--By Peter K. Y. Chang--
An Evil Spirit from God
In First Samuel, the Spirit of God had departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from God tormented him. Many people then asked why evil existed and how could evil come from God. Does God create evil, and manipulate it as His device to deal with people? It lends an excuse to the antitheists and antichrists for disapproving God�s justice. Therefore, the problems of evil should be thoroughly purged. The following is my starting point for a discussion on this issue.
Two kinds of evil, gratuitous evil, and two basic forms of the problem
There are two kinds of evil; one is moral evil, which results from the choice and actions of human beings; another is natural evil, which is the accidental disaster such as an earthquake, tornado, or unexpected disease.
The problems of evil appear in two different forms, the deductive problem of evil and the inductive or evidential problem of evil. The former shows that the existence of evil is logically inconsistence with essential tenets of Christian theism. Namely, God who is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent, created the universe, which contains good and evil to be necessarily false. The inductive problem of evil, which is opposed to the logical form, suggests that the existence of evil shows Christianity is probably false. Those problems in the non-Christian point of view show that God is not worthy to believe and Christianity is false.
The main arguments for those problems are called the free will theodicy, the natural law theodicy, and the soul-making theodicy. The reasons are that God�s creation containing evil is to bring about the greater good for the free will of human beings. Without evil, humans would be no moral good. Human�s free rational action requires a world of orderly environment governed by the natural law. Owing to the development of the humans� virtues, God has good reason to put human beings into a challenging environment to test them. In addition, the presence of gratuitous evil in God�s creation also applies to the three prongs of theodicy to show its consistence with God�s purpose for His creation.
Another explanation from biblical standpoint.
The debates on the above issues almost focus on the premises that God created good and evil, that God bestows the free will upon human beings to choose between good and evil, and that God has caused the primary problem of moral evil. However, Augustine indicates that God has never created evil. The cause of moral evil is not God but the created will. Only the cause of good things is the divine goodness. Although human beings have been created with the free will, which enables them to choose good or evil, they are simultaneously endowed with a supernatural vocation to follow the moral perfection that is possessed of God and revealed by God in the Scripture. Therefore, the human will is free to turn to God or away from God, but simultaneously the human mind must recognize the truth they possess of the immutable good because the direction of the will to that good is implanted by God and willed by God. When they are turning away from God, their wills run counter to the divine law so that they, even the ungodly, are conscious to some extent of moral standards and laws.
Evil should be justified by the will of God.
Satan, whose disposition hostiles to all goodness, is the chief opponent of God and human beings. He is the first cause of evil that aims at destroying the work of God, and persuading human beings to sin. Adam is the first man who was induced by Satan to sin. Thus, sin is a want of transgression of the law of God, which is given as a rule to the reasonable human beings. Evil is not only forbidden by God, but will be punished by the law of God. Yet, punishment is not the chastisement, which is intended to reform the offender. From the beginning of committing sin, Adam, Eve, and Cain were punished by God. The book of Exodus filled with God�s punishments for His justice, even including the extraordinarily natural disasters such as famine, plagues, the killing of all first-born Egyptian children, and the drowning of Pharaoh�s entire army in the Red Sea. There are other examples found in Israel after her division into Northern and Southern Kingdoms (Israel and Judah), as well as the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra as punishment for their heinous wickedness.
If God has created evil and connives at the crime committed by the free will of human beings, He is unjust to punish evil. The free will of human beings is under the law of God, just as the state law limits the freedom of the citizen. Even Satan, who is a fallen angel created by God, has been punished. Once he had a time of probation, now his condemnation is irrevocably fixed and for him the everlasting fire is prepared by God. He will be expelled from the earth to be bound, and cast into the abyss during the last judgment of God.
The conclusion is that God never created the evil, but Satan did and all human beings has inherited the original sin from Adam, who was induced by Satan to commit sin. Therefore, human beings cannot choose to sin or not to sin after the fall or before the regeneration and the glorification. All human beings need the grace and salvation of God to justify evil. For now, all evils are under God�s control; some of them even become the use of testing Christian faith as the example of Job. However, after the last judgment, all things will be destroyed, and then, God will rebuild a new heaven and a new earth. That is the everlasting solution of the problems of evil.
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This Morning, I Woke Up At 4:30 A.M.
--By Peter K. Y. Chang--
I lived on campus with my wife Sarah. We have no car to go out. Every Sunday the
pastor or deacon, even Dr. and Mrs. Covell came to take us to the church. Sometimes
we went shopping on our way home. I could not stay anywhere longer except at home
Last week I planned to stay alone in the basement of church for my retreat before
handing in the Growth Plan, but the deacon could not wait for me, and we went home
as usual.
This morning, I woke up at 4:30 a.m. to take my personal retreat at home until this
noon. I meditated on the relationship with God, and looked into the future; the rest of
my hfe...At tranquil dawn. God seemed especially close to me. I begged Him to teach
me counting my days, not just for me, not like a dream, but for the sake of His
Kingdom, the fulfillment of a promise that is everlasting salvation. If I must stretch out
my hands to be taken to somewhere I never wish to go, I hope that God will fasten a
bell around me and take me to His altar. I wish that His power would be perfectly in
my weakness, and His grace sufficiently in my iniquity. Oh, Lord let it be done for me
as I wish. I wish I could take up my cross on the rock of mountain, and be able to drink
your cup. Let me ready for your coming at that unexpected hour!
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Fighting A Good Fight for God
--Peter K. Y. Chang--
In Second Timothy chapter four, verse seven he said, �I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.� Paul thought that his death was at hand, but he was content with what he had done for God in his entire life. He used the Greek word in the perfect tense to express his completed action and his confidence. He was not boasting of his achievement, but wanted to encourage Timothy and all of us to continue his ministry. Yes, we must continue to fight for God. Our fight and our courses are not yet completed, especially, many of you who are very young. You have much more time than Paul had at that time to fight for God. Of course, our fight is not to engage in human physical warfare. We are on a spiritual battlefield, face-to-face and hand-to hand fighting against Satan.
It is not that we fight for our living everyday. We have many tensions and pressures in our hi-tech era and everyone needs to fight for his or her existence. At this point, non-Christians are engaged even more than we are. They fight even more furiously than we do. When I was young, about your age, I was not a Christian, but I had to fight for my studies, my marriage, and my job very hard. I fought a very good fight for myself, but I almost fought against God and would have been destroyed by God if He had never had pity on me and saved me from disaster.
Here is a brief story of my student days. I do not think I was a student genius, but I had always been at the top of my class. I even independently studied much well-known existentialistic philosophy and literature, such as the works of Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus who were all atheists, all denied the truth of God, and all despised traditional concepts and the Christian worldview. From their influence, I thought that life is absurd, that human existence is in vain, that all things are meaningless, and that believing in God must eliminate freewill from human beings. Although there were some Christian existentialists such as Kierkegaard and Heidegger, I rather adored Nietzsche and Sartre. Sartre is the cousin of Albert Schweitzer who was the famous Christian physician that first went to Africa. People called him �the father of African physicians� to pay homage to him. However, Sartre never believed in God. He would rather transform himself into a book for a longer existence in the world than to become a Christian and obtain eternal life. Nietzsche thought of himself as Superman. With his philosophic hypothesis Will to Power, he rejected the existence of God and declared �God is dead.� Probably you heard of a joke that Nietzsche wrote on a gravestone, � God is dead.� He filled in the date and signed his name on the bottom of the gravestone. After that, Nietzsche became insane and died young. Surprisingly, what he had written on the gravestone was changed to � Nietzsche is dead.� Moreover, the date he filled in was changed to the date he died. Instead of his signature, God signed His name, Jehovah. This joke showed how finite and ignorant human beings are, if compared with God�s infinity, omnipotence, and omnipresence. The tragedy of existentialists is more awful than the Athenians in Acts chapter seventeen, verse twelve, who worshiped an unknown god but soon followed the proclamation of Paul to seek the true God.
With such a deficient worldview and evaluation of existentialism, I fought a good fight to get my secular knowledge of the world, but consequently, I denied Christianity and almost went astray onto a wrong road of atheism for about ten years. Therefore, I needed God�s grace and revelation more than the ancient Athenians.
In fact, before God revealed His truth to me, He had set up an extraordinary circumstance for me to convert to Christianity, but I still denied Him. This extraordinary event was tightly connected to my marriage that was one of God�s plans for me, but I did not realize it then. I only knew how hard I fought for my marriage. When I said that I even fought for my marriage, it does not mean that I had many rivals in love. I had no formal rival in love at all. It started as all usual love stories. Sarah and I were working together in the same place and were always concerned with each other, but we never intended courting each other because our relationship was just like that of siblings; brother and sister, so to speak. Then, it happened that a man, who was a soldier with a pistol on his waist, went after Sarah every evening all the way to her home, threatening her irrationally to marry him. Sarah was so frightened. She asked me to escort her home when the guy was following her. I was delighted to do so without fear, even under the threatening muzzle of a pistol, but a more miserable disaster occurred when I was escorting Sarah down to her hometown railroad station. An impetuous torrent of water swiftly poured down from an upper mountain right after a cloud burst of sudden heavy rain. The flood immediately covered the station as if it were a small islet among the blackening ocean. We were trapped in the station with a few clerks and passengers, all in great danger. Damaged furniture, animal carcasses, and even the corpses of victims were swept into the darkness. The clerks rescued only two wounded elderly women. We all suffered through a frightening night without a glimpse of hope to escape from danger. We were desperate, seeking a scheme to bind ourselves on a wooden bench to flee for our lives. Fortunately, the water subsided gradually after the rain stopped at the next dawn. We hurried to go back to Sarah�s home along the crooked railroad and stony track. This was the prominent disaster of the �Taiwan Eight-Seven Flood. � It is called �Eight Seven� because it happened on August 7. (In nineteen fifty something, I forget the year. You may ask Dr. and Mrs. Covell who were living in Sun-Moon-Lake, a scenic point in the middle of Taiwan, during the flood. I heard that they could not go down the mountain until a helicopter brought them down.) The station we were trapped in is called �San-yee Railroad Station.� The irrational soldier who threatened Sarah was camped in Houly. Military discipline was really in disorder during that time.
Anyway, both natural calamity and moral evil caused Sarah and me to huddle together and talk about our engagement. We finally married in the next year. We should have thanked God for His grace and mercy, but we did not. We owed God so much yet He still loved us and called a devoted Christian, who is one of my best friends, to send me a deluxe copy of the Bible. I enjoyed the Bible as literature, but I had never been attentive to understand God�s word. Too much existentialistic philosophy hindered me from accepting the Gospel. I debated with my Christian friend concerning the miracle of the incarnation and resurrection. I joked about the Christian faith and rejected salvation. I was as stonehearted as the Egyptian Pharaoh, but my Christian friend continued to pray for me lest I would perish by God�s rage. Thus, I kept away from the grace of God for about ten years. During these ten years, my Christian friend unceasingly prayed for me until the day God gave me insight into His deliverance.
There is another story concerning my job. It was the most important period in my lifetime. Hunting for a job must be more difficult than studying in school, but I was able to fight with my competition to win a job opportunity. I used to find employment very easily while the others had a hard time. I was unaware that those good chances also came from God�s grace. I only thought of my own ability to acquire desirable jobs. I was recruited for the script supervisor of the Taiwan Television Company during the last year of my college study. After graduation, I got a job as the program director at the China Television Company, and was soon sent to Japan to pursue further study at NHK Central Institute. When I completed my study and returned to the China Television Company, I endeavored to produce and direct a series drama with all of my strength. I revised the scripts, modified the plots, replaced the performers, and corrected the actions in each rehearsal until I felt everything was perfect. I had all the power in my grip. I controlled every character�s birth, age, illness, and death. If I wanted to hear laughter they laughed; if I wanted to see tears they cried; if I wanted them sick they were sick; if I wanted them to drown, they jumped into the river and drowned. When the performance was mixed up with reality, I felt as if I was the almighty God to manipulate the fate of human beings. But, when I sobered up, I felt subconsciously that God was staring at me with His solemn and gracious eyes. I admitted that I was usurping His authority, mimicking His power to create a fantastic world, and my arbitrary power would be dismissed after my drama was over. God seemed to ask me �How about the real world?� With my profession, I thought that the world must have a cause and an effect, just like I was the cause of my drama, and my drama was the effect of my professional skill. It should be an omnipotent Being to create the world and universe; just like I created everything in the world of my drama. Then, I wondered what inference could I draw from this fact. Of course, God! I therefore, was without any reason to deny that God is the only Creator of the world and the entire universe. Thus, I hastily asked my Christian friend to arrange my baptism. He told me that for ten years, he had been unceasingly praying for me, just for this moment.
Since then, God has led me to work for Him, to fight for Him in many different positions, such as the senior specialist of the China Broadcasting Corporation, the vice president of the Kuangchi Program Service, the vice president of the Tausheng Publishing House and Christian Tribune Weekly, and the vice president of the Chinese Public Television Station. During that period, I produced some important telecasting programs, such as the funeral of Chiang Kai-shek, the late president of the Republic of China. In this program, the host Reverend Chou Lian-hua, the former pastor of Chiang, for first time gave his lecture in public on the subject of Christian belief. Reverend Chou read Chiang Kai-shek�s last will, in which Chiang said, �I have always acknowledged that I am a Christian,� to encourage people believing in God, had been telecast throughout the world. Another important telecasting program I produced was the Billy Graham Crusade in Taiwan, which had never taken place before, and could never take place again. For three days, there were approximately one tenth of ninety thousand attendants being converted to Christianity in the crusade. In addition to telecasting, I was responsible for all the publications for the crusade. The committee recommended me to do this because God had inspired me to write many books to fight for Him. Nevertheless, each time I completed a major work for God, He would lead me to fight in another battle, so that everybody who envied my position would suppose that I was very lucky. However, I understood that it was God opening up the doors for me because He wanted me to fight for Him. He also closed down many doors when He thought I should not enter into them. God has always wanted His people to walk in the narrow road through His small gate as Matthew Chapter seven, verse fourteen said. He finally closed all my broad roads through the wide gate that lead to destruction, and then, let me start over again to be an older student to study His truth at the Denver Seminary.
From the above, you may summarize three parts of my story, fighting for study, fighting for marriage, and fighting for jobs. Before my conversion, I fought for myself and really was fighting against God, but God rescued me from perishing. After I believed in God, I changed my worldview from being human-centered to Christ-centered. Before believing in God, my concern was only for human welfare, but now it has expanded to eternal life in heaven. The weapon I used to fight for myself before I believed in God, such as existentialism, was now out of fashion, and was replaced by modernism and post-modernism. Everything from the battle I fought for secular well-being has vanished. Only a few things useful for fighting for God have remained. All fame and gain are as transient and ephemeral as a fleeting cloud. How many love stories and marriages of non-Christians become tragedies? How many talented people have been on the decline after they climbed up to the top of their enterprises? Only the achievements of Christian works last forever. That was why the Apostle Paul wanted to live for God in his entire life. He said that he had fought a good fight, that he had finished his course, and that he had kept the faith. This does not mean he had done three things separately, but they were all one. We must have faith all the way, walking through our courses to fight for God.
Now we are ready to follow Paul�s last will fighting for God, but how? How can we fight a good fight as Paul had done? He told us in Ephesians chapter six, verse thirteen to seventeen that we have to put on the full armor of God. The full armor includes the following six kinds of weapons with their sufficient functions. Buckle the belt of truth around the waist to hold fast the other weapons. Place the breastplate of righteousness to protect our biblical concepts and conduct according to the principles of the Bible and the will of God. Put on the shoes of the Gospel of peace to reach out and proclaim the Gospel in the expected battle. Take up the shield of faith to extinguish the arrows and fire of the evil. Take up the helmet of salvation to keep us from fallacy and heresy. And take the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God with two sharpened blades. We use it face-to-face and hand-to-hand to attack the antiChrist worldviews and hypotheses.
These six weapons are all in one. When you put on the full armor God has given to you, you have to put on all of them. You cannot use only one of them or some of them to fight. I trust that you are very familiar with these six kinds of weapons, but I still want to remind you that none of them can be used to protect your back, because Christians, as the soldiers of Christ, cannot shrink back from the battle. If you retreat, you expose your empty back to Satan and will be easily stricken down. The second thing I want to remind you is that most of these weapons are defensive. None of them is an offensive weapon except the sword of Spirit, which is the word of God we use it to attack the enemy. Because God is almighty, His word has never lost a battle. We must rely on the most powerful resource, the Bible.
The last thing, I want to remind you, is that the full armor belongs to the individual. You are responsible for using it by yourself. Nobody can use your weapons to fight instead of yourself, they can only pray for you. Anybody�s prayer can strengthen another person�s combat capacity, like Moses with Aaron and Hur praying on the top of hill for Joshua to attack the Amalekites. Each time Moses held up his hands with the staff of God, Joshua and the Israelites prevailed. When Moses was tired, Aaron and Hur let him sit on the stone and helped him hold up his hands. If you feel weak or confront with an extra-strong enemy such as Goliath who was the Philistine giant, you need to ask people to pray that you might be as strong as David, who was strengthened by the God of the heavenly armies. Of course, this means only the metaphoric example, not that of physical fighting. I hope that you will be victorious all the time in your spiritual battlefield. Thank you!
