Fire

Image by Malene Thyssen

"This third I will put into the fire;

I will refine them like silver

and test them like gold.

They will call on my name

and I will answer them;

I will say, ‘They are my people,’

and they will say, ‘The Lord is our God.’ ”

~Zechariah 13:9

The world is a fire. It is however very hard to be objective about a fire when you are burning in it. I am not at all sure I am objective about it myself.

I have tended to agree with the Gnostic idea that the world is inherently evil and dominated by evil. The Gospel of John appears to agree with that appraisal. But this leads inevitably to the question, and it is a question the Gnostics clearly had issues with, of how then it is allowed to be such. For the Gnostics... the world is a mistake. The creation of the world was an error, a malfunction, one having nothing to do with us. For more mainstream Christians it is also a mistake of sorts, but in this case entirely our own. Or rather, our ancestors, and ourselves are allowed to carry the burden of our ancestors mistake down to this day. For some, it is an inevitable consequence of our free will.

I am going out on a limb and say that they are all full of horseshit. As unsatisfying and tacked-on as the Adam and Eve story is as an explanation of evil, the Gnostics are even worse, coming up with the most convoluted explanation of how divine but not supreme or even knowledgeable beings wound up creating the world in a rather bastardized way. To me, what that suggests is that neither the ancient Jews nor the Christians nor the Gnostics - none of them had a clue, and they had to come up with something. Because they didn't know.

To have God create the world when the world is evil is rather problematic. Of course Christians don't agree that the world is evil, despite John telling them pretty point-blank that it is. Not only John either, you can find snippets suggesting the same in other Gospels. I would go so far as to say that the Christians' lack of appropriate revulsion for the satanic nature of worldly power and authority was the cause of many of their excesses and evils in the centuries afterwards. How you could go from "do not love the World" and "the prince of this world (Satan) now stands condemned" to having a ROMAN EMPEROR preside over the consolidation of church dogma is a game of mental Twister that I have a hard time understanding.

Anyway, back on topic, did God create the world? Because if He was in fact the author of a place of evil and suffering, that would challenge the idea of the goodness of God. If like the Gnostics think he didn't create it but doesn't UNcreate it, it matters little. You would either have a God that creates an evil world or a God who doesn't give a whit about it existing. Any way you look at it, unless you have a God who is powerless or a God who is okay with evil, it presents the same problem.

Believers in God, Jew Christian and Muslim alike, have tended to take a pretty hard attitude towards those perceived to be evil. Stone em, burn em, behead em. They have condemned them to their hells, to burn everlastingly. They have not been very tolerant towards them. I approve of their hatred of evil, if that is actually what it is, but say that it is improperly directed. The place where the hatred of evil is appropriately applied is within yourself, not without. Within the believer himself. Not to other people.

I am going to say something that might be kind of hard to wrap your head around. You might accuse me of spinning horseshit about God's theoretical responsibility for the world like the Jews, Christians and Gnostics have done before me. And maybe you are right, I wouldn't be the best judge of that.

The world is evil, yes. Its fundamental processes are evil, human power structures are evil, it's evil.

God willed or allows it to exist, yes. Both those things are true. The omnipotence of God means that the world could not exist if God did not will it to do so.

And though the world is genuinely evil and dominated by evil, and that evil is extremely real to those suffering the consequences of it, that evil in the end will not exist except abstractly and will not have really existed. None who were ever truly alive will be dead or impaired in any way. There will be no adverse consequences of having lived in the world except for how long you have to spend there.

Imagine a future schoolroom. In this future there is no war or injustice, but parents want their children to understand war and injustice. So there are very high-tech equivalents of VR headsets through which these children can experience what it was like to be in the trenches during WWI or in the Holocaust in WWII. And they experience everything exactly as it was, perfectly. But at the end of class, they take off their VR equipment and go home to their loving parents, and aside from a remembrance of what happened (and perhaps a few late-night nightmares) there are no lasting consequences. They felt the bullet enter their heart, but they are whole. They breathed the cyanide and mustard gas, but they still breathe. They murdered their fellow man, but they did not truly sin, because none of it ultimately exists. They did this to understand how precious their current liberty and peace was. This evil of war and death and hate, it still existed abstractly, their society could decline again to such a state, but it will not.

We are in this fire of evil because God wills it, and because God wills it for our good. Yes, many, most in fact, won't get that this go-round, but there are other days in school and other journeys in the VR headsets and other opportunities to learn what we should all know, how terrible evil is, and how good God is. There are no sinners burning in hell, there are only ignorant ones who don't understand and so must stay here in this simulation until they learn. Do not remain in Plato's cave imagining that shadows are reality, come outside with me to the Light.

Evil is terrible. Our proper action expressing our utter revulsion at it should be directed on ourselves, not other people. We don't have the right to judge anyone, this was one of the insightful snippets Jesus told us about. There is more than enough work to do on ourselves. I for one don't want to stay here in school, I want to leave and enter the greater world of God. This being the case, I would hope that I always examine myself for sin, not others.

How great will be our praise to God when we finally understand all that we have been going through and how great has been His care of us! Even in this fire, even here, I say that only God reigns.