Thought for Today

Genesis 2:9 Out of the ground the LORD God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  

Psalm 7:9 O let the evil of the wicked come to an end, but establish the righteous, you who test the minds and hearts, O righteous God.  

Matthew 5:11 "Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.  

John 3:19 And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.  

Do you differentiate between bad and evil? I know, bad is an adjective or adverb, evil is either an adjective or a noun; and, they are listed in the dictionary as synonyms. I do differentiate between the two.

First, I am very anti-bad and anti-evil. They are probably not real words, but I consider myself an evilphobe and a badphobe. I do ,however, believe that all evil is bad but not all things bad are evil. In my worldview, evil denotes connotations of deliberate, malicious badness. So, in my worldview, killing is evil, earthquakes are bad.

Hard as it may be to believe, I am thinking about this today because recently I watched a television show and the word exoplanet was mentioned. “The worlds orbiting other stars are called “exoplanets,” and they come in a wide variety of sizes, from gas giants larger than Jupiter to small, rocky planets about as big around as Earth or Mars. They can be hot enough to boil metal or locked in deep freeze. They can orbit their stars so tightly that a “year” lasts only a few days; they can orbit two suns at once. Some exoplanets are sunless rogues, wandering through the galaxy in permanent darkness.” (science.nasa.gov)

NASA and other organizations are searching the universe for exoplanets orbiting their suns in the Goldilocks Zone. “There is only one planet we know of so far that is teeming with life––Earth. And on our planet, water is a critical ingredient for life as we know it. While astronomers still don't know whether there's life on other planets, they narrow the search for potentially habitable worlds using a handful of criteria. Because our blueprint for life is Earth, astronomers look for planets with Earth-like characteristics, like liquid water. But a celestial object can only orbit so close (like Mercury) or so far (like Pluto) from its star before water on its surface boils away or freezes. The 'Goldilocks Zone,' or habitable zone, is the range of distance with the right temperatures for water to remain liquid.” (ibid)

If you are wondering what any of this has to do with Christianity or faith, bear with me. In the Creation narrative in Genesis, the phrase “and God saw that it was good” is repeated often. Yet, as we look around us, there are elements of God’s creation that are not good, e.g., earthquakes, tornadoes, etc. There are geological and meteorological phenomena that are bad. Are they also evil? If everything God created was good, why are there now those bad things?

I believe God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. I cannot believe there is an inherent design flaw in God’s Creation. I cannot help but wonder whether all of those exoplanets we detect will also have earthquakes and tornadoes. Will they have electro-magnetic fields sheathing the planet to protect the planet from the harmful effects of the solar radiation from their sun(s)? Are some of what we consider bad things necessary for the existence of human life? Or, maybe God has other ways of breathing into the man’s nostrils the breath of life so that the man can become a living being (Genesis 2:7).

Evil, the deliberate, malicious badness is something else entirely. Shortly following God’s breathing the breath of life into those nostrils, God created “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” That is the first appearance of the word evil. Regrettably, the authors of Genesis don’t tell us where the concept of evil even comes from. My dictionary tells me that evil is “That which opposes the will of God.” (Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms, pg. 97)

Neither that dictionary nor the Bible really helps me understand why any of God’s children deliberately choose to oppose the will of God. Again, I cannot believe God’s breath caused some inherent design flaw. Yet, we all know that some in fact do choose to oppose God’s will. Maybe, when Jesus takes me to that place in eternity he has prepared for me (John 14:2), I will some day understand. Maybe! In the interim, I will continue to pray “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Stay safe, pray long and often, trust God,

Pastor Ray