When God allows evil (divorce, slavery etc)

Hi Athlee.

The contrast between Moses and God's law comes from Matthew 19. It's Moses who allows remarriage, while God considers it adultery.

Your question is a very good one. "If God doesn't explicitly say he has a reason for allowing a sub optimal state of affairs, how can you tell on any such issue that the principle as divine allowance can be appropriately applied. "

You rightly see the problem, that God's representative, His image on Earth, has commanded something not in keeping with God's intentions. The only commands that God directly gave to Moses was the decalogue, which was destroyed and rewritten by Moses. Israel's national laws were created by Moses as an imager of God. Moses was given authority and inspired by God. The law that Moses completed was like light through a projector. The projection is only as good as the lens it passes through. Jesus declares that Moses's law was not perfect. Although the image Moses cast seems poor to us today, if we compare his law to those of the same age, like Hammurabi, the light that brought it forth becomes noticable.

I haven't watched the video but I'm adding it to my watch list. I love Michael Brown.

Athée said:

Pardon the click bait title, I couldn't figure out how to summarize my question effectively.

We read in the Bible that while God finds divorce sinful, he allows it because of the hardness of human hearts.

My question for apologists is, why is this proof of concept applied to questions like the slavery laws in the old testamen? IIf God doesn't explicitly say he has a reason for allowing a sub optimal state of affairs, how can you tell on any such issue that the principle as divine allowance can be appropriately applied.

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Jesus' reply was specific toward divorce because He was asked specifically about divorce, but His response broader than that.

Jesus replied, "Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning.

"But it was not this way from the beginning."

Adam's heart was hardened as a result of the fall--and that was a dire consequence upon Eve that was immediately apparent when Adam instantly placed the blame on his wife. His heart had already been hardened just that quickly.

From that hardened heart were all human relationships changed from what they had been in the beginning.

So that's not just about divorce.

We can address the larger question: Why does God allow free will?

One of the elements that is poorly understood in Christian circles let alone those outside of the Christian worldview is the fact that God creates worlds where he shares his power and governorship. In the heavens we see of a divine assembly that helps govern the world. God certainly doesn't need their help, and they screw things up (see Gen 6 and Google the sin of the watchers) later at Jesus birth we see 1/3rd of the angels rebel (revelation 12) demonstrating that they have free will. Further Adam and Eve don't arrive at a perfect world but of a garden that was for a time perfect and where God dwelled. But they were commanded to subdue the rest of the world. Terraform that world to make it like the garden of Eden.

They rebelled and failed. So God continually sacrifices perfection of a world for giving agents freewill where some will choose to rebel. These rebellions produce warfare where some agents choose to freely obey God and others to freely disobey.

When people become Christian they don't just change their worldview, they are actually filled with a new nature and freedom to obey. Their sense of how God wampnts them to act is greatly hightened due to the presence of the Holy Spirit, but they have some significant work to do to retrain themselves out of bad habits and to listen and obey the HS.

When Christians choose to go to church for an hour a week they produces no change. They are no different than the non-believer because they refuse to renew their minds, they refuse to humble themselves and serve the poor, the weak, the infirm, the needy. They never fulfill God's plan for them to mature to be ambassadors of Christ!

There is not one in fifty Christians in the US that is a disciple. That is meets the criteria Paul and Peter and Jesus lay down for becoming a disciple.

And so we see evil continue and sins like divorce, addiction to inappropriate contentography, fornication, adultery, materialism, are all very similar to the secular American culture.

God will change this formula at the second coming and will ultimately get a group of disciples who will rule and reign over his world justly, but that is not this world or this time.

As for why this much evil and suffering, we don't know. There is the concept that we have to suffer like Jesus in order to gain certain character development (known since the second century as soul-building). Hope this helps you gain some insight.

Athée said:

You make a good point, that phrase does indeed refer to the state of the heart. But it seems like in this context Jesus is only talking about divorce. The hardness of the human heart will affect all kinds of things to be sure, but Moses didn't permit all of them so I don't t see this as warrant to extend that principle beyond the example of divorce given in the text.

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Not extending the principle of the permission of all things because of the hardening of the heart. Note that of one Eve's particular consequences was that she would have a "desire" (a need) for her husband...yet his heart would be hardened toward her. That was a terrible consequence for which divorce could actually be her relief.

But my point is that a consequence for Adam was a hardening of his heart--which had not been hard when God created him, but as a consequence of disobedience, and that hardening affects all human relationships.

Athée said:

Agian your point is well taken. My thought is that whatever the reason, the example of Moses allowing divorce and Jesus later saying it is not God's will, doesn't allow us to assert other examples without an explicit endorsement from Jesus. For example I don't think it would be right to say that while Moses (the law) permitted chattle slavery, that this is not God's will. If Jesus had made a clear statement about slavery we certainly could... But he doesn't and so however much we may want to say that chattel slavery wasn't God's will, the text of the Bible just doesn't support this.

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I don't think we are at odds here. But if your issue is actually the question of slavery, "hardness of men's hearts" does still apply. Just as the Mosaic law greatly ameliorated the status of wives compared to the situation before it, it also greatly ameliorated the position of slaves compared to the situation before it. No Jew was born a slave, and no Jew--except by his own will--could be kept a slave for life.

My own great-grandparents had been chattel slaves in Mississippi--had the Mosaic Law been applied to them, their condition would have been much, much better.

None of Jesus audience were chattel slaves or owned any chattel slaves (by the 1st century--for that matter, at no time after the Captivity--Jews no longer had aliens as slaves captured in warfare ). Why do you expect Him to have made any statements about hypothetical situations?

But when the Gospel expanded into the Roman empire where there was chattel slavery, scripture is clear enough: 1. Slavery to men was not a desired situation, and no Christian should sell himself into debt slavery (which millions of us are in today). 2. It was a mortal sin to put a man into chattel slavery. 3. Slaveholders who became Christian were to consider their "slaves" as their responsibility, not their property, and Christ would hold them accountable as fellow-slaves for the welfare of His property.