The word good appears seven times in the first chapter of Genesis. Scripture states emphatically that everything God made was good. One of God’s attributes is that He is goodness in perfect form. So why do bad things happen and where does evil come from?

The best way to understand the concept of evil is to think about an artist who draws a picture of a tree in the middle of a blank white page. We see and recognize the tree, but in drawing the tree the artist has also inadvertently produced white space around the tree which in itself is not recognizable as anything. Artists often call this negative space; learning to recognize negative space is a useful way of learning how to draw. Seeing the shape of the space BETWEEN objects clarifies your view of the objects themselves.

In the same way, when God chose to create the universe he was operating in a dimension which called for boundaries. The plane God dwells in has no boundaries. So when God made the earth, the sky, the sea, and all its inhabitants, he was defining a new reality beyond his own plane of existence. In doing so, a negative reality was created by default. Every good thing God created was accompanied by its own negative counterpart.

To protect man from this negativity, God made him blind to it. He made him unaware of the negative reality so that he would not be corrupted by it. Man in his original state did not have to work at being righteous, because he was made good to begin with, but having partaken of the tree of life, having opened his mind to worldly knowledge, all was laid bare, the stuff outside the boundaries prescribed by God as well as within. Man, his innocence lost, could now enter territory unprotected by God´s grace.

So life as we know it today, full of pitfalls and perils, encompasses not only God´s created good works, but also all the negativity that surrounds it. Plato came close to recognizing this phenomenon when he defined evil not as a quality in itself but as the “absence of good”.

Church Elder

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