Showing posts with label demons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label demons. Show all posts

Saturday, 14 December 2019

What is Evil? Isaiah 45:7

What is Evil? 




Come to hate hypocrisy and the evil thought; for it is the thought that gives birth to hypocrisy; but hypocrisy is far from truth." (The Apocryphon Gospel of James)

evil--That which is not of the Deity; unreality; error thought; a product of the fallen human consciousness; negation.

'Evil' in the New Testament can denote three things-misleading standards (stoichiea) like henos anthropos; wrong disposition in the sense of a materialistic world-view; and dehumanizing acts. For Paul, evil is not associated with demons in the sense of supernatural beings. He clearly supports this in Gal 4:8-9 when he says, "stoichieas [daemons] are not gods."

Isaiah 45:7 7 I form the light and create darkness, I make peace [national well-being] and I create [physical] evil (calamity); I am the Lord, Who does all these things.

Moral evil proceeds from the will of men, but physical evil proceeds from the will of God
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Sin and evil are as cause and effect. God is the author of evil, but not of sin; for the evil is the punishment of sin. "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I, Yahweh, do all these things." (Isa. 45:7) "Shall there be evil in a city, and Yahweh has not done it?" (Amos 3:6) The evil then to which man is subjected is Yahweh's doing. War, famine, pestilence, flood, earthquake, disease, and death, are the terrible evils which God inflicts upon mankind for their transgressions. Nations cannot go to war when they please, any more than they can shake the earth at their will and pleasure; neither can they preserve peace, when He proclaims war. Evil is the artillery with which He combats the enemies of His law, and of His the holy ones; consequently, there will be neither peace nor blessedness for the nations, until sin is put down, His people avenged, and truth and righteousness be established in the earth. 


Apparent evil is the result of ignorance, and when Truth is presented the error disappears.
Evil appears in the world because man is not in spiritual understanding.

evil, overcoming--Evil must be overcome with good. We must dwell in the good so wholly that all the substance of our thoughts and our being is given over to the promotion of the good. This is a mental process in which all negation (evil) is denied, and creative, fearless affirmation of God's perfect good is steadfastly adhered to.

Tuesday, 22 October 2019

The Book of Tobit




The book of Tobit has all the outer trappings of a historical account however the book is best understood as an allegorical story. The story is intended to edify and to inspire faith in God

the author of Tobit uses Job as a model for Tobit  the two persons are both men of outstandingly good deeds and rightousness who thought they suffered and were tested job 1:6-2:10 Tobit 12:14 did not loss their faith job 31:37 Tobit 3:2-6  and ultimately were rewarded with even greater blessings job 42:10-16 Tobit 14:1-2

the moral sense of the book of tobit is that God answers our prayers

Tobit is a symbol of Israel's blindness 1enoch 93:8
Tobias is a symbol of redeemed Israel
Raphael is a symbol of God redeeming Israel
Sarah is a symbol of the nation of Israel in exile
Asmodeus – ruler of lust,the demon is an aspect of the misfortunes of Israel in exile in a gentile land
the demon is also a symbol of the fallen priesthood

Tobiah's marriage to Sarah can be taken as an allegory of Christ's mystical marriage to His Bride the Church. 


Just as Tobiah's marriage was made possible by the exorcism of a demon, Christ's marriage to the Church was made possible through the defeat of the Devil.

 Just as Christ's resurrection from the dead took place at the conclusion of the seventh day of the week-i.e., the ``eighth'' day-so Tobiah was the eighth husband of Sarah.

Christians who were used to symbolising Jesus as a fish would naturally see the fish of the Book of Tobit as a type of Christ. Just as Christ healed the sick and cast out demons, so it was the miraculous medicinal powers of the fish's organs that made possible the exorcism of Asmodeus and the healing of Tobit's blindness. 

The blindness and poverty of Tobit would represent Adam's bondage to sin and death, so Tobiah's healing of his father is like Christ's spiritual healing of Adam's sin. 

Hannah's grief at the departure of her only son Tobiah also reminds us of Mary's grief at the suffering and death of her son Jesus (Luke 2:34-35).

Again, the Sadducees' rhetorical example of a woman with seven husbands (Matt. 22:23-28) might be an oblique reference to Sarah,

the demon was "bound up by the angel" (ch.8:3)
neither the liver nor the heart or the bile of the fish per se were the objects that cured and drove out the demon, but were merely SYMBOLIC means, through which God performed the miraculous cure of Tobit, and the expulsion of the demon.