say, as he did say when ridding people of evil spirits, anything like “come out of him.” On the contrary, the 2nd sentence seems quite clearly to place the responsibility on Peter himself. With all of us, the focus of our minds is our choice. Our cultures tend to have many mechanisms in them that work to train our minds to focus on certain things that benefit our societies, which are often things that benefit those few in our societies with power. Knowing that the focus of your mind—and by extension, the things you desire—is each individual’s choice tends not to benefit those few. For their interest is worldly power and worldly power—be it political, military, economic, philosophical psychological or even theological—depends on controlling many people.
Yet, if the evil was that Peter was not choosing the right focus for his mind—not choosing what is good in God’s eyes, which in the context of Jesus’ statement was Jesus being arrested, ridiculed, tortured and crucified—what does Satan have to do with it?
Was Satan literally entering Peter’s mind and turning his focus away from God?
Well, what Peter had done was express his concern for Jesus’ welfare. Peter was surely a person who cared about Jesus and who was prone to emotion-driven declarations, as when he declared he would never deny Jesus only to deny him 3 times, just as Jesus said he would.
So could it be that Satan did not cause Peter to focus on Jesus’ welfare, but rather that he spoke spontaneously on his emotional reaction to what Peter had just told him? IOW, was this not something caused by an evil force taking control of Peter, but rather by his innate nature? Or are these distinctions that, in our perception and thought seem real, but are not actually real?
I go back to the 2 options Jesus gave for the focus of Peter’s mind: The things of God vs the things of man. And then I have to consider Jesus’ response to the young rich man who addressed Jesus as “good teacher.” Jesus replied, “Why do you call Me good?” Jesus replied. “No one is good except God alone.”
It would seem that Jesus has defined evil in its entirety. I put it this way in my poem: “…isn’t evil that which is not good?” And Jesus, in his rebuke of Peter, defined good as “the things of God.”
But if this is the case, then the way one can BE evil is by not having ones mind on God all the time. Yet, this is not what we normally think of as BEING. And I would argue that DOING evil is not BEING evil because if it were, who could be saved? We all do evil, for evil can be subtle and seem like good, as I would say Peter’s concern for Jesus was. If Jesus had responded to Peter by saying, “I understand your concern, Peter, but this is the way it must be so that God’s all of God’s people can be reconciled with him and all of his Creation can be healed,” who reading that would have thought, “Whoa, Jesus, are you going to let Peter get away with such evil thoughts!!??”
I think almost nobody would think that. The first time I read that passage, I though, “wow, that is harsh!” I got what he was saying in the 2nd sentence, but the first sentence just seemed over the top and kind of mean to Peter. My thinking now is that Jesus responded this way because evil starts in such subtle ways. We actually cannot perceive it at its root, because it is not just the focus of our mind, but more fundamentally the desires of our heart.
Yet, all of this concerns evil in this world and the evil that human beings do. What about God?
Well, if both evil and good have to do with the desires of our hearts and the focus of our minds, good being those being entirely on God and evil being anything else (that which is not good), and God being the only good, how can God be focused on something that is not good? For wouldn’t he then be a house divided?
Thus, if God created evil, it would have to be to serve his good purposes. God would not BE evil, but would be using evil.
That is the assertion of my poem. And this is not anything new, for God uses evil for good all through the Bible.
I think this is only difficult for us to—the idea that God intended evil to come into the world—because our experience of evil is so negative. And this is because we see such a small part of what is occurring, has occurred and will occur. We see things that happen to us and to others as being either good or bad in and of themselves. Yet, everything that happens in the world is part of the vast river of actions and consequences flowing forward in time. If you follow any one chain of actions and consequences, you will find that any one thing that seems good to you has consequences later on that seem bad and vice versa.
We don’t see this without a lot of learning and contemplation (and even that only brings us a glimpse of it), but God sees all of it in all of its details.
This is why my poem is concerned with our creativeness. If Jesus had not rebuked Peter, perhaps Peter would have begun to think that Jesus, as great a teacher and master as he was, was wrong and that Peter should take it upon himself to prevent Jesus from getting himself crucified. If Peter had done that, that would have been a creative act. And if he had succeeded (which, of course, God would not have permitted), the consequences for humanity would have been the worst possible. And that illustrates the severity of what he said, and why Jesus rebuked him so harshly.
We are creating all the time, with everything we think, feel and do.
And this is why my poem has the question, “how do we know what we are creating?”
You are perceiving my poem through a certain lens that produces the reactions you have had. I hope that this long comment helps you to understand better the lens through which I was looking when I wrote it.
