Tag Archives: evil

Reflection: A Split in the Identity of God

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Satan Appears Before the Divine Presence, Ephraim Moses Lillen (1874-1925) Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Book_of_Job#/media/File:Satan_appears_before_the_divine_presence.jpg

One of the difficult to reconcile portions of the prophetic witness to God is the all-encompassing view of God being responsible for all things. In the words of the prophet Isaiah:

I am the LORD, and there is no other; besides me there is no god. I arm you, though you do not know me, so that they may know, from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is no one besides me; I am the LORD, and there is no other. I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the LORD do all these things. Isaiah 45:5-7

Whatever is happening on the earth is directly attributable to the LORD who is not only the God of Israel but works through the movements of nations, natural disasters, the presence or absence of rain, the fruitfulness of both harvest, animals, and children. Everything for good or ill comes from God and can be attributed to either the faithfulness or unfaithfulness of the people. Yet, something shifts theologically in the post-exilic period and prior to the time of Jesus. My theory is that this shift occurs due to the experience of the faithful enduring suffering and the wicked prospering both at the individual and international level.

There seemed to be forces resisting the justice of God, forces larger than what the faithful could account for. Several solutions present themselves within Bible, one being that the ‘gods’ or ‘princes’ of the nations were resisting the forces of the God of Israel. This occurs in Daniel 10 where the ‘prince of the kingdom of Persia’ resists the divine messenger sent to respond to Daniel’s prayers for twenty-one days before the LORD dispatches Michael, ‘one of the chief princes’ to subdue this prince of the kingdom of Persia and allow the messenger to reach Daniel. Michael will later in Revelation 12 be viewed as the commander of the angel. Yet, one answer to this question of resistance to the justice of God was given by some of the faithful as being attributed to these divine protectors or princes of the nation. They were still subservient to the LORD the God of the earth, but their desires are not always aligned with the LORD.

Most people are unaware that throughout the Hebrew Scriptures there are no demons, no devil[1] and the character of Satan who only appears in Job, 1 Chronicles, and Zechariah is not the devilish opponent of God but rather acts as like a prosecuting attorney testing the people of God in God’s presence.  The most famous example of this is from Job:

One day the heavenly beings came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them. The LORD said to Satan, “Where have you come from?” Satan answered the LORD, “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.” The LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil.”  Then Satan  answered the LORD, “Does Job fear God for nothing? Have you not put a fence around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But stretch out your hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.” Job 1: 6-11

 Similarly in 1 Chronicles 21:1 Satan is responsible for convincing David to conduct his ill-conceived census and in Zechariah 3 Satan is the prosecuting attorney accusing the high priest Joshua before God. Satan is the accuser[2] and although he is responsible for deceiving David, convincing God to test the righteous Job, and accusing the high priest Joshua he is still considered one of the heavenly beings who works for God. He may be an uncomfortable character, but he is not considered evil or opposed to God.

There are others far more familiar with the intertestamental literature than I am, but one thing is clear between the conclusion of the Hebrew Scriptures and the beginning of the New Testament: the cosmology has drastically changed. The devil and demons are present and actively resist the kingdom of God, mislead the nations, and generally have an active role in the current governance of the world. Now instead of God being responsible for making weal and creating woe, now there are cosmic and demonic forces that create woe, while God is primarily resisting their activity to bring about good. There are a variety of imagery that the New Testament applies to these forces: demons, Satan, the devil in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Sin (as an embodied and possessing forces) and Death in Paul’s letters as well as referring to cosmic rulers (particularly in Ephesians and Colossians) while these forces become embodied in the beasts and the dragon of Revelation.

Somewhere between the New Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures there evolves a view of the cosmos with entities actively opposed to God which help to explain for the prevalence of injustice and suffering in the world. It is different from the all-encompassing view of God being responsible for all things, both good and evil. The question of theodicy, of the persistence of evil in the presence of a powerful and righteous creator, becomes personified in the New Testament. Evil is concentrated in the devil and demons, Sin and Death (as entities) and the cosmic powers which are behind the nations resisting God. Revelation brings these forces into a personified conflict between the beasts of the land and sea, and the dragon which are defeated by the forces of God. The uncompromising prophetic view of God would have to view God in conflict with Godself to explain the injustice of the world, but by the New Testament there seems to be a split in the prophetic identity of God into God working for weal and these anti-God forces working to create woe.

[1] Some will argue that the serpent in the Garden of Eden is the devil, but he is never named thus in the Hebrew Scriptures.

[2] The title ha-satan in Hebrew means the Accuser.

What I learned about myself, life and God from my child on the Autistic Spectrum: Part 4

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Autism by 1 footonthedawn(deviantart.com)

Autism by 1 footonthedawn(deviantart.com)

This is my final installment on this for the time being. There are certainly more things I have learned but for now this is enough to say.

8.  Familial Image of God, this comes more from the experience of being a father in general, rather than the father of my son in particular, but being a father made me realize the amount of personal investment I have in my own son—and that would not be something I would be able to walk away from, nor would my son be able to end his relationship to me as his father. Aren will always, no matter what he does throughout his life, have a place in my heart and nothing will change that. There is nothing he could do that would make me disown him. So long as I live I will not give up on him. I will always attempt to support him as best I can. On the other hand, he is his own person and I want him to grow up and continue to develop his own personality and identity. I want him to have the ability to follow his own dreams and make his own mistakes. I want him to have the freedom to fail, to stumble and to get back up and I think that is part of what the concept of grace is all about. Who he is as my son will never change, he will always be that, but who he is as a person I want him to determine on his own, and I will be his biggest cheerleader throughout that process but I will not force him to follow in my footsteps. The more I encounter God, the more I think there is something to this picture of God as a Father who is not uninvolved, but who is gracious. A God who wants us to find our own identity, but we also never lose our identity as children of God.  I try to as best I can to be the type of father who models the way Martin Luther talks about God the Father who want us to come to him as loving children come to a loving father.

9. Dealing with the dark side of reality. I have been accused of being the eternal optimist, that even in the darkest experiences of life (which I have had my share of) I still seek for the gift in the suffering, the lesson in the pain and I know this does not come immediately, yet my son wrestles with the self destructive and environmentally destructive nature of humanity with a very different lens. One of the most profound conversations I have had with my sons a couple times over the last year is , “With all the evil that people do, what right do we have to exist?” No otherworldly vision of Christianity has an answer to this, yet the faith of the early Christians was very worldly, and they took very serious the reality that God indeed loved the world, and in strong contrast to many modern Christian belief systems the entire purpose of life was not to escape the world (actually that was the worldview of one of the early Christian heresies called Gnosticism) but rather that as followers of Christ (or more generally God) they were caught up in the dream of God for the renewal and reconciliation of the world.  Both the Jewish people and early Christians had the audacious view that they were a part of God’s plan for the renewal of creation, this is the reason Paul can write in Romans that “the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.” The dark side of reality is present, real and painful and yet part of the Christian hope is that it is not the final answer and in hope we yearn (and work) for something better.  

10. The reality that even when we are unable to receive love, love is still given. I think most parents have times throughout their childrens’ lives where they have trouble connecting, where the advice, care, support and love are not able to be accepted because the children themselves are in a process of growing up and becoming their own selves. My son in his own way is navigating the early teenage years where his journey is different than mine was, and yet there is definitely a change. He no longer needs or honestly wants the same level of attention, he is becoming more self sufficient and I am proud of him for that. Are there times I grieve the type of relationship we had earlier, yes, but I try to let him know that he is loved and valued but there are times where he doesn’t seem to want to hear this anymore.  I think many of us go through this in our relationship with others and with God as well. I think many, and I certainly did, go through a phase where we have to figure out who we are as individuals, and individuals trying to negotiate different and new relationships and sometimes (at least for a time) the old relationships get put to the side and the ones that are valued are come back to. I also have had several points in my own journey with God where I have had to argue something through, I’ve gone through several difficult things in my life that I had to make sense of, and part of making sense of that was arguing with God about it for me. In those times when I may have been arguing with God and may not have always wanted to hear what God had to say, when I may have wanted to push God away I found God waiting patiently through the process.

purple rose 01 by picsofflowers.blogspot.com