I was reminded today of a conversation we had in my discipleship class about lies and temptation and all that fun stuff. Basically it went down like this:
If God is the creator, then everything else is created. This includes, you, me, the angels and the demons. God did not create sin however. So where does sin come from? A common miss-conception is that Satan created sin. This isn't possible because God is creator and Satan is not.
We decided in class that lies are never created, but based out of truth. Lies are usually only part of the truth or a form of skewed truth.
Anyways, I was reminded all this today when I was reading out of Shane Claiborne's Jesus For President. Here's an excerpt from what I was reading:
It's the beautiful things that get us. Perhaps the greatest seduction is not the ANTI-GOD, but the ALMOST-GOD. Poisonous fruit can look pretty tasty... Most of the ugliness in the human narrative comes from a distorted quest to possess beauty. Coveting begins with appreciating blessings. Murder begins with a hunger for justice. Lust begins with a rcognition of beauty. Gluttony begins when our enjoyment of the delectable gifts of God start to consume us. Idolatry begins when our seeing a reflection of God in something beautiful leads to out thinking that the beautiful imagebearer is worthy of worship.In this time in my life, that's comforting news. There is something in me that is inherently good and somewhere along the line, that good has been skewed. Somewhere along the track, I have been right in my pursuits. It's just a point now of finding my way back to that original truth and pursuing it in a godly manner.
P. 26
This is something liberating.
Feel free to call me on heresy.
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3 comments:
Heretic!! haha j/k I just started readin that book the other day too. It's a wicked book- definitely food for thought.
Good thoughts Greg. And a good reminder too. Looking at sin this way (I'm joining your 'heresy' here...) really does seem encouraging, knowing that sin comes from a Godly state and that we just overstepped the line, but are capable of backtracking.
Sounds to me like you're talking about the problem of evil, a philosophical quandary that has existed forever, it seems.
The theory of absence indicates that if something IS, there must, by its very existence, be something that what is, IS NOT. Ergo, for me to be tall, I must have something short to measure against. And so if God is indeed good, then he is good by separating himself from the absence of evil. And evil, thus, lives in direct contrast to good, validating it and making it true.
So God did not create evil, so much as he existed separate from it. And thus, the floating absence of good we call evil was, at some point in eternity past, claimed by the entity we now call Satan.
Or something like that. Maybe instead of reading all this, we can just go read Aquinas?
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