My Personal Christian Blog

Thanks for sliding into my blog site. This blog bog is a spin-off from my website at http://www.niteowldave.com/. Call me a Night Owl, as my full-time mission and hobby are jabbering from midnight until 8 a.m.ish with chatter bugs across the world. Hoot, hoot! Being a retired newspaper guy and a Curious George, I've written and assembled a whack of stuff that I hope you'll find interesting and thought-provoking. Check out the Stories bar on the right side, below, for all my articles - from my web site and this blog.




June 16, 2011

Did God Create Evil? Seems So.


By NiteOwlDave
www.niteowldave.com

This old chestnut of a question - Did God create good and evil? - harkens back to the puzzler; which came first, the chicken or the egg? Squawk!

God created good first, but many Bible believers suggest no way did God creat e evil, that He just “allowed” it. I suggest scriptural evidence and solid sense must conclude that God did create good and evil.

How can something be touchy, feely real without being created by the master planner? If God allows something, He’s on the hook for it being there. That’s abrupt perhaps,but it makes bold sense as I see it. In Genesis 2:16-17 we read,

"And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."

God created everything in the Garden of Eden, the tree of good and evil included. We see another example in Isaiah 45:7. “I form the light and create darkness, I make peace and create calamity; I, the LORD do all these things.”

God presented the freedom of choice with the creation of Adam and Eve. They chose to sin. In order for choice to work, there must be at least two options, good and evil. It takes the salvation blood of the risen Christ to purify us, if we chose that. Again, our choice.

God allows for angels and humans to choose to do right or wrong. Lucifer, the highest angel, choose to sin by wanting equal power with God. Lucifer and one third of the angelic force that choose to bow to him were booted from Heaven to become Satan and demons.

We live in a world of created opposites - day-night, fat-skinny, happy-sad, hot-cold, saved-unsaved, good-evil. Some suggest that evil has no existence of its own but is the absence of good. If darkness is the absence of light, I counter with the statement that light is the absence of darkness.

Genesis 1:4 states that God created darkness and light. It says God then separated the two. It is talking about literal day and night here, but this is an opener for the thought of created good and evil.

Critics say that God created heat and that cold does not exist by itself. They say cold is the absence of heat. Hmm. Grab a jacket. One brash Christian writer, Rick Deem, proclaims, “The Bible is quite clear that God is not the author of evil and He is incapable of doing so.” Quite clear, you say? God can’t create anything He wants? Oh, my.

If God did not allow for created evil, mankind and angels would be serving God out of obligation, not choice. God did not create programmed robots. God created the option of evil so that we could genuinely have a free will and choose whether or not we wanted to serve Him.