Turning Evil into Good- The Conclusion

There is plenty of talk about all of the evil in the world today.  Murder, rape, violent crime, and terrorism are just a few examples.  When we take a deeper look at the evil in the world, we find domestic violence, child abuse, robbery, corruption, even animal abuse.  All of these are good examples of some of the evils in the world today.  As a society, we like to think that our generation faces more evils than the world has ever seen.   If we look at the Bible we find this to be false. Genesis 6: 5-6 tell us that there was so much evil in the world before the flood that HaShem regretted having created us. 5 And the Lord saw that the evil of man was great in the earth, and every imagination of his heart was only evil all the time.6 And the Lord regretted that He had made man upon the earth, and He became grieved in His heart.  It says that every imagination of his [man's] heart was only evil.  That's a lot of evil.  It is foolish to think that the evil we face today is any worse than the evil they faced in those days.  Ecclesiastes 1:9 teaches us that  9 What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.    

What do we know about evil?  One of the major breakthroughs of the information age is research. There have been countless studies into what makes people commit evil acts.  Any of us can go online and look up these studies and learn for ourselves what science tells us are the reasons for these acts. What science cannot tell us is the source of evil in the world.  Again, I turn to the Bible for the answer.  Isaiah 45:6-8 tells us the source. 6 In order that they know from the shining of the sun and from the west that there is no one besides Me; I am the Lord and there is no other. 7 Who forms light and creates darkness, Who makes peace and creates evil; I am the Lord, Who makes all these. 8 Cause the heavens above to drip, and let the skies pour down righteousness; let the earth open, and let salvation and righteousness be fruitful; let it cause them to sprout together; I, the Lord, have created it.    Also in Amos 3:6 Will a shophar be sounded in the city and the people not quake? Will there be evil in the city if the Lord has not done it?  Yes, you read that correctly.  Evil comes from the Lord.  In Deuteronomy 30: 15-16 it says, 15 Behold, I have set before you today life and good, and death and evil, 16 inasmuch as I command you this day to love the Lord, your God, to walk in His ways, and to observe His commandments, His statutes, and His ordinances, so that you will live and increase, and the Lord, your God, will bless you in the land to which you are coming to take possession of it.  Why has HaShem put evil in the world?  The reason is very simple.  It is in order to give us the ability to choose Him.  Without giving us this choice, we don't have free will.  Without evil, we could not know hatred.  Without hatred, we could not know love.  Can you imagine the world without love?       

Throughout the Bible, we find stories where G-d turns something evil into something good.  Joseph was sold into slavery, spent time in an Egyptian prison, and later became second only Pharoh. Within this same story, we find that G-d sent a famine into the land of Cannan where Jacob and his family lived.  They were forced to go to Egypt looking for food and as a result, Jacob was reunited with the son he thought was dead.  There are many stories just like this.  All of these stories have an underlying theme.  G-d can take something which we perceive as evil and make it good.  Not only does He make it good.  He makes it extremely good; so much so that it could only be His will that makes it happen.  Could the children of Israel have simply walked away from over two hundred years of bondage without divine intervention?  Could Abraham have survived when Nimrod had him thrown into a furnace?  Likewise with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego?  Daniel was thrown into a den of lions, survived without a scratch and was made Viceroy.  Moses fled Egypt, running for his life and later returned as the greatest prophet of all time.  Elijah fled for his life.  David fled for his life.  Jacob fled for his life.  In all of these stories, they faced an evil which HaShem used to perform miracles.   

After the times of the Bible, Israel would face some of the most evil times in its history.  The Romans devastated the people.  They flayed the flesh from the great Rabbi Akiva for the crime of teaching Torah.  The Roman Empire would later spilt, with the remnants becoming the Roman Catholic Church. These later Romans spent centuries killing Jews who refused to convert to Christianity. They were forced out of Spain at the hands of the Inquisition.  Many submitted to conversion. Others fled to Portugal.  Part of the deal made with Queen Isabella to finance the journeys of Columbus included running the Jews out of Portugal.  Many Jews from this period were received by the Muslim-controlled Ottoman Empire.  Antisemitism later reached a climax in twentieth century Germany where at least six million Jews were savagely murdered.  Some estimates put that number at close to nine million Jews whose only crime was being Jewish.  Civilized people of today don't understand how this could have happened.  Many are now denying that it did happen.  This is a foolish claim since much of it was filmed at the time.  After two thousand years of hatred, forced conversions, killings, and varying degrees of rampant antisemitism, we were blessed with the reformation of the state of Israel in 1948.

The title of this article is "Turning Evil into Good- the Conclusion".  I chose this title because we are approaching the conclusion of this age.  The biggest evil in the world which the Jewish people have faced since the time of the Bible has been Christianity.  While it is true that the Holocaust saw the murder of the largest number of Jews in recorded history, it too had its roots in Christianity.  Hitler was a fan of Martin Luther who also supported, even called for the mass killing of the Jewish people. It is no doubt that Christianity has been the leading cause of death among Jewish people since the time of Jesus, who ironically, was a Jew.

Christianity,of course, has its roots in Judaism.  The early Christians were Jews who were misled by a false prophet.  By the end of the first century, however, Christianity was its own entity.  It was no longer made up of Jews.  It was made up of Romans and Greeks, both of whom hated the Jews. What happened all those years ago set the stage for the final and biggest example of HaShem turning something evil into something amazing for the Jewish people; the Messianic Age.  Isaiah 53 explains that the Jewish people, after having been despised and rejected (vv 3-4), will be used by G-d to vindicate the just (v11).  You see, G-d has always used the little guy to further His purpose. Look back at the stories we discussed earlier.  Joseph, Jacob, Moses, David, Daniel, and Elijah were all the little guy.  G-d uses the small and weak to show His glory to the big and the strong.  This is exactly what will happen in the final story.

Look at the Jewish people.  Compared to other religions of the world they are the smallest. Christianity is the biggest by far.  Christianity is the Goliath that will be destroyed by a son of David. Like Egypt, Christianity has been allowed to become grand.  In their grandiosity, they have oppressed the Jewish people.  They are like Esau, who could have supported his brother Jacob, but decided to stand aside and let His brother be destroyed (Obadiah 1).   They are the fourth kingdom of Daniel chapter 2 that will be destroyed when G-d sets up the kingdom that will not be destroyed.
                         

Copyright 2016 by:

William Bouker

The Reality of Freewill

When the Creator, blessed be His name, gave His Torah at Mount Sinai He told the Children of Israel He was setting before them life and death and that they should choose life.  We make choices every day.  Some are easy while others require some thought on our part.  The choices we make in our lives make us who we are.  I choose to follow the G-d of Avraham.  In doing so, I have accepted upon myself everything that goes along with that.  The Talmud tells us there are 613 commandments in the Torah.  These commandments have various rules that go along with them as well.  I choose to follow them and do them to the best of my ability.  Furthermore, I accept them without even knowing what all of them are and what they entail.  This is the same thing the Children of Israel did at Sinai. “na’aseh v’nishma“–“We will do and we will hear/understand.”  This teaches us that understanding comes after doing.  Indeed, our understanding of Torah can only come after doing what it says. Further, the more that we do what it says, the deeper our understanding becomes.  But, before you can do any of it, you must choose to do it.  So why would you choose to do it?  Isn't that a lot to do?

It goes without saying that choosing to follow Torah is a good thing.  But, how can you possibly know this?  How is it that you can understand what is good?  In order to understand what "good" is you must also understand what evil is.  Evil, being the opposite of good, is easy for us to understand. It fits into the realm of what we can comprehend.  It is a simple equation.  Good equals life while evil equals death.  Who in their right mind would choose death over life?  Many people try to extend this equation to their understanding of G-d.  G-d is good so something else must be causing all this evil in the world.  This is the mistake that comes from trying to understand first rather than doing.  The Torah teaches us that good and evil both come from G-d.  There is no evil force at odds with Him. Everything comes from Him.  He created this world and everything in it.  This concept is foreign to other religions, but it is the only one that makes sense.  Think of it this way.  Say you are an artisan of some kind.  You sit down to do your creative work.  Do you create some part of it to negate the work itself?  It is not even possible.  Can a musician write a song that will have some opposite part that will stand out as being a negative of the song?  Can a painter or a sculptor do this?  In the same way, G-d did not create the world with some evil being who is trying to undermine its creator.  It just isn't possible.  But we know that there is evil in the world.  From where did it come?  Torah teaches us that evil comes from G-d just like everything else.  Without evil in the world, it would not be possible to choose good.  He wants us to choose Him, to choose life and not death.  Without at least two options, one cannot make a choice.  You must also understand that He transcends our limited understanding of good and evil. We cannot say that G-d is good or that He is evil.  We can only say that He is.

Free will gives us power, albeit a limited power.  Whatever our status in this world, free will gives us some power.  Even those of the lowest social status have the power to choose to do good.  That is free will. Whichever path in life you choose, there are things that go along with it.  We work at becoming what we are.  The evil person has things he does and practices his evil.  Likewise, the righteous person has work to do to fulfill his righteousness.  Both paths have that which is simple and that which is difficult.  It is simple for the righteous person not to kill someone.  It is simple for the evil person pocket something that is not his if the opportunity should arise.  Where the two paths come close to each other is when it gets difficult.  The righteous person might be tempted to steal something or the evil person might be tempted to do good.  At times, we do make choices that are out of our character.  But this is not the norm, and that is not to say that the individual cannot decide to change his life and take the opposite path.  This happens all the time.

Many people believe that humans are born evil.  The concept of "original sin" however, does not exist in the Torah and is nothing more that pagan folklore.  There were many righteous people born after the time of Adam and prior to the Nazarene.  Noah, Abraham, and Moses are but a few.  These men, and countless others like them, made the conscious decision to do that which was good.  The pagan concept of original sin should have rendered them guilty.  Noah was counted righteous enough to populate the entire world.  Abraham was counted righteous enough to be the father of many nations. Moses, the greatest of all the prophets, was given the honor of receiving the Torah.  Do these men bear the guilt of original sin?  Are they burning in hell right now?  Of course not.  That would be ridiculous.  The pagan church has been very successful in convincing much of the world that this is exactly the case.  The church, in fact, does its best to remove free will from the world by means of an ultimatum.

The church negates free will by removing the ability to choose.  They demand that you believe in their god.  If you don't, you will burn in hell for eternity.  Is that a choice?  Not hardly.  The church has spent two thousand years perpetuating these pagan ideas.  Recent history has not been nearly as violent as the early years.  The Protestant Reformation severely undermined the power the early church wielded over humanity.  But rest assured the concepts are still there.

The church actually calls free will a problem.  Protestant reformers Calvin and Luther didn't think free will even existed.  Catholics contend that G-d controls the wills of men.  These concepts are complete foolishness and even contradict their own tenets.  All churches teach that one must be saved in order to receive eternal life.  They also teach that those who are not saved are under the control of the devil.  This begs the question.  How can a person who is wicked ever be saved unless they make the decision to do so?  Freewill is a big problem for the church.  Free will gives us the power and removes it from them and they don't like that.  They would rather people just follow along with what they are pushing and not be free thinkers.

Judaism doesn't have this problem.  In fact, they don't expect anyone who isn't Jewish to become Jewish.  They certainly allow conversion, but it is neither demanded or expected.  They allow the individual to choose their path in life.  The Hebrew Scriptures even allow people who aren't Jewish to have a relationship with G-d.  Gentiles are only responsible for following the seven Noahide Laws. These are the seven general regulations given to Noah after the flood.  Those who keep the seven laws are guaranteed a place in the world to come.  So, in Jewish thought Gentiles are given three options for their lives.  You can be a good Noahide and keep the seven laws.  You can convert to Judaism and take on the entire Law of Moses.  Thirdly, you can be evil if you so choose.  The choice is completely up to you.  Unfortunately for the church, they have chosen this third option.  You see, the church practices idolatry in that they worship the man on the stick.  Worship of anything or anyone other that the Creator, blessed be His name, is idolatry.  Idolatry is forbidden by the seven laws as well as the Law of Moses.  Idolatry is a grave insult to G-d.

Know that you have a choice in life.  Know that you are at liberty to make any choice you wish. Don't allow the church to threaten you with hellfire only to trap you in their idolatrous maelstrom they call religion.      

Copyright 2016 by:
Willliam Bouker