God
Taking Responsibility in the Old Testament
By
Troy J. Edwards
Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of
God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man
(James 1:13)
As most of us are aware,
the Bible, though a divinely inspired book, has some troubling passages. Scripture
reveals that God is loving, merciful, kind, gracious, forgiving, patient,
longsuffering, etc. We learn that He hates evil and is compassionate towards
those who suffer from it. But then we are told in this very same book that He afflicts
with sickness and disease, brings disaster, deceives, tempts, gives people evil
spirits, creates evil, hardens hearts, moves men to do evil, etc.
The way to rectify these
apparent contradictions has been to understand what scholars have coined “the
permissive sense”. That is, to understand the passages that make God appear
to be harsh and cruel were things that were not directly caused by God but simply
not prevented by Him for various reasons.
In conjunction with the permissive
sense is to also understand the Bible as a progressive revelation. In
the earlier times in which Scripture was written, due to Israel’s weakness for
constantly slipping into idolatry, it would have done more harm than good to
reveal too much knowledge about Satan’s activities. Therefore, God often took
responsibility for actions that He would later reveal were actually Satan’s
doing (compare 2 Samuel 24:1 and 1 Chronicles 21:1).
With that said, I recently
ran across a commentary on James 1:13 by Dr. Peter H. Davids that sheds more
light on this subject:
But what about “God does not tempt [test] anyone”? To
deal with this problem we must consider the development of doctrine within and
between the testaments. Old Testament Hebrews, at least in their earlier
period, traced all events directly back to God. Whatever happened, God caused it.
This level of revelation was quite appropriate, since God’s first task with
Israel was to convince them that there was only one God for them to worship.
Beginning late in the Old Testament, however, and continuing into the
intertestamental period, it became clear that other beings often actually
caused the test.[1]
When we learn to keep
this truth in our minds as we are reading Scripture, we will be careful not to
read into it the false ideas that God is actually the author of sickness,
disaster, and other evils.
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We have a couple of
videos addressing this issue that we highly recommend. Click on the links below
to watch:
We also recommend our
book, The Bible Principle of
Accommodation, where we have two chapters on this subject. Also, be on the
lookout for our upcoming book, “God Taking Responsibility for Satan’s Work: Understanding
Bible Passages that Question God’s Character”.
[1] Davids,
Peter H. “James” in Hard Sayings of the Bible (Downer’s Grove, Il:
Intervarsity Press, 1996), p. 695
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