No Other God

Today's Three-minute Bible Study
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Title: No Other God------------------------------ Date: 1/22/2001
Keywords: "darkness" "evil" "good" "light"
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Passage: Isaiah 45:5-7*

5. I am the Lord, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God. I will strengthen you, though you have not acknowledged me,

6. so that from the rising of the sun to the place of its setting men may know there is none besides me. I am the Lord and there is no other.

7. I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things.

Questions

1. Why do bad things happen to good people?

 

2. Why do bad people prosper?

 

3. How can a good God allow evil, like porn, to exist?

 

Practical help

The questions above are some of the most significant stumbling blocks to faith. We don't pretend to offer the concise and complete answer in a three-minute Bible study. However, God, speaking through Isaiah, sheds some light on the issue (pun intended).

Noted Hebrew scholar and cosmologist Gerald L. Schroeder translates Verse 7 as follows: "I make light and create darkness, I make peace and create evil." God, by the very act of making what was good, also created what was evil. How would we know light if we knew not darkness? God, by creating a physical world, and instilling in it the knowledge of good and evil, chose to permit us, by free will, to exclude him by choosing to act and think as if he doesn't exist. Once that choice was made in the Garden, it set in motion the cause-and-effect laws of nature, laws which God invented, which result in randomness and uncertainty. Things can only be set back into order when we rest in the knowledge of him. God has not withdrawn completely; otherwise his creation would have quickly dissipated into nothingness. The evil men, those who do not acknowledge him, still have strength because of him. If you are weighed down by your porn habit, you can still acknowledge the fact that he has not completely destroyed you, and know that he is God, and that there is no other.

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*Scriptures are from The Holy Bible: New International Version © Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. All rights reserved.