‘We have conjured up a god out of our own imaginations, we have projected our own thoughts, and we have thought that that is God.’
Evil’s advocate: Clive Gordon reads from Isaiah
‘Unless we approach the Bible with deep humility, we can easily fall into the error of creating a god after our own image.’
In Isaiah 45:7 God says, ‘I make peace, and create evil’ (King James Version). Startling, no? Both ‘peace’ and ‘evil’ do carry a broad connotation in the Hebrew original, which leads to wide variations in translation (the general context of this chapter is of war, suggesting that the word evil here is related to that). But most contentious is the word ‘create’, with many theologians wishing to distance God from evil. Yet the Hebrew – uvoray ra – is unequivocal: ‘and create evil’. Hence if we allow scripture, we find that God creates evil.
But we must tread carefully. We are not told that God is the author of sin. We retain full responsibility for our sins. God evidently does permit sin, for reasons undisclosed in scripture – but presumably these reasons are good ones because, being omnipotent, God could prevent sin and evil. Being omniscient, God certainly foresaw them before beginning creation.
Many people avoid this dilemma by believing that God is either not omnipotent, or voluntarily limits omnipotence to allow for free will. Others escape the problem altogether by believing in a God that is independent of the material universe. Others again are led to deny God’s existence, or suppose two gods: one good, one evil. But if we take away the God of Love’s omnipotence and care, we deny scripture (and are left with a universe that is out of control, and without hope). For me, unless we approach the Bible with deep humility, and a recognition that there are mysteries beyond our understanding, we can easily fall into the error of creating a god after our own image.
The Wisdom of Solomon (9:14-16) expresses this sense of mystery well: ‘Human reason is not adequate for the task, and our philosophies tend to mislead us… All we can do is make guesses about things on earth; we must struggle to learn about things that are close to us. Who, then, can ever hope to understand heavenly things?’ (Good News version). As the Welsh protestant minister Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote: ‘We have conjured up a god out of our own imaginations, we have projected our own thoughts, and we have thought that that is God.’
Isaiah 45:7 is not an isolated text; the same idea is found in Amos and Lamentations. And since in scripture there is a tension between God being love and God creating evil, we need to hold the two in balance.
But in this discussion of the origin of evil, let no one’s faith in God’s love be in any way diminished. We must remember that, over and above everything, God is love. The reformed biblical scholar DA Carson writes that ‘The remarkable thing about the Bible is that it assumes or teaches that both propositions are true… Despite everything it says about the limitless reaches of God’s sovereignty, the Bible insists again and again on God’s unblemished goodness.’ ‘Righteousness and peace have kissed each other’ as Psalm 85 has it.
For me, the greatest proof of God’s love is his sending Jesus into the world, to save us by his death.
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