Evil Exists... So?
By John R. Gavazzoni

I have had few discussions with Christian brethren that were more intense than I've had recently, participating in a Facebook Christian forum/site, regarding the Old Testament's record of the violence attributed to God as Yahweh. The stories of Yahweh "commanding" the wholesale killing of entire tribal nations has so shocked the sensibilities of a goodly number of believers, including those who embrace the truth of ultimate reconciliation, that they find themselves unable to believe that that Yahweh, as described in the text of the biblical record, could possibly be the same God as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Those whose sensibilities are so offended, I found, are not able to take their reasoning to the next necessary stage of intellectually facing whose responsibility it is that such evil, such violence, exists in the world, and without facing that issue, protesting against any kind of possible violence-complicity by Yahweh only serves to cloud the issue.

As I laid very carefully in detail that there is no escaping the fact that the existence of evil traces to the sovereign will of God, that evil would not, and could not, exist apart from God's deliberate choice to introduce into His world the role of evil as instrumental to His administering, in depth, His love and grace to His creation. Well, at that point the discussion pretty much ground to a halt, with those of offended sensibilities simply insisting that there was no way they could ever believe that the existence of evil, so to speak, ends up at the desk of God.

Those of you old enough will remember President Harry S. Truman's, "the buck stops here." It was written on a plaque, as I recall, sitting on his desk in the Oval Office. If God had a literal desk, it would be fitting for Him to have on His desk a plaque reading, "the buck stops here." Nothing exists except it exists as an integral part of the intent, purpose, will, and plan, of God. As such, it goes beyond the popular notion of what God permits vs what He directs. It is not a matter of mere permission that evil exists. Rather, as a mental picture, imagine God deliberately opening the door to evil, to all that is contrary to His Love-nature, and saying, "Welcome, come in, I've got plans for you within My plan."

He who is responsible as to its existence, is He who is responsible for how it is directed. A preacher, wrestling with the evil of his lovely young daughter being raped and murdered, in the throes of agonizing on what he must make of such a horror, found a place for his heart and mind to settle. That place? The conviction, "I don't believe the devil is some loose cannon in God's universe." Evil exists to be directed with the loving wisdom that is only God's.

Do you suppose that when God directed the Israelites to, as it were, clean out the promised land to the point of killing entire tribal nations for Israel's possession in accordance to what part that would play in "the history of salvation" that the Israelite warriors sent in to do the work were full of love for the people of those nations? You can be sure that no such noble motivation energized their dirty work. It may not have been of the same degree, but there was, to be sure, an evil in kind in the hearts of those warriors to the evil they were about to destroy.

And they ended evil of unimaginable depth. It was the custom among those nations to ritually worship the demon god, Molech, by offering up infant children to be burned alive on the white-hot arms of the image of that vilest of pagan deities. This was done with the beating of drums to drown out the screams of the children, as the parents were required to stand at attention to show their agreement by their silence. In God's ordering, in His directing of existing evil, there comes a time when He, as it were, says, "enough; end it; no more." And it was done mercifully. Never was there a command to Israel to kill by torture. Death was quick, over in an instance, as it was with Sodom and Gomorrah. Mercy was at work, delivering souls from ever increasing depravity to saving confrontation "on the other side," beyond this life.

How about God in the-here-and-now? Is He to be excused from any responsibility of the 10 million murdered by the Third Reich Nazis in Germany (yes there were more than the 6 million Jews), of the 100 to 150 million killed by the communist regimes in the Soviet Union, communist China, and Cambodia? Where was the immanent God when the cities of Germany and Japan were turned into infernos by the fire-bombing of the Allies, mostly by the U.S.A., in WW 2? President Eisenhower called the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, "that awful thing," commenting that it need not to have been resorted to. Was not the God in the days of the Old Testament, the same God who in attendance in our more-recent history? Or, is evil really a loose cannon in God's universe. A tsunami that kills almost a quarter million people. Do we not lay that at the feet of "nature's God"?

We had better hope it is God doing the directing, otherwise there is nowhere for us to turn except to the kind of madness where nihilism makes crazy sense. When I've brought up how the Lord is presented in the Book of Job, as very clearly directing the malevolence of Satan against His servant, Job, one response I received was something to the effect, "I don't accept the message of the Book of Job as inspired." In effect, what people of that mentality are saying is, "I want a nice God, not like Yahweh. He's not to my liking, and my liking is what I go by, so I'll just dismiss Him."

How convenient. It doesn't fit with how you think God should act, so dismiss anything that doesn't fit your mental and emotional temperament, and dismiss it with simplistic arrogance. Divine love and divine majesty go hand in hand. Otherwise we have a situation described as, "a group of nice people, getting together to sing nice songs, and listen to nice man tell them how to be nicer."

The gift of discerning of spirits kicks in when I'm confronted by such arrogance disguised as righteous indignation. The spirit of discernment of spirits speaks to me in contemporary language: "take note: what you're hearing is classic virtue-signaling." It sits on a high horse of snobbish moral posturing, that, when carefully examined, really can't handle, for instance, Peter's understanding that the King of glory was crucified at the hands of wicked men, ACCORDING to the predeterminate will of God. Yes, God by predetermination, God, the Father, delivered up His Son to be tortured and murdered by wicked men. Yeah; and it was Yahweh, in the Old Testament who laid out in detail what all would be involved in that evil of all evils.

Having determined that evil exists, and that tracing its existence brings us to the predeterminate will of God, our next step is to address how God, as it were, opened the door to evil's entrance into the world (the world, from the Greek, the Kosmos, the orderly arrangement, dominant system driven by the lust to live a life independent of God). God opened the door to His world to be invaded by that which is hostile to Him and His ultimate purpose, the effect being God's world being afflicted by the presence of evil having become systemic, and thus, the present, evil, dominating system. That system has reached a point of critical mass in our day, getting in the face of our native humanness, baring its teeth, saying, "I dare you to try to resist."

But how did God arrange said opening? By what means? Simply, by the means of deprivation. In the arena of the penultimate (the next to final), the denial of an adequacy of released grace to "withstand the wiles of the devil." In the case of the average Bible student, reading the story in Genesis of what unfolded in the experience of the original couple in the Garden of Eden, he/she classically misses the forest for the trees. With their Bible-study noses pressed up against the trees of detail, they miss the forest hidden in plain sight.

It is so obvious: The forest view accurately sees Eve obviously completely unprepared to deal with the serpent's seduction. Is there grace that enables one to resist temptation? Indeed, there is! As the lovely gospel song lyrics proclaim, "...for out of His infinite riches in Jesus, He giveth, and giveth, and giveth again." In that song, it's the unlimited love and unmeasurable grace that He gives, and gives, and gives. Our God is a giving God. But while it may tax our conceptual ability to the extreme to give serious consideration to the truth that the penultimate denial of grace-sufficiency serves the ultimate purpose of grace released in super-abundance of supply.

Please understand that there is that which is within God, and that which "in due time" He releases to us. He means for us to abound in grace, but it's only "...where sin abounds, grace doth much more abound." When God opened the door to evil, to sin giving birth to death, with that death being passed on to all men, He really opened the door to abounding grace. Love, delivered as grace, i.e., love freely given, is the soul's nourishment. But there's the matter of nutrient absorption. No need, no absorption. In fact, the greater the need, the greater the absorption.

Experientially, the perfect complement to God's grace is our neediness. On one hand, the church, which is His body, is the fullness and/or completeness of Him who fills/completes all in all , but on the other hand, in the design of God, we penultimately suffer an existential disconnect from that reality. The story of our eonian spiritual journey, is a story of becoming.... as in being returned to.... who we are; a journey by which our futility-subjected creaturehood, is grace-delivered to match the glory of our sonship.

A more careful rendering of the Greek, in the place of "come short of," we would have, "are lacking of," and/or "falling behind of," the glory of God. We are lacking of the glory of God. We are falling behind of the glory of God. In effect, our creaturehood is in need of catching up with the glory of our sonship, and when, as creatures, we catch up to ourselves, as sons, all creation shall be delivered from its bondage to decay. Do you see how deprivation serves provision finally? While it is the will of God that He not withhold ANY good thing from us, He does, for a season, withhold SOME good things, for the purpose that NO good thing shall be withheld from us.

Filling requires hunger and thirst. Got it? Hunger and thirst is a condition of lack, a lack deliberately imposed upon us for the purpose of fully absorbed filling.