Scripture says that God cannot be tempted by evil, yet as time goes by, I see more and more people doubting, questioning, and accusing God of hypocrisy and evil. After all according to the Bible God has had people killed and enslaved and both are not good right?
I hear things like: ‘God says that we shall not kill, yet commands certain people in history to do just that’. We also know it is wrong to enslave another human being, yet God hands people over to slavery at certain times in biblical history. It is obviously wrong to drown someone, yet God drowned a who age of humans, minus Noah and seven others. And it is obvious that burning someone to death is wrong, yet God will throw the wicked into the Lake of Fire to their death.
Of course such questions can lead men to doubt that God is real or that he is good even though s. It may also lead men to think that this supposed hypocrisy of God could just be explained away by saying that the scriptures are just plain wrong. God is not like that at all they might say. After all, they reason, the God in scripture is basically saying, ‘do as I say, not as I do and is that not hypocrisy?’ Or God commands men to kill other men, the same God that gave the commandments, such as, ‘thou shalt not kill”. How do we rationalise this?
Are there any more questions or insinuations against the Most High? I am sure there are even better ones than this. Maybe we just need to ask Job’s friends, or the one-third of the angels that rebelled. Even Satan would have probably much better accusations against the Most High, after all if anyone has thought about exposing God it is him.
If all this resonates with you, then welcome to the rebellion. Will you get caught up too and put God on trial too. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. Perhaps you will be too scared to question this all the way to its logical end and rebel once you realise the injustice of it all. Or perhaps your religion does not allow such questions to be asked and hence by ignorance be spared any unforgivable sin. Yet, such accusations have already happened. There is nothing new under the sun as it says. One-third of God’s angels rebelled against God. Why did they do it. What caused them to rebel? Were their questions the same as what many have today?
But here is where I stand. God can do what he wants and he does. No one can compete with him because he is before them and after them. If he is evil, we are all in trouble. If he is good, then that is perhaps the single greatest blessing and fortune for all living things.
I believe that God is indeed good. Only he has the insight, hindsight, and foresight to see all ages in context. And only he is worthy to subject people to discipline in order to make us better people. Did God set up slavery or did man or devil? God hands people over to the very things that they have crafted with their own hands? God says, “what you sow is what you reap, and I think God just uses that which is here in the world to discipline us. If men make guns, then men will die by guns. If men take slaves, then they will be slaves. If they pollute the world, then they will suffer that pollution.
I believe that had man lived God’s way from the beginning, then we would be in Paradise today. But we didn’t and rather than God just walking away from us and letting us destroy ourselves, he stuck around and worked with what was available to teach us lessons. He sometimes gives us a dose of our own medicine so that we can learn the errors of our ways.
If we are in slavery, perhaps this helps us understand how wrong our mentality to enslave others is. If we have been sick, then we are more compassionate to those who are going through the same thing. So possessing a certain negative mentality is best solved by us being inflicted by the very mentality that we possess. Sometimes that is called, ‘learning the hard way’.
People may choose to doubt God or to judge him by their own standards, but I instinctively know that he is good and rewards the righteous and humble and opposes the proud, the unbelievers, and the selfish. The wicked may not see judgement straight away and hence we may conclude that God is not real or God doesn’t care, but judgement does happen in God’s timetable and he is more patient than us.
Welcome to the world people. Where every man’s faith is tested. When the fire comes, will you works and faith burn up, or will you come out refined? Whose side will you ultimately find yourself on? God’s side, or at the side of the accuser.
