Demonstrating God’s Will

Flickr/Edward Zulawski

By Beth Snodderly

“In a cosmic battle for the rulership of this planet, God is deliberately overcoming evil with good until, in the end, Jesus will reign in his Kingdom of shalom. But until God ushers in that final perfect new heaven and new earth, there is a need for believers to engage intentionally in efforts to demonstrate God’s will for people, for societies, and for God’s originally good creation. Jesus’ followers serve as God’s display window, showing what Jesus’ reign is meant to look like. As pastor-theologian, Gregory Boyd, says,

As Christ gave his all for us, so we are called and empowered to give our all for others. As we abide in Christ and participate in the love of the self-sacrificial God, our lives are to manifest the self-sacrificial love of God to others. See “Living In, and Looking Like, Christ,” in Servant God: The Cosmic Conflict Over God’s Trustworthiness (Loma Linda: Loma Linda University Press, 2013), 407.    

Read more excerpts from my book, Chaos Is Not God’s Will at: Introducing International Development as Cosmic Battle

The Kingdom Strikes Back

By Ralph D. Winter

Editor's Note: Perhaps one of Ralph Winter's most popular and well-loved essays is entitled, "The Kingdom Strikes Back." It is a centerpiece chapter in the Perspectives on the World Christian Movement course reader. Below, we've excerpted a portion of that essay that to us highlights the rationale for the existence of the Roberta Winter Institute. Enjoy.

…the first eleven chapters of Genesis constitute a scary “introduction” to the entire problem of evil, indeed, to the plot of the entire Bible. Those few pages describe three things: 1) a glorious and “good” original creator; 2) the entrance of a rebellious and destructive evil—superhuman, demonic being—resulting in 3) a humanity caught up in that rebellion and brought under the power of that evil being.

Don’t ever think that the whole remainder of the Bible is simply a bundle of divergent, unrelated stories as taught in Sunday School. Rather, the Bible consists of a single drama: the entrance of the Kingdom, the power and the glory of the living God in this enemy-occupied territory. From Genesis 12 to the end of the Bible, and indeed until the end of time, there unfolds the single, coherent drama of “the Kingdom strikes back.” This would make a good title for the Bible itself were it to be printed in modern dress (with Gen 1-11 as the introduction to the whole Bible). In this unfolding drama we see the gradual but irresistible power of God reconquering and redeeming His fallen creation through the giving of His own Son at the very center of the 4000-year period ending in 2000 BC. This is tersely summed up: “The Son of God appeared for this purpose, that He might destroy the works of the devil” (1 Jn 3:6).

This counterattack against the Evil One clearly does not await the appearance of the good Person in the center of the story. Indeed, there would seem to be five identifiable epochs of advance prior to the appearance of Christ as well as five after that event. The purpose of this chapter is mainly to describe the five epochs after Christ. However, in order for those later epochs to be seen as part of a single ten-epoch 4,000-year unfolding story, we will note a few clues about the first five epochs.

The theme that links all ten epochs is the grace of God intervening in a “world which lies in the power of the Evil One” (1 Jn 5:19), contesting an enemy who temporarily is “the god of this world” (2 Cor 4:4) so that the nations will praise God’s name. His plan for doing this is to reach all peoples by conferring an unusual “blessing” on Abraham and Abraham’s children-by-faith, even as we pray “Thy Kingdom come.” By contrast, the Evil One’s plan is to bring reproach on the Name of God. The Evil One stirs up hate, distorts even DNA sequences, perhaps authors suffering and all destruction of God’s good creation. Satan’s devices may very well include devising virulent germs in order to tear down confidence in God’s loving character.

Therefore this “blessing” is a key concept. The English word blessing is not an ideal translation. We see the word in use where Isaac confers his “blessing” on Jacob and not on Esau. It was not “blessings” but “a blessing,” the conferral of a family name, responsibility, obligation, as well as privilege. It is not something you can receive or get like a box of chocolates you can run off with and eat by yourself in a cave, or a new personal power you can show off like rippling muscles. It is something you become in a permanent relationship and fellowship with your Father in Heaven. It returns “families,” that is, nations to His household, to the Kingdom of God, so that the nations “will declare His glory.” The nations are being prevented from declaring God’s glory by the scarcity of evidence of God’s ability to cope with evil. If the Son of God appeared to destroy the works of the Devil, then what are the Son of God’s followers and “joint heirs” supposed to do to bring honor to His Name?

The “blessing” of God is in effect conditioned upon its being shared with other nations, since those who yield to and receive God’s blessing are, like Abraham, those of faith who subject themselves to God’s will, become part of His Kingdom, and represent the extension of His rule, His power, His authority within all other peoples.

Photo Credit: Dan Pearce/Flickr

Ralph D. Winter (12/8/24 – 5/20/09) was
an American missiologist and missionary
who founded the Roberta Winter Institute.

Three Views to the Problem of Evil: View #3

Nick Kenrick/Flickr

By Brian Lowther

Ralph Winter once said, “There are very many people, even Bible-believing Christians not just non-Christians, who are profoundly puzzled, perplexed, and certainly confused by the extensive presence of outrageous evil in the created world of an all-powerful, benevolent God.” In other words, if God is all-powerful and all loving, then why is there so much evil, disease, and suffering in the world?

In this third and final post, I will explore one last Biblical view addressing this question. [Click here for Part 1, and here for Part 2.] As before, I won’t venture to interpret any scripture passages. I’ll simply list the passages that at a surface level, seem to support the view I’m exploring.

View #3: Suffering and Evil are a result of a Cosmic War between God and Satan.

This conviction shows up any time someone encounters evil such as disease, demonization, or natural disasters and understands them through the lens of the warfare worldview. For example:

• “Life is war and the world is a battlefield, ravaged by eons of conflict among powerful invisible forces.”
• “Evil originates in the wills of Satan, fallen angels, and sinful people, rather than of God.”
• “The mystery of suffering resides not in God’s providence or because of an arbitrary streak in his character, but in the warfare that engulfs creation.”
• “Evil happens because in a war, casualties and accidents are expected and very likely. ‘Bullets fly, bombs explode, mines are stepped on, and children are maimed.’ [1] In a war, suffering is not an intellectual puzzle to solve. In a war, suffering is a given.”

Scriptural Support

This understanding is taken from the Bible, where you can read of numerous indications of a cosmic war between God and Satan.

• Paul describes the necessity of the Armor of God (Ephesians 6:10-18) in this war, which is not a war between flesh and blood, but against “the cosmic powers over this present darkness and the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6:12)
• Jesus repeatedly calls Satan "the ruler of this world" (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11), Luke suggests that Satan owns all the authority of all the kingdoms of the world (Luke 4:5-7), Paul calls Satan "the god of this world" (2 Corinthians 4:4) and "the prince of the power of the air" (Ephesians 2:2), and John says “the whole world lies in the power of the evil one." (1 John 5:19)
• Luke summarizes Jesus’ ministry as “doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil.” (Acts 10:38) Similarly, John explains, “the reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). And Paul confirms that the death of Christ was meant to “break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14).

Key Advantage

One of the great benefits of adopting this view is that it creates a posture of revolt and resistance in the face of evil, rather than a passive resignation that often characterizes the response to the other two views. Evil isn't to be puzzled. Evil is to be confronted and overcome.

Surprisingly this conviction doesn’t come up nearly as often as the previous two views. However, it is older than Christianity itself. In fact, the primary way the early Church Fathers (such as Origen, Athenagorus and Tertullian) explained evil in nature was by blaming Satan and his demons. [2] This view was pre-dominant until St. Augustine in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries. Before he became the most influential Christian thinker of all time, Augustine was part of a religious sect called Manichaeism, which had two equal gods, one good and one bad. As he was inching back toward Orthodox Christianity, he reacted against this dualistic worldview so dramatically that he essentially banished references to an Evil One, taking a view in which there was no intelligent angelic opponent to God at all. Or, if there was, he did very little, all things instead being God’s initiative. 

Questions

But should we take this view to be the universal explanation for all evil? If so, a few questions arise.

• To take this view seriously, we have to take angels and demons seriously. To many people today, especially in the West, the notion of a personal, real, and active Satan who has great power in the world is ludicrous.  
• How does this view make sense of texts like the book of Job? In Job, it’s clear that Satan caused all of Job’s suffering. It can also seem that God controls every move Satan makes.
• Does this view attribute to Satan more power than he has?
• Does this view inevitably lead to Christians who are angrily militant, authoritarian, or even violent? In other words, does this view inevitably lead to tragedies like the ones that occurred in Waco in 1993 or Jonestown in 1978?

Conclusion

I personally feel that the explanation that people suffer because the world is engulfed in a cosmic war offers some important philosophical and explanatory advantages to the two other views I’ve explored. However, this is partly because I grew up with the other two views as the pervading theological assumptions, and frankly I always felt something was missing. Can these three views be synthesized into a more complete answer to the problem of evil? Is it possible to hold all three views in tension? Or does the third view cancel the other two or vice versa? These are questions for another day.

Endnotes

[1] Greg Boyd, God at War: The Bible and Spiritual Conflict, (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1997) 58.
[2] See more here: http://gregboyd.blogspot.com/2007/07/argument-from-early-church-fathers.html

Brian Lowther is the director of the Roberta Winter Institute. 

Numbers 16: The Destroying Angel and Korah's Rebellion

The Red Creek in the Nahal Vardit, at the Arava, Israel. Photo Credit: Flickr/chany crystal

By Brad and Dorothee Cole 

One of the most troubling stories in the Old Testament is Korah's rebellion where the earth opened up to swallow those who rebelled against God (Numbers 16:31, 32). The Bible says that after this a fire came out “from the Lord” (vs. 35) and destroyed 250 men. 

There are many who can’t take the Old Testament seriously because of the vengeful picture of God that seems to come through. Some are driven to atheism – “if God is like that, he isn’t worthy of my worship and admiration.”

The single most liberating belief for us is the core conviction that God is exactly like Jesus. Or, said in another way, Jesus was God in human form. Jesus never killed anyone and repeatedly said, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” Jesus died while forgiving his enemies and encouraged us to treat our enemies the same way. As we seek to understand stories like this, the character of God as revealed by Jesus must take supremacy; as soon as God begins to look like a flame-throwing, bone-crunching deity we should consider the possibility that we haven’t understood the story correctly.

First, it’s helpful to establish how serious this rebellion was. Moses asked Korah to bring only his 250 followers, yet “the entire community” (vs. 19) came to rebel against Moses and Aaron. Even after the earth opened up and others were destroyed by fire, the people were not intimidated away from their rebellion against God. The mutiny persisted since, “The next day the whole community complained against Moses and Aaron…” (vs. 41). This was a full-out revolt and it seemed that there was no one left who supported Moses. God was about to lose his people entirely.

Many times in the Old Testament God is described as actively doing what he instead allowed to occur. This is an important principle if we are to understand the Old Testament correctly. Please read this article if you need some evidence to support that position.

Is this story yet another example of this recurring theme? It is fascinating to read Paul describe in 1 Corinthians 10:10 that the people in Korah’s rebellion were “killed by the destroying angel.”

Who is the “destroying angel” that Paul is referring to?

An important principle of interpreting the Old Testament is to understand the relative absence of Satan. He is only named three times in comparison to abundant references in the New Testament including the final book of the Bible which is entirely about the “war in heaven” and Satan’s attempts to deceive those on earth.

We need to put Satan back into the Old Testament. God veiled Satan in the Old Testament partly because he didn’t want people to worship him as another god. But the first thing that Jesus did when he began his ministry was to expose Satan in the wilderness temptation. Jesus’ mission concluded with the complete defeat of the Serpent, “Now is the critical moment of the world; now the ruler of this world will be exposed” (John 12:31).

The New Testament understanding moves away from attributing violence to God and shifts the blame to Satan. Jesus never uses violence. The book of Revelation portrays God as the suffering victim of violence (the “violently slaughtered Lamb”) while Satan is labeled as the “Destroyer”. This is a message that had to be slowly unfolded to us. In Jesus, God was able to finally reveal, expose and defeat the one who uses the methods of coercion and violence.

Why would Satan do what Moses warned about?

One difficult question to consider, however, is why Satan would do what Moses warned about when he said that the earth would open up and swallow those who followed Korah. As a parallel story, Elijah commanded fire down to destroy his enemies. Following that lead, the disciples asked Jesus to do the same. Of course, Jesus strongly rebuked them and said that they did not know what spirit that sort of request came from. Could we say that it is not Christ-like to ask for our enemies to be swallowed up by the earth or destroyed by fire? We should only do what we see Jesus doing. We aren’t followers of Moses or Elijah. The Psalmist might bless the action of dashing babies against rocks and say, “I hate my enemies with a total hatred” (Psalm 139), but we don’t see Jesus doing that.

Did the story of Korah help or hurt God’s reputation? Are more people today drawn to God because of the traditional understanding of this story, or are more people pushed into atheism with the thought that God acts in that way? Perhaps it wasn’t entirely foolish for Satan to act in this way.

This is an abbreviated version of a blog entry by Brad and Dorothee on their website, godscharacter.com. You can read the original post here: http://godscharacter.com/index.php/bible-study/numbers/numbers-16

Drs. Brad and Dorothee Cole work as neurologists at the Loma Linda VA hospital and teach neuroscience and neurology education at Loma Linda University (LLU).  Brad and Dorothee also edited Servant God, a multi-authored book about God’s character. 

The Story of the Cosmic Conflict

We have already mentioned the Warfare Worldview many times on this blog. It reframes our view of history and is reflected in our interpretation of current events. But if you are new to this line of thinking you might wonder how different the story of mankind looks through the lens of the Cosmic Conflict.

Citing from John Eldredge, Beth Snodderly, and Ralph Winter, who was intimately, personally acquainted with war, these reflections outline the history of this universal struggle in four acts. But, more importantly, it traces from the beginning, to the present, and beyond, our own role…

"Humanity wasn't created merely as a consequence of Lucifer's sin. We weren't intended only to fight a war. While the warfare theme permeates the Bible, so do other themes such as of love, joy, rest, relationship and righteousness. After all, what would be our role in the 'next' life, when sin and evil are no more, if we are merely infantry for this one?"