In my commentary on Chapter 5 of the Tao Te Ching, I tried to reconcile the Christian understanding of a God who is good with the description of the Tao, which ‘gives birth to both good and evil.‘
Then this morning I was reminded by Matt Stone at Glocal Christianity of the following passage from Isaiah:
I form the light and create darkness,
I bring prosperity and create disaster;
I, the Lord, do all these things.
The tendency for Christians is to see God and ‘the devil’ as opposite (and nearly equal) forces.* I have heard some Christians unwittingly describe Satan as nearly omnipotent! But this of course makes no sense. This passage from Isaiah (and others like it) reminds us that if God has created everything that is, then he is responsible for their existence.
What do you think?
* Why does this happen? I think it is because, if we attribute every misfortune and difficulty to Satan, we don’t have to consider what lessons we might need to learn from it. It is always easier to see goodness in one corner and evil in another, with a nice clean break between the two. It is much more difficult to recognise the paradox of good and evil mingled together in every situation, and within every person.
