In the previous two presentations, I laboured to answer the question asked by Sadam on why God would send (if at all he did – my emphasis) an evil spirit to his anointed king. Apart from the controversy in the text of an evil spirit coming from an all-good and loving God, I have extended the discussion to handle even other challenges that Christians face in their search and relationship with God.
I presented the simple answer first, which deals with the fact of man’s first-time encounter with the divine and man’s primitive perception of the divine revelation as exhibited in the text by the Jews.
They first knew God to be the source of both good and evil. That can be detected in their Genesis 1-3 mythology that seeks to answer the question of the origin of both good and evil. It was the God who had created all the good in Genesis 1 who again placed the tree of knowledge of good and evil in Genesis 2 which resulted into invention of evil in the good he had created through the choice of man in Genesis 3.
From this narrative, you are justified to deduce that God caused both good and evil. The cult of Judaism paints God this way throughout their text and it becomes next to impossible to rescue God from the responsibility of good and the guilt of evil as well. It was actually him who created the serpent that tempted Eve, and no one reads Genesis 3 and misses the chronological accusation of God for man’s fall by Adam and Eve. I can tell you this has not stopped. We still blame and hold God responsible mostly for the evil that happens in our world and to us. Trust me this is the biggest weapon in the arsenal of the Atheists and they use it often to actually dismiss the existence of God.
All these are questions born out of both the ignorance (not knowing at all) and deception (half-knowledge) of the being we worship under the name ‘God’. That is why in part 1 and part two, I dealt with the Divine Revelation and Divine Permissiveness, to make sure we understand who is God and how he operates in the context of evil and good. We now turn to DIvine Providence.
Divine Providence
God taught us this truth at our fellowship retreat in Entebbe some time back. Evil and Pain are not authored by God but agents that take advantage of God’s permissive nature. The rationale of God’s permissiveness is God’s immutability. Divine immutability is God’s quality of Standard-ness and his PERPETUAL STATUS. So he is permissive because he cannot change His nature, His mind, and His will just because something good or evil happened, is happening or is about to happen. He does not panic, he doesn’t react but acts accordingly.
God is eternal and therefore never affected or limited by time (John 1:1, 17:5, Psalms 33:11, 2Timothy 1:9, Jeremiah 1:5). So he permits good and bad times (long and short) yet that changes nothing about him and his plan for us. It is actually we who change, in our appreciation of him.
The exercise of both good and evil in their respective magnitudes, do not affect God physiologically and psychologically. God does not improve in quality and neither does he learn something new after an event. He knows everything. He is the ‘standard good’. He does not cheat in the great contest between evil and good and neither does he change (Proverbs 11:1. Malachi 3:6). Why am I saying all this in answer to the question of evil spirits from God? I will tell you why.
In the case of King Ahab (1Kings 22:20-23), his greed, his heathen wife (Jezebel), his lying prophets – were independent agents that God providentially worked alongside to secure a regime change to his oppressed people in Israel. Ahab’s Greed, Jezebel, and the guilty prophets were not original with God, but situations within which God’s ultimate plan was accomplished.
It would, therefore, be foolhardy for any ardent Bible reader to assume that God compromises and partners with evil instead of unveiling the truth that even amidst maximum evil, God’s purposes still prevails.
When we grasp this truth, we develop the ability to discern a difference between pain and punishment. At one point God used Assyria and Babylon (pagan nations) to chastise Israel, his holy nation (Isaiah 10:5, Habakkuk 1:2-11). What am trying to tell you is that while in this world we cannot defend a total absentia of evil in every good we know, it is likewise a fact that there is always divine involvement at every scene of crime.
Let’s go back to God in the New Testament (Mathew 8:28-34). While the swine owners mourned a loss of pigs, two community members regained their sanity and removed the roadblock they held as demoniacs (verses 32, 28). Now watch this again, the Gadarenes were people whose attention could only be attracted through tampering with the economy and that was the only way Jesus could preach to them (Vs. 34). It was a loss for a greater good or a greater good at loss of goods.
So, my brother, that is what we call God’s providence in unlikely situations.
God bless you and: THINK & UNDERSTAND (2Tim 2:7 NLT)
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The Gospel Hawker
iTiS Well of Worship Fellowship (John 4:24)
iTiS Well of Worship Fellowship (John 4:24) 