15 February 2024
In the Bible, good and evil are inherently contextual. The context is us; it applies to us alone, not the whole universe. In yesterday's post, I mentioned that the Bible doesn't use the word "evil" the way we do in English. It is not an absolute quality, but limited to the context. When God says something is "evil", it refers specifically to unpleasant outcomes for us.
Thus, when Isaiah quotes God as saying that He creates evil (Isaiah 45:7), it refers to a bad experience for those under His covenant. It is what they must deal with, and it does not apply to anyone else. To "do evil" is to defile the land and people and oneself, and thus bring destruction to God's promised blessings.
In a certain sense, this is a built-in response of Creation. The mechanism for bad consequences existed from the beginning by design. This is how God "creates evil". You can choose space, stability and work, or you can choose time, instability and frivolity. There is a place for each in the grand scheme of things. But the grand scheme of things is the covenant under which it is declared; it is not necessarily the same reaction Creation has to the rest of the human race. God differentiates. The existence of a covenant changes everything, including reality itself.
Those outside the Covenant experience a totally different reality. They get laws; we have grace. What is our reality? What do we have once inside the Covenant?
For Covenant people, this world is inherently false. It's a prison for our souls, and the way to get out is to transition to the eternal state. You can simply escape; there's a lot of ways to die. Or, you can graduate with honors by completing your mission. You have the choice of wasting this passage or investing it. For most of us, it will be a mixture.
This life is inherently evil. It is the ultimate experience of time, absurdity, entropy, etc. To build purpose and meaning in this space is an intrusion, and sadly, only temporary. However, choosing to build will in itself alter you eternally. The Bible avoids stating in clinical terms how it changes us, but asserts clearly that it does so. Rather, the Bible uses symbolic language to reveal how it changes us, and what is involved. We can sense it, but we cannot define it. We cannot define it because this life is absurd in the first place.
Being here in this world was not God's ideal for us. It was our choice. I struggle for the words, but this was not merely a choice made for us by Adam and Eve. Rather, it was a choice inherent in human nature, so that none of us would have done differently in place of Adam and Eve. It's fundamental to our existence. We are vulnerable to the temptations and lies of the Devil; that's how we are made.
So, here we are in a fallen world. The world is not fallen, but we are. It's the same natural time-space existence Adam and Eve dealt with, but they were in a different state before the Fall. The mission then was to serve the Lord as His gardeners, a symbolism we cannot fully comprehend. There was something about this that the Devil and his allies on the elohim council rejected. They rebelled, so we have been given the new mission of proving them wrong.
Adam and Eve before the Fall had powers we do not. They kept the natural world as God willed, but after the Fall, they lost their powers. This leaves the Lord's Garden unkept. It's not total chaos; things work as designed, but they lack the vivid daily guidance they need. God then came up with a revelation to meet us in our fallen condition that would move us toward a better grasp of the underlying design. While we cannot do what Adam and Eve did before the Fall, we can move toward it. We are allowed to choose something better.
This is what Pageau means by the inherent orderliness of God's will coming down from above. Something in this dynamic of returning to God through the Flaming Sword/Cross is the evidence He needs to convict the Devil and his allies among the elohim councilors. We hold the capability of destroying the Devil and his works. If we can seize upon revelation and set about restoring some measure of God's original design for things, even though something in the task is inherently futile, then we prove God's point. Yes, we will fail in one sense -- it is inevitable. The task is actually beyond us. But in another sense, our choice to participate in God's agenda is quite the victory. We go with His Son to the Cross and that's how we win.
That's how we graduate with honors from this prison, this simulation.
You don't have to actually see through the veil of symbolism; indeed, you cannot. All you really need to recognize is that His glory shines on the other side of that veil. Reach for His glory in the choices you make; accept what is on the other side by faith. We will bring evil upon ourselves by making any other choice offered.
Sidenote: The concept of sin is actually two different things. One is missing the standard (falling short), the other is arguing with God. The former is obviously contextual. The only truly universal concept is the latter.
Comments
Jay DiNitto
Reminds me C.S. Lewis and the Screwtape Letter, about the Christian solider dying...
There was a sudden clearing of his eyes (was there not?) as he saw you for the first time, and recognised the part you had had in him and knew that you had it no longer. Just think (and let it be the beginning of your agony) what he felt at that moment; as if a scab had fallen from an old sore, as if he were emerging from a hideous, shell-like tetter [skin disease], as if he shuffled off for good and all a defiled, wet, clinging garment. By Hell, it is misery enough to see them in their mortal days taking off dirtied and uncomfortable clothes and splashing in hot water and giving little grunts of pleasure -- stretching their eased limbs. What, then, of this final stripping, this complete cleansing? The more one thinks about it, the worse it becomes. He got through so easily! No gradual misgivings, no doctor's sentence, no nursing home, no operating theatre, no false hopes of life; sheer, instantaneous liberation. One moment it seemed to be all our world; the scream of bombs, the fall of houses, the stink and taste of high explosive on the lips and in the lungs, the feet burning with weariness, the heart cold with horrors, the brain reeling, the legs aching; next moment all this was gone, gone like a bad dream, never again to be of any account. Defeated, out-manoeuvred fool! Did you mark how naturally — as if he'd been born for it -- the earthborn vermin entered the new life? How all his doubts became, in the twinkling of an eye, ridiculous? I know what the creature was saying to itself! "Yes. Of course. It always was like this. All horrors have followed the same course, getting worse and worse and forcing you into a kind of bottle-neck till, at the very moment when you thought you must be crushed, behold! you were out of the narrows and all was suddenly well. The extraction hurt more and more and then the tooth was out. The dream became a nightmare and then you woke. You die and die and then you are beyond death. How could I ever have doubted it?"
This document is public domain; spread the message.