Atheists allege that "God is evil." Time after time Mr. Emmett
Fields alleges this.
1 In brief, atheists think that
anytime God acts contrary to their own view of right and wrong, then God
is evil. Here they become a "hater of God," which is what the word
above means in Greek.
Mr. Fields cites multiple examples in the Old Testament to support his
hypothesis that the God of the Old Testament is evil. He says the
following:
GOD IS A MURDERER.
- God murdered the innocent first-born of the Egyptians (Ex 12:29).
- God murdered the people of Israel in the wilderness. (Num
14:28ff)
- God murdered the Canaanites when Israel entered Canaan
(Deut 20:16).
- God murdered the men of Bethsemesh (Israelites) (1 Sam
6:19).2
- God murdered Bathsheba's innocent child because of
David's sin (2 Sam 12:15-23).
GOD GAVE EVIL COMMANDMENTS.
- He commanded the murder of witches (22:18).
- He commanded slavery, and the Bible always upholds
slavery (Ex 21:2ff).
- He commanded murder of anyone who would not follow him
only (Deut 13:6ff).
- He holds the children responsible for the crimes of
their parents to the fourth generation (Ex 20:5).
- He commanded the savage rape of women and children (Num
31:15ff).
Having spoken of these evil things, Fields now turns to the evil
of the New Testament, as follows:
JESUS GIVES EVIL COMMANDMENTS.
- Jesus commanded that we hate our father, mother, wife,
brothers and sisters and even our own life also, or we
cannot be His disciples (Luke 14:26; Matt 10:34-37; Matt
19:29; Mark 10:29-30).
- Jesus spoke of hell for those who don't do what he said,
and this is the worse thing of all (Mark 9:43-48; Luke
12:5).
Because of these terrible evils they perceive, atheists like Mr. Fields
come to the conclusion that there can be no God at all. If God is
so evil, then how can there really be a god, any god? Thus ends
his reasoning on this issue.
The dealings of God with men in the Old Testament have been a favorite
topic for the atheists' attacks. They see themselves as having a
higher morality than God, and thus they feel qualified to sit in
judgment over God. They cannot conceive that the real God is like
a consuming fire (Deut 4:24; 9:3; Isa 33:14; Heb 12:29), and that it is
He who sits in judgment over them.
MY REPLY TO MR. FIELDS:
THE BIBLICAL WORLD VIEW OF SIN AND PUNISHMENT.
The world view of the Bible is that God created everything, and so
everything is His. As Creator, God has the right to establish His
law and has the right to do with His creation as He pleases. He
created man in His own image, and bestowed on man great blessing and
divine favor. God gave man free moral agency because God wanted
man to choose Him rather than being forced to serve Him. God gave
but one commandment to our first parents. Yet they did not love
the Lord their God with all their heart and with all their soul because
they allowed another's word to be more important than God's Word.
As God had promised, they died spiritually the very hour they sinned,
and they died physically even though Satan said they would not die.
God judged Satan, the tempter, and foretold the coming of the Messiah
who would conquer him. God also judged Adam and Eve, and said that
since they were made from dust, to dust they would return. Thus,
from this fallen state where death began to reign as the consequence of
sin, death came to all men because all men sinned (Rom 5:12).
The sinfulness of man only grew deeper and deeper as man became more and
more alienated from God. So great was their violence, bloodshed
and evil that God destroyed the vast majority of them in a great flood,
but saved righteous Noah and his family in the Ark. It was His
great mercy to spare the family of man. Yet even with this great salvation, the
descendants of Noah's sons became just as evil as those who lived before
the flood. One thing we can know for sure from this, for
everything that follows thereafter, even through the New Testament times
and up to this very day shows the same pattern: People who seek to
love God and give themselves to Him have joy and peace. But the
descendents of such a righteous person will inevitably stray away from
this righteousness, and will eventually become the enemies of God by
their own actions.
God found one man, Abraham, who was righteous, and being in the
Messiah's seed line, God gave Abraham great favor. God promised
Abraham that in his seed all the nations of the world would be blessed.
This is yet another prophecy regarding the Messiah. God gave
Abraham a detailed prophecy about the people who would come from Abraham
and Sarah, and what kind of troubles they would face in Egypt:
Genesis 15:13-16 (ESV)
13 Then the
Lord said to Abram, “Know
for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not
theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four
hundred years. 14 But I will bring
judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come
out with great possessions. 15 As
for yourself, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried
in a good old age. 16 And they
shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the
Amorites is not yet complete.”
Here the use of the word "Amorites" is used as a general
term for the Canaanites. Note the patience of God, not
wanting to bring premature judgment on the Gentiles.
God rules over and cares for the Gentiles even in the
Old Testament, and this is the very assumption undergirding the book
of Jonah. The Assyrians were spared the sentence
of destruction and death that was preached by Jonah because
they repented, and this is what God desired of them. This shows that
prophecy was conditional. Their very act of repentance resulted in their own civilization
lasting much longer,
more than 100 years longer. Truly this is what God
hoped for in regards to the Canaanites.
So then, what were the sins of the Amorites (Canaanites)
that brought God's judgment of death on the land of Canaan?
Moses lists at least some of these sins in Deut 18:9-14.
Chief among these sins and the theme common to all is
idolatry. So what was so bad about the idolatry that made God full
of wrath? The very first description gives it away:
Deuteronomy 18:10a (ESV)
10 There shall not be found
among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an
offering....
This same command/warning is repeated in Lev 18:21; 20:2-5; Deut 12:31. When
God's especially chosen people, the Jews, started do this very same
thing (2 Kings 16:3; Jer 7:31), God said they too would receive the
judgment of exile and death. Of this horrible sin God said,
"...which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind...."(Jer
19:5)
Therefore, God did the same to His own possession Israel and Judah, as
He did to the Canaanites. Truly God is no respecter of persons,
but He is patient--more patient that any man, for he waited 400 years
before punishing the Amorites for their horrible murders of their own
children. Yes, God used capital punishment for this heinous sin,
regardless of where He found it.
Let's be clear about the Canaanites. God could not tolerate their
sin anymore, and His purpose for the Israelites was for them to serve as
his rod of punishment to wipe out these exceedingly sinful people.
Because they were not wiped out, Israel and Judah
eventually fell. However, there were obviously exceptions to this
rule of extermination,
including Rahab (Josh 2:1,3; 6:17, 23) and the Gibeonites (Josh 9:3ff).
Apparently God made exceptions, especially for those who worshipped the
one God of the universe instead of the multitudes of idols that were
worshipped is such a terrible manner throughout the land of Canaan.
This brings us back to the biblical worldview of God. God is holy,
and no evil can co-exist in harmony with God. God loves better
than any human, but He also hates evil more than any human. It is
not until we wrap our minds around this very simple concept that we can
understand God's actions toward the Canaanites and even His own chosen
people Israel. Only then can we understand the capital punishment
God commanded in the Mosaic Law. Life and breath are in His hands.
Who are we to stand in judgment against our Creator?
But what about the innocent children who were killed? In a society
so evil that the youth were polluted with idolatry at a tender age, one
can understand. Besides, those who were truly innocent were not
destined to eternal punishment. At least these would find eternal
blessing. Is this reasoning far-fetched from a biblical
perspective? Did not God Himself cut short the lives of the
righteous so that they would not have to endure the invasions that would
destroy God chosen, rebellious and idolatrous people? (Isa 57:1-2)
REGARDING SLAVERY.
We must understand that revelation in the Bible is progressive. It
would not have been possible to take a tribe of Hebrew slaves and give
them God's own morality. There were certain things that God
accommodated in the Hebrews that couldn't be changed until the coming of
Christ. Things such as anger, lust, divorce, oaths, retaliation,
and loving our enemies were addressed by Christ and not the Mosaic Law,
and the purpose of the Mosaic Law was to lead them to Christ (Gal 3:19,
23-25) so that He could reveal a better way. It took His own death
in the cross to really penetrate the callous hearts of the Hebrews so
that they could really change.
Now regarding slavery, Moses wrote also of the fact that Hebrew slaves
deserved release (Ex 21:2; Lev 23:39-43; Deut 15:2; Jer 34:14).
That foreigners had no such protection is assumed since it was not
provided for in the Mosaic Law. However, the fact that Jesus
commanded that the gospel be preached to all nations (Matt 28:19) set a
platform that would dramatically change civilization. As the short
epistle to Philemon shows, both master and slave could become
Christians, and the master was deemed a slave of God while the slave was
deemed a freeman in Christ (1 Cor 7:22). Granted, this new
teaching must have been shocking, and the implications of it not fully
accepted by all masters. Yet the implications are surely there.
Neither Jesus nor his apostles sought to overthrow Roman law or to
incite slaves to rebellion. However, it is clear that Paul
encouraged manumission (1 Cor 7:21), and
that very fact indicated that such was possible in the first century.
Therefore, Fields' opinion that the Bible always encouraged slavery is
not accurate.
CHILDREN RESPONSIBLE FOR PARENTS' SINS.
The passage offered for this is Ex 20:5, but we should include verses
4-6 as follows:
Exodus 20:4-6 (ESV)
4 “You shall not make for yourself a
carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or
that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
5 You shall not bow down to them or serve
them, for I the Lord your
God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the
children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me,
6 but showing steadfast love to thousands
of those who love me and keep my commandments.
The context is idolatry. The iniquity of idolatry
could last for generations, as did the judgment.
However, God also shows steadfast love to multitudes who
love Him and keep His commandments. Now certainly
those who believe in original sin may cite this, as does the
atheist Fields, but this is in error. Please read
carefully Eze 18 where God clears up this persistent
misunderstanding. He states it repeatedly, and
summarizes it in Eze 18:20 as follows:
Ezekiel 18:20 (ESV)
20 The soul who sins shall
die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the
father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son.
The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself,
and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.
If we love God and seek to obey Him, we will be regarded in
His favor, even if our father or mother were gross sinners and
unbelievers. We do not inherit our parents' sins and don't
pay the penalty of our parents' sins. We don't inherit the
sin of Adam and Eve either.
THE SAVAGE RAPE OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN.
Here Fields assumes more that the passage in Num 31:15-18 says.
Moses does not say to rape the young female prisoners. The
young women were captives. The Mosaic Law
specifically stated what was to be the procedure regarding
marrying female captives:
Deuteronomy 21:10-14 (ESV)
10 “When you go out to war against
your enemies, and the
Lord your God gives them into your hand and you take them
captive, 11 and you see
among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire to take her
to be your wife, 12 and you
bring her home to your house, she shall shave her head and pare
her nails. 13 And she shall
take off the clothes in which she was captured and shall remain
in your house and lament her father and her mother a full month.
After that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she
shall be your wife. 14 But
if you no longer delight in her, you shall let her go where she
wants. But you shall not sell her for money, nor shall you treat
her as a slave, since you have humiliated her.
Fornication was never allowed under Mosaic Law (Ex 22:16-17; Lev
19:29; 21:9; Deut 22:20-29; 23:18). There is no evidence that the
Mosaic Law condoned the rape of female captives or children.
JESUS GIVES EVIL COMMANDS.
Mr. Fields insists that Jesus is even worse that what we find in the Old
Testament. His first "proof" is that he commands that we hate our
whole family in order to be His disciple. However, such is a very
superficial reading of the New Testament. This is a use of
hyperbole in order to deeply impress a point, just as Jesus did when He
said we were to gouge out an eye or cut off a hand to keep from being
sexually immoral (Matt 5:27-30). His point was that we must do
everything humanly possible to keep from being sexually immoral.
In the passages that Mr. Fields cites for the purpose of judging Jesus,
Jesus is telling his disciples that He must be first in their lives.
Nothing and no person can take that number one priority. If your
husband or wife or son or daughter says they want to be an atheist, they
you say you will remain a Christian. If your employer tells you he
will fire you unless you hide your Christianity, then you politely say
good-bye and find another job. If the US government says they will
arrest you if you tell the truth about sexual immorality, then you keep
telling the truth and try to stay out of jail. You also bring to
their remembrance the first amendment to the Constitution, and you press
that to the Supreme Court if necessary. Jesus stays in first
position, regardless what happens.
Mr. Fields is very angry that Jesus says so much about Hell. He
says this is a terrible burden on people, causing them to live in fear
and anxiety. He is really angry about this. Well, his anger
is not my problem--it is his anger and he has to deal with it.
There is a God in Heaven, and He is the Creator of the Universe and He
will judge all people in the Judgment Day. Mr. Fields, "prepare to
meet your God." (Amos 4:12).
