Can God do evil?

[KingJ]

Invalid question when "you" instead of God says whats good or evil. Yes, you are capable of seeing evil and good in some things, but your fallen state keeps you from being "perfect" in your perception of whats good or evil.

Brad, you, @B-A-C and @Dave M are all making the same mistaken assumption about the topic and argument being raised.

I am going to try and be very clear.

1. God gave you eyes.

If you use them, you will see things. See things like people crying. People screaming from pain.

2. God gave you ears.

Ears can hear people hurting, screaming and crying.

3. God gave you a brain.

Your brain is able to grasp that if someone is crying they are hurt. If someone is screaming they are in torture.

Now, when God acts in Scripture and today, He enters our physical realm and heals people, helps people with their problems, wipes away tears.

God has given us the tools to both grasp good and evil and to discern it.

Genesis 3:22 even says man has come to know good and evil. So the idea that we are somehow incapable of recognizing it is not what the text says.

The argument that our “fallen state” makes us unable to recognize good and evil collapses immediately if taken seriously. If that were true, then you could not say murder is evil. You could not say torture is evil. You could not even say lying or stealing is evil. Yet everyone here has no problem identifying those things as wrong.

Why? Because the recognition is not complicated. When someone is unjustly harmed, that is evil. When someone is helped, protected, healed, or restored, that is good.

So no, this idea that good and evil are some mysterious category forever beyond human understanding is not supported by Scripture or by reality.

God created humans with the capacity to recognize suffering, injustice, kindness, mercy, and love. The entire moral language of Scripture assumes we can recognize those things.

Otherwise commands like “love your neighbor,” “do justice,” and “show mercy” would be meaningless, because we would have no ability to recognize when those things are happening.

So the claim that humans cannot judge good and evil is not humility. It actually undermines the entire moral framework that Scripture itself appeals to.

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It is true that we cannot grasp God. He is beyond us. But we can grasp all that is in our environment. This includes everything in our / mankind's past, present and future.

In our human space, God has chosen to act within a moral framework.

Yes, God is God. In His absolute being He could operate in ways far beyond anything we understand. But when He deals with mankind, He does not operate in some unknowable category beyond good and evil.

He consistently speaks to us in moral terms. Justice, mercy, righteousness, wickedness, love, and sin.

That is the framework He Himself chose to reveal and operate within when interacting with humanity.

And if God chooses to deal with mankind in that framework, then it follows that mankind must be capable of recognizing those categories in order for His commands, judgments, and teachings to have any meaning.

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Considering all the above, it becomes clear that to suggest we cannot judge good and evil, even the morality of God is simply insulting to our intelligence, insulting to God and makes a mockery of all scripture.

Not to mention, imagine being 'that' person that is fine with serving a god he believes is doing evil and can't call him out for it. Just a real cringey Christian position to take!!

 

[joestue]

You do these cringey one liner snippets instead of addressing the whole post and its context. The verse you referring to was not used for the 'end times' it was used to explain purpose for a millennium which is after the 'end times'. Perhaps better read and put some effort into your posts?

a cringe worthy distinction without a difference.

God has treated children as young as 7 as adults from as early as Samuel's calling.