God and Violence (7) Purpose

God had to use the spiritual powers to accomplish his purposes. Of course, he can use evil spirits if they do his will by mistake, but he cannot make them do things they do not want to do. They are in rebellion against God, so they prefer to do the opposite of what he wants. However, they love violence so they are quite happy to engage in violence, even against other evil spirits that are opposed to God too.

The spiritual powers of evil are not very smart and mostly do what they have done before. If God puts an idea in their minds, they will usually run with it, if it provides an opportunity for them to be violent. The powers of evil love violence so they are quite happy to use violence against their own side. One was happy to be a deceiver when God suggested that to him, because he wanted to destroy a king (1 Kings 22:22).

God uses powerful evil nations to accomplish his purposes. He uses bad nations to destroy evil nations. For example, he used Cyrus of Persia to destroy the Babylonian empire. So while God, might not have organised the violence, he colluded with violent nations to accomplish his purposes. He had no alternative, because he had such limited authority on earth. No other means were open to him in the situation.

While the spiritual powers are doing evil, God seems to trick them into doing what he wants them to. He can accomplish his purposes by manipulating them to destroy other evil. He does not make them more evil. Instead, he gives them ideas to change the direction of the evil that they would be doing evil anyway. They switch from meaningless evil to doing evil that allows God to achieve his goals in the world.

God uses the spiritual powers of evil to accomplish his purposes. They are often extremely violent. They led Pharaoh and his army into the Red Sea, where they were destroyed. Could God have stopped this from happening? I don’t think so. He did not have any authority once the Israelites had departed, so the powers of evil had a free hand to destroy the Egyptian army. I presume they did it for their enjoyment. However, it did have the benefit of protecting the children of Israel from being pursued by the people that they had escaped from.