THE ORIGIN OF SIN AND WHO SATAN IS (PART III)

Question: Please! Can you handle the issue of the ORIGIN of evil/sin? It disturbs me a lot! Can this theory of it having its origin in heaven hold water? And who is SATAN (my grandmother 100+yrs old, asked me this last yr. It was then that I discovered that I don’t know who Satan is). – Elitwatz from Tanzania

Response: In the last session I listed the assertions that I think are instrumental in responding to this question. These are

• The origin of sin is mysterious.
• Secondly, its mystery is in the fact that it appeared in a good and perfect environment.
• Third, it is God who first recognizes and warns creation against the existence of Evil.
• Fourth, Origin is mysterious to us but not excluded from God’s omniscience.
• Finally, what we mean by evil/sin is not a corrupted entity (something that has fallen from a particular standard-good to a low and evil one) but rather an essentially and substantially (in nature) evil thing.

We addressed the first three and now we turn to the fourth one.

God’s Natural Attributes

The being we know as God is not just a supernatural being but a supra-natural being. God has never begun but he is the beginning of everything material or immaterial. It the nature of this God that makes possible the presence of two fundamental things; 1. Human free-will and 2. Evil. The story of Evil makes sense in the context of the creation of man. Without man, evil is rendered irrelevant for evil only consumes one relevant creature and that is humanity. The right place, therefore, to begin from in understanding the origin of Evil/Sin is in discussing the divine attributes of being.

God is ontologically three things: 1. God is omnipotent, 2. God is Omnipresent and 3. God is Omniscient. The prefix ‘Omni’ means ‘All’. ‘Potency’ is Power, ‘Presence’ is Presence, ‘Science’ is ‘Perception‘. So God is all-powerful, God is in all places at all times and God is all-knowing. In the last session, I discussed what makes God omnipotent by demonstrating that true power is that which allows all other powers to exercise freely to their fullest without interruption by the supra-power. The case I was and am making, therefore, was that the origin of Sin is in who God is. The practicality of evil in the universe is not a Divine Mandate. However, it can only be possible but under what is known as the Permissive Sovereignty of God (Job 1:12).

Evil/Sin, therefore, is not omnipotent but only God is. The power that Evil/Sin has over God’s creation is an Undeniable Divine Grant to it (John 10:18). And it is these attributes (All-Power, All-Presence and All-Knowing) of who God is and the reality of evil/sin in the world with conscience beings like us that arouses not only questions of its origin but also questions of God’s integrity.

The Paradox of Epicurus

In the years 341-270BC a philosopher by the names Epicurus who lived in Athens argued against the existence of God altogether in the lens of the reality of both natural and moral evil. It is his argument that has over time been termed as the Epicurean Paradox. Originally, Epicurus deductively asked three rhetorical questions in his argument which later his school of thought have expanded to five. The original discourse of Epicurus went as follows:

• God is omnipotent
• God is Omni-love
• Evil Exists

What the philosopher deductively argued was that God cannot be all-powerful and have another power practically opposed to his will which is love. Later these claims are broken down into pieces we can all perceive as follows:

• How can an all-good, all-loving God allow evil to exist?
• Either God wants to abolish evil and cannot, or God can abolish evil and doesn’t want to
• If God wants to abolish evil and cannot, then God is impotent
• If God can abolish evil and does not want to, then God is evil
• If God can abolish evil and God really wants to abolish evil, then why is there evil in the world?

It is the reasoning of this philosopher that has framed the ideological thinking of Atheists about God and motivated the theodicy (defence of God’s goodness against the reality of evil) of theism.  

Christian Theodicy

The term ‘Theodicy’ are two Greek words; ‘Thoe’= God and ‘Dike’= ‘Righteous/Just’. Theodicy is an explanation of the Justice or Righteousness of the Christian God in the reality of evil. The existence of evil and its effectiveness is evidence of God’s all power, all goodness and all-knowing. Evil/Sin manifests in two forms: 1. Natural Evil which refers to the predicaments without human cause or participation (natural disasters and diseases) and 2. Moral Evil which refers to humanity’s direct volitional creation and exercise of evil in what they choose to do and not to.

Christian Theodicy argues that for God, in his omnipotence, to deal with sin before it tampers with his creation is an abuse of power in the presence of humanity with the capacity to choose right from wrong (Job 1:10). Divine Omnipotence is not dictatorial but democratic (Genesis 2:16-17), man must choose or not his creator (Free-Will). For God to be a just and righteous God, his omniscience must not participate in the perceptive faculties of man as he decides. Whether a man chooses God or not, man must eventually worship this very God as a just and fair God (Psalms 25:8-14)

The story of the Cross upon which a God died, is a reality of an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good God issuing salvation to humankind without bullying or violating the intentions Evil/Sin which to man is an alternative in man’s natural attribute of free-will. Before the Cross, the forgiveness of God to sinners is injustice displayed, God is only justified (Theodicy) to forgive the sinning of sinners after his death at the cross and resurrection (Ephesians 1:7; Hebrews 9:15-22; Mathew 28:18).

So an all-good and all-loving God can consistently be that if he allows evil to exist as an alternative to him until the volitional beings (Genesis 1:26) created in his image willingly (without fear or favour) declare him as Just and denounce even their preferred positions opposed to God. So to an all-power, goodness and Knowing God, dealing with evil/sin is not an issue of the loss and pain of the human race as it is a challenge to who this God is. It is how this God understood through those attributes deals with sin that determines who he is and whether he is worthy to be worshipped or not. This is what Sin/Evil is about, we are victims of fragments of its (Sin) direct attack to the identity of God. That is why in the previous presentations I said, that the question of the Origin of Sin and who Satan is, is a question more on who God is than what it states to ask.

Next, I will extend this a little bit then investigate Satan in the Bible.

God bless you I invoke TRUTH, WISDOM, and FAITH (2Tim 2:7) 

Priest M.I.T WHITE (+256-775 822833 for further inquiries)

iTiS Well of Worship Fellowship (John 4:24)

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