Theological Commentary: Click Here
For today’s
post, I have an interesting moral quandary.
The issue comes out of the story of Hazael and his trip to see
Elisha. The king of Syria, Ben-hadad,
gets sick and sends Hazael to seek Elisha to see if he will recover from the illness. While Hazael is in Elisha’s company, Elisha
begins to weep. Elisha explains to
Hazael that he is weeping because God has shown Elisha all of the things that
Hazael will do to the Hebrew people once he becomes king over Syria. When Hazael returns to Ben-hadad, Hazael
kills him so that he can take over as king!
There are
two quandaries, actually. I believe that
the first is more readily navigated than the second. The first one is: would Hazael have had the plan
to kill Ben-hadad had Elisha not told him that he would be king? The reason that this quandary is navigated
easily is because I believe the answer to be yes. Human beings are inherently evil, so the lan
to kill Ben-hadad and assume all of his power would have certainly developed in
Hazael eventually. It wasn’t God’s idea,
therefore it was Hazael’s. He would have
come to that decision at some point. In
fact, one could make the case that Elisha’s word weren’t actually what spurred
Hazael to commit murder but to affirm publicly what was already hidden away in
Hazael’s heart. This is actually what I
think is going on in this chapter. God
isn’t inspiring Hazael to become king, God is trying to show Hazael His power
by revealing knowledge of the plan that u until now has been privately festering
in his heart. Naturally, this is speculation
on my behalf.
The second
quandary is far more difficult to navigate.
If God knew about all of the evil that Hazael would do, why didn’t God
have Hazael killed by Elisha or eaten by some wild animal on his way back
home? It isn’t like that hasn’t been a plotline
in other stories surrounding Elisha, even!
The reason
that this is a quandary is because it points us to a truth that we don’t like
to talk about when pondering God. God
has the power to utterly destroy evil.
But for the sake of free will, He doesn’t. God allows Hazael to live, even though he
will bring much pain and suffering on other human beings.
That puts us
in a tight spot emotionally speaking. God
doesn’t kill Hazael and allows him to become king. For the record, in the future we’ll see how
God brings forth the Assyrians to do bring Israel under judgment. God brings forth the Babylonians to bring
judgment upon Judah. Both the Assyrians
and the Babylonians do horrible things to the Hebrew people. The reality is that God doesn’t vanquish true
evil wherever it exists.
If we are
willing to accept that – as difficult as that may be to accept – we can
actually see why. I believe there are
many reasons; I’ll outline two here.
First, if God were to have a standing policy to vanquish evil, we should
all die right now. The reality is that
evil lies within my heart. I am sinful
and evil. I fight against it, but I am
still evil within my heart. I should be
vanquished. Second, God uses that evil
to try and teach His people about faith.
The end result of the Assyrian and Babylonian captivity is that His
people spiritually return to Him. The
end result of the evil of the crucifixion is a spiritual people devoted to the
teachings of His Son. God allows evil to
continue to exist because through His greatness He can work through the evil
and produce far greater outcomes than would be gained by crushing the evil
outright.
That doesn’t
make the evil right, nor does it justify the evil in any way. What it does is demonstrate to us the power
of God to even work true spiritual righteousness out of even the most
unspeakable evil. That’s a learning that
can only come through the study of the quandary the arises when we ask why God
allows Hazael to live when He knows the evil that is about to ensue.
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