GOD'S NEW WORLD, DAY 29 (What's a good God to do?)
“…there were loud voices in heaven, saying,
“The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord
and of his Messiah, and he will
reign forever and ever.”
Then the twenty-four elders…worshiped God…
“We give you thanks, Lord God Almighty…
for you have taken your great power and begun to reign.
…your wrath has come, and the time for judging the dead, for rewarding
your servants, the prophets and saints and all who fear your name…and for
destroying those who destroy the earth.” (Rev. 11.15-18)
What is a good God to do? Can God judge the world without morally
compromising himself? Does it make moral
sense for the Creator to “destroy those who destroy the earth” (cf. Rev.
11.18)? Surely, destruction in
and of itself is morally wrong, no? Isn’t
God “love” (cf. 1 Jn. 4.16-18)? Doesn’t
God always forgive wrongdoing? Indeed,
it often seems that in today’s Global North, (the Christian) God has become
quite sentimental…[1] Positive thinking – including a “positive”
image of God – will always be welcome to anxious/affluent moderns, but the question
remains – what can this “good God”[2]
do about evil? This is the question to
which the book of Revelation offers itself as an answer.
God created a “good” cosmos; indeed, the
Creator declared his work to be “very good” (Gn. 1.31; cf. 1.4, 10, 12,
etc.). And yet, there was a snake in the
garden… (cf. Gn. 3.1ff). Evil – whose origins
are never fully explained in the Bible[3]
– infiltrated God’s good world and corrupted it, along with the wills of God’s human
creatures (cf. Gn. 3.1-7). The rest is (quite
literally) history…
The Bible is the long, tortuous story of
the Creator’s struggle to rescue his world from the evil that defaces and seeks
to destroy it. Evil is a slippery foe. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918—2008) said,
the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. No one is untainted by evil; traditionally,
this reality – of which everyone is intuitively aware – has been referred to as
“original sin”.[4] No one occupies the proverbial moral high
ground; therefore, each person who would seek to fight evil will not only do so
imperfectly, but will also be painfully aware of the inherent hypocrisy in even
their best-intentioned actions. Indeed,
this would be an apt summary of the history of ancient Israel as told in the
Hebrew Scriptures (OT). Israel, called
to be the Creator’s agent of salvation and rescue among the nations of the world,
turns out to be just as tainted by evil as the heathen nations for whom she was
supposed to be the light.[5]
But what of God himself? Can God (violently) judge the world without
ceasing to be “good”? According to the
Bible, the Creator rarely acts without partnering with human beings – and therefore
always runs the risk of being associated with the moral ambiguity of human nature. Be that as it may, there are times when God
acts unilaterally; for example, the great Flood described in Genesis chapters 6—9. Indeed, the story of Noah’s Flood is in many
ways the “prequel” to the book of Revelation – in both instances, the Creator performs
a cataclysmic judgment of the world in order to make a new beginning (cp. Gn. 1.26-31
with Gn. 9.1-7; cf. Rev. 21.1-5).[6] Paradoxically, God tells Noah that the reason
he is about to destroy the earth is because of humankind’s rampant violence
(Gn. 6.11-13; cf. Rev. 11.18)![7] This apparent paradox is somewhat mitigated
when we consider that the Flood represents the tragic climax of violence that
ultimately ruined creation. The Flood
was both the end and natural result of violence and God’s way of mediating the
consequences of sin that were already present in the pre-Flood situation.[8] Through the Flood, the Creator brought the
world back to its pre-creation state (cf. Gn. 1.1-2), with the goal of
re-creating it. Following the Flood, God
promised never to un-make his creation again (Gn. 9.8-17). In Revelation, God re-makes his ultimate
version of his creation (Rev. 21.1ff).
It remains that before new creation can become a reality, all anti-creation
forces must be destroyed…[9]
[1] This phenomenon has resulted in the proliferation of what some call
“therapeutic spirituality”.
[2] Cf. the québécois expression « Le bon Dieu est bon » : https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2016/11/27/le-bon-dieu-est-bon
(accessed June 26, 2024).
[3] Cf. N.T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God, Downers Grove:
IVP Books, 2006, pp. 13-42.
[4] The classic exposition of this doctrine was made by St. Augustine
in the 5th century AD. Since
the advent of modernity, this doctrine has become controversial, but the events
of the 20th century served to remind the West that there may still
be something to it (to put it mildly…). Different
attitudes towards evil emerged in the modern era. Liberal theology has tended to assume that human
nature is basically good; for his part, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844—1900) waxed
eloquent about the “problem of morality” and taught that we must go “beyond
good and evil” in order to arrive at a true account of human nature. Nietzsche believed that the “good” consisted
in exerting one’s “will to power”, to constantly surpass both oneself and
society’s conventions. On his account, the
fundamental mistake was to appease weakness, the error exhibited in the “morality
of resentment” which was the hallmark of Christianity.
[5] Cf. chapters 9—11 of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans.
[6] Interestingly, in Rev. 21.1, “there is no more sea” (cf. Gn.
9.8-17).
[7] Cf. Matthew J. Lynch, Flood and Fury: Old Testament Violence and
the Shalom of God, Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2023, pp. 64-73.
[8] Cf. Ibid, pp. 84-85.
[9] Cf. chapters 6-20 of Revelation.
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