Yeah . . . you know it's okay for you guys to disagree on this. The whole evil vs good and where did evil come from thing is actively debated amongst far more knowledgeable theologians than I ever expect to become in this life . . . they can't agree, either.
But I find this topic interesting, and I haven't by any means settled my views on it, so I'm interested in musing on it with any of you. I wonder . . . the idea of a black hole fascinates me. I'm not a scientist, but I have a sort of idea of a black hole as a huge nothing or chaos that tries to swallow up everything. And so I have this picture in my mind of God, before creation, filling everything and complete in Himself -- love -- Father, Son, Holy Spirit, loving one another; pouring all they are into one another with complete unselfish abandon in this amazing, magnificent vortex of love.
And God agrees within Himself that it would be great to share this; to expand it to others; this divine love. Now I get a little shaky -- not that the whole thing isn't shaky. I'm just thinking, musing aloud and interested in your take on it because this has been swirling around in me for a while now and still hasn't coalesced. I'm more of an artist than a mathematician. I'm the sort of person who looks at all those incredible numbers everywhere that make up the known world and say, "Isn't that beautiful?" and doesn't understand a bit of it. So you know where I'm coming from. It's all intuitive.
Anyway, God wants to expand. The Father wants sons and daughters; the Son wants a bride; the Spirit wants a temple. And they concoct this plan. How do you make a corporate person worthy to be a companion to the Godhead? I wonder why God didn't just form exactly what they wanted and be done with it? Could it be that such a creation would lack something in "REAL"?
When I do a journal page, I often start with a layer of stuff, then add another layer of stuff, then another and another and another until I like what I've made and am ready to call it finished. You can barely see the first layer, but it's there adding to the depth and the mystery. There's really no other way you could make a page of this sort and get the same feel. I wonder if that's something like what God is doing, making human beings; making the One New Man (Christ in/among us, the hope of glory).
You start by making a void; a chaos, maybe. The chaos is hungry like a black hole and it tries to suck everything into itself. Maybe the chaos is a place where God is not. There's never been such a place before, and God isn't there, and it's evil. It isn't always going to be evil. God will pull it inside out, form it, fill it, refine it, squeeze every bit of "nothing" out of it, and ultimately enter the chaos as a human being, the ultimate sacrifice given on the cross and entering the chaos for the purpose of becoming its master. Now He is filling all, and soon He will be filling all in all.
Eventually the chaos will be completely transformed, but meanwhile we have bits of chaos dispersed through this world. We call it evil. It's the ambient weather of the present evil age. And here and there we regularly have great storms of chaos, like the Holocaust, Somalia, the "evil empire," Mao, Kim Jung Ill -- also the tsunamis in Japan and Indonesia -- great earthquakes in China, Iran, Haiti, volcanoes, typhoons, hurricanes, fires . . . chaos working itself out. But what if that's just
what it takes to build the sort of daughters and sons; the sort of bride; the sort of temple God desires to have?
So did God create evil? Well, sort of. God created the void; the chaos; the raw materials out of which He would wrest and is wresting that which is His ultimate intention; the companion(s) of His heart. A great people who are one as He is One, fully mature and complete, fully love, fully aware, fully alive. Perhaps this is simply the only way it could be done.
When I put a piece of pottery on the shelf to dry out, is that an evil to the pot (if it could think)? Probably. What about the kiln? Twice? A far simpler process than the making of mankind, but from the pot's point of view I suppose it would be pure anguish. I know that's just what it takes to make a beautiful piece of pottery. I bear the clay no ill will. It came to me as a lump of wet brown or gray slimy stuff and I'm going to turn it into a thing of beauty that could last until God the Son remakes the heavens and the earth. From my point of view, it's worth it, and I imagine that if the pot could think, once it saw what it had become, it would agree.
So yeah . . . just my somewhat nebulous thoughts. They'll probably change quite a lot before they're tough enough to go into the kiln. Is it possible that all the stuff that looks so messy and wrong to us is messy and wrong because it is in the process of being made, and we're not seeing the final outcome? That the chaos is the sort of stuff out of which you
have to make the real? That the finished product will justify the agony of the process? Maybe we trust the potter and everything will be okay -- maybe that's the only thing we CAN do after all.
Love, Cindy
