Devotional Notes on Isaiah 63 - Violent God vs. Peaceful and The Problem of Evil
I was reading Isaiah 63, where God describes His willingness to welcome back a rebellious Israel, and then describes Israel’s self-righteous position as they continue in their sin. God is then quoted as follows:
Behold, it is written before me:
“I will not keep silent, but I will repay;
I will indeed repay into their bosom
both your iniquities and your fathers’ iniquities together,
says the LORD;
because they made offerings on the mountains
and insulted me on the hills,
I will measure into their bosom
payment for their former deeds.”
It makes me think about how we don’t really “get” God’s nature. We’re confused by it, and so decide that it isn’t us that are confused, but man’s contradictory notions of God that are confusing. But, let us look at this more carefully.
Before the quote, God is described like Jesus described the Father of the prodigal son. In this case, Israel is the prodigal, and we see God’s love in His willingness to take her back. (I know, kind of funny to call a “son” her, but then I again I think Jesus is the woman Wisdom in Proverbs). But, then what is it that we see in God’s declaration of punishment, what an atheist would see as vindictive revenge, for not coming back? Well, let us go back to the prodigal son and see what insight that gives us…
If the prodigal had not come back, the father in the tale was not going to chase after him. Whatever happened to the son would happen, and the father was going to let it happen. Is that what we’re talking about here?
Well, I think an atheist would argue that the Isaiah 63 verses above show God actively punishing, not passively, and so might argue that this isn’t describing the prodigal’s father, but a contradiction between the OT’s God of war and the NT’s God of love. However, I imagine that same atheist also believes that if God exists, then He is responsible for all evil, because He lets the evil happen. As the argument goes, a God who can do anything can prevent anything, and is therefore as responsible for the evil in this universe as if He had done it Himself. And what Jesus describes is a Father who allows his son to commit evil. What I believe we are seeing then is a scriptural acknowledgement that God’s conscious choice to let us choose our state (choosing whether we go to God or away from Him) is both our choice and His simultaneously. It is our choice because we choose the state; it is God’s choice to let us choose and then not take that choice from us. And for our choice, God will repay our iniquities.
What is very interesting about this is if an atheist sees these verses as evidence that God is responsible for evil, then it needs to be true of the prodigal son verses also (for the case implied of a son who leaves and does not return), which is an objection to God’s nature, a nature which did not change in the NT. In other words, one objection undoes the other, which lets us cut to the chase of why certain people familiar with the scriptures choose atheism: they do not like God’s nature. They disagree with His choices, and do not find them loving. And that brings me to me my final point: times change.
In the OT, it was “obvious” to people that evil gets you punished. It just does. Abandoning your god gets you punished. It just does. It was obvious. But now, times have changed. Now, it is “obvious” to people that evil is based on what civilization realizes it must define as such to survive. It is “obvious” that for a God to allow evil is also evil, and that to punish us for it is therefore even more evil. Well, one day, Jesus will return, and as each of us stands before our maker to account for our lives, the truth will finally be obvious to us all.
Given the unreliability of people, their propensity to change their assessment of what is “obvious” over time, and the scientific accuracy of Genesis 1 (which I have documented extensively on this blog), I will let God speak for Himself through the scriptures. At least in my life, He has earned it.