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This restoration also clarified that God does not create Ex nihilo (out of nothing), but uses existing materials to organize order out of chaos. [68] Because opposition is inherent in nature, and God operates within nature's bounds, God is therefore not considered the author of evil, nor will He eradicate all evil from the mortal experience. [69]
This verse extends the same observations to God's response to prayer. If a flawed human father looks out for his own child, then there is no reason to doubt that the perfectly good God will not have the best interest of his followers in heart. According to this verse, Jesus calls his hearers Greek: Πονηροὶ, poneroi, "evil".
This verse, as with Matthew 5:37, is vague on evil. It could be interpreted as a reference to the Evil One, i.e. Satan, the general evil of the world, as translated by the KJV, or the evil of specific individuals, as is translated by the WEB. The third interpretation is the one held by most modern scholars.
For some thinkers, the existence of evil and hell could mean that God is not perfectly good and powerful or that there is no God at all. [58] Theodicy tries to address this dilemma by reconciling an all-knowing, all-powerful, and omnibenevolent God with the existence of evil and suffering, outlining the possibility that God and evil can coexist.
Indeed, one of the most important issues with this verse is that it seems to imply that God is the one who leads humans into sin, not humanity's innate sinfulness as Christian theologians generally believe. A literal reading of this verse could imply that God is the source of evil. There are several explanations for getting around this.
…it is possible that one thing in relation to another may be evil, and at the same time within the limits of its proper being it may not be evil. Then it is proved that there is no evil in existence; all that God created He created good. This evil is nothingness; so death is the absence of life. When man no longer receives life, he dies.
Critics of Christian conceptions of God as all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful cite the presence of evil in the world as evidence that it is impossible for all three attributes to be true; this apparent contradiction is known as the problem of evil. The evil God challenge is a thought experiment that explores whether the hypothesis that God ...
Therefore, the devil is only able to pursue evil as long as God allows. Evil has no ontological reality, but is defined by deficits or a lack of existence, in Origen's cosmology. Therefore, the devil is considered most remote from the presence of God, and those who adhere to the devil's will follow the devil's removal from God's presence.