To make no choice, is to make a choice

This is the nature of love. It cannot be forced or controlled, or it is not love. If the world looks like a war-zone, it is because it is one! Indifference is a choice. Seeking peace and healing are no soft option.

Nigel Pocock

Indeed, to make no choice, is to make a choice. You are already committed.

Let us then play a language game. God is in the market-place. He wants people to make a free choice.

This flows out of love being itself a choice, and one that demands freedom. He creates many other beings apart from people, angels, hierarchies of them. They, too, must choose. Some decide to follow goodness, beauty and truth; others, despotism and destruction. Like Gollum, their obsession with power depersonalises them; they become demons, evil spirits, gods, angels bent on destruction, Apollyon.

God cannot allow this destruction to go on forever, so he sets a plan in motion. It is a secret plan, hidden from those blinded by their ‘precious’.

The demonic powers, in their conceit, think that they understand it. For God sends a man who attracts nothing but total contempt from the ruling powers. Yet they fear this servant, who says that his name is simply ‘man’. To destroy him, will destroy this master-plan!

So Apollyon – the destroyer – raises his mailed fist, and strikes him dead. Such is the all-consuming hatred of the powers for the servant, that evil itself consumes them. Like pigs drowning in the mire, so they die in their own vomit. Down on the earth, there are people. Some are wringing their hands. “How can bad things happen to good people?” they cry.

Two thousand years have gone by. Then, one-one asked such a question, it was so unreal, as to be bizarre. After all, that was exactly what was expected to happen to good people!

The Greeks came, and the Christians adopted their notion of a God that was ‘sovereign’, in that he, in order to be all-powerful, must be in control of everything. Not a pin dropped, but God controlled it.

Thus – how could evil exist, if this God was a God of love – and all-powerful, all controlling? There could be no room for evil!

Before this, the existence of evil was a practical question, not an intellectual one. Yet, surprising as it may seem, like Occam’s Razor, thus is actually a better answer to why evil happens. God is in the market-place, because his love propels him there. People must choose. Other created beings must choose.

For this is the nature of love. It cannot be forced or controlled, or it is not love. If the world looks like a war-zone, it is because it is one!

Pascal’s coin, ever spinning, yet at some time it must fall. How will you wager? Not to wager is a choice. Indifference is a choice. Seeking peace and healing are no soft option.