Does good need evil?

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PeteZaHut

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I know that God allows good and evil to coexist, and He also brings good out of evil, but does good NEED evil?

Our whole faith is centered around Christ dying for our sins. Evil acts were necessary for that to take place. If Judas did not betray Jesus, if the people in the crowd did not yell out “Crucify him,” and if Pontius Pilate did not sentence Jesus to death, then Jesus would not have died for our sins.

God brings good out of evil, but in this case, it seems like the evil was necessary for the good to take place.
 
God does not need evil.
Jesus died because there was sin in the world. If there was no sin Jesus would not have died.

God allows evil because he can conquer it. But he does not need evil in order to do good.
If there have not been evil, there would not have been a need to conquer it.
Those evils you enumerated did not happen so Jesus can die, but Jesus died so they can be conquered.
Jesus death was inevitable. He just put himself against the stream.

This is an interesting way to look at it I discovered recently.
Consider a child who is born out of rape. We often wonder why would God create a human being out of rape? It sound as if he is corraborating with evil. But this is not the case.

I think God is being victorious over evil. Remember the main battle happens in the spiritual world. Even though the mother is in a sense destroyed. God shows that he can bring life out of death. If the mother believes, God is already using the child to show his power, I believe that he can use it for even greater good for the mother even though this sound fourish to the regular human eye.

Back to the cruxifiction. Remember the Lord Jesus is the Lamb who was slain before the foundation of the world!!! I think this refer to the mystery of the Trinity. Sacrifice is built-in in the Holy Trinity.

The love in the trinity is a self-sacrificial love. Every person lives entirely for the other. There is precisly perfect unity because there is perfect sacrifice of self.

God bless
 
God is ultimate goodness and He needs nothing. He created everything good and it was the gift of free will that got us into evil. Evil is what results when one chooses to go against the will of infinite Goodness.(God) God could have done everything with creation even if we had continually followed His will and never sinned.

No, good does not need evil since good comes from God and evil is a consequence of rejecting God…teachccd
 
Mark 10:18 *And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God.

God is that good One…Does God need evil…for himself…hmm??
 
PeteZaHut said:
I know that God allows good and evil to coexist, and He also brings good out of evil, but does good NEED evil?

Our whole faith is centered around Christ dying for our sins. Evil acts were necessary for that to take place. If Judas did not betray Jesus, if the people in the crowd did not yell out “Crucify him,” and if Pontius Pilate did not sentence Jesus to death, then Jesus would not have died for our sins.

God brings good out of evil, but in this case, it seems like the evil was necessary for the good to take place.
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…yeah… but only in the grand scheming realm of hollo-wood!

Maran atha!

Angel
 
It is like light and darkness. Darkness is just the absence of light.

Evil is what you get when you reject God. It is not a force in and of itself.

When people complain about the evil in the world, just rephrase it. They are complaining about the lack of God in the world. And why not, they keep rejecting Him. Even their complaint shows that they think themselves capable of judging God’s ability to run His universe, and is a rejection of God.

Romans 1 says God gives them what they want. He backs out and lets the consequences of their own sin come to fruition.

If you think about it. In one way God said, “You want to be gods of your world, have at it” and the evil is the mess we made of it.

The light dispels the darkness, and one needs only resist the devil to have him flee.
 
**There is no possible source of evil except good.
–Saint Augustine **

Evil can come from good by virtue of its being a privation of good but good can’t come from evil or depend on it to exist.
 
fhansen said:
**There is no possible source of evil except good.
–Saint Augustine **

Evil can come from good by virtue of its being a privation of good but good can’t come from evil or depend on it to exist.
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…can you be less exclusive? Quoting this single sentence seems to imply that Saint Augustine believed that God is the source of evil… though I am not familiar with the quote, I don’t think that St. Augustine believed that, by design, God creates evil or that He needs evil to exist in order for Him to exist!

Maran atha!

Angel
 
jcrichton said:
…can you be less exclusive? Quoting this single sentence seems to imply that Saint Augustine believed that God is the source of evil… though I am not familiar with the quote, I don’t think that St. Augustine believed that, by design, God creates evil or that He needs evil to exist in order for Him to exist!

Maran atha!

Angel
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It just means that everything that exists was created by God and everything created by God is good so that the source material for evil has to come from good, even if the existence of evil was enabled solely by giving free will (a good thing) to creatures (also good things).
 
PeteZaHut said:
I know that God allows good and evil to coexist, and He also brings good out of evil, but does good NEED evil?

Our whole faith is centered around Christ dying for our sins. Evil acts were necessary for that to take place. If Judas did not betray Jesus, if the people in the crowd did not yell out “Crucify him,” and if Pontius Pilate did not sentence Jesus to death, then Jesus would not have died for our sins.

God brings good out of evil, but in this case, it seems like the evil was necessary for the good to take place.
Click to expand...
No. Good does not need evil. God Is Good and He doesn’t need anything. Christ would have prefered not to die for us He asked for it. If He didn’t die for us because sin never happened, it wouldn’t make Him any less Who He Is and Who He Is to us. We are His beloved spouse. Perhaps if we didn’t sin we would even have a better understanding of what this means. Evil makes things worse not better.
 
From the Exultet sung every Easter Vigil Mass:

This is the night
when Christians everywhere,
washed clean of sin and freed from all defilement,
are restored to grace and grow together in holiness.

This is the night
when Jesus Christ broke the chains of death
and rose triumphant from the grave.

What good would life have been to us,
had Christ not come as our Redeemer?
Father, how wonderful your care for us!
How boundless your merciful love!
To ransom a slave you gave away your Son.

O happy fault,
O necessary sin of Adam,
which gained for us so great a Redeemer!

From the Catholic Encyclopedia: newadvent.org/cathen/05730b.htm

We are drawn out of cold dogmatic statement into the warmth of the deepest mysticism, to the region where, in the light of paradise, even the sin of Adam may be regarded as truly necessary and a happy fault".

newadvent.org/summa/4001.htm

For such things as spring from God’s will, and beyond the creature’s due, can be made known to us only through being revealed in the Sacred Scripture, in which the Divine Will is made known to us. Hence, since everywhere in the Sacred Scripture the sin of the first man is assigned as the reason of Incarnation, it is more in accordance with this to say that the work of Incarnation was ordained by God as a remedy for sin; so that, had sin not existed, Incarnation would not have been. And yet the power of God is not limited to this; even had sin not existed, God could have become incarnate.

What do you all think?
 
In the hundreds of “dark sayings”, in the layer known to the Jews as PaRaDiSe or PaRDeS , I have yet to see a single hint that there was anything happy about sin.

In fact, one of the predominant themes of the shadows is that of splitting, and tearing. Every instance is a shadow of Christ on the cross. The riddle is how does it represent him when he was not torn on the cross.

The agony of the cross was that the very nature and hypostaseos of God was torn. The Father could not bear to look upon his Son who had been made to be sin, so much that the very substance of God, whatever that is, was torn. The Father had left, and the Son was made to be sin. How much more desolate could the earth be?

And for a divine person who exists in eternity, how long would three days be? The Father was separated from the Son for three days that stretched for an eternity.

No, there is no happiness in sin. “Obedience is better than sacrifice.”
 
dranzal said:
From the Exultet sung every Easter Vigil Mass:

This is the night
when Christians everywhere,
washed clean of sin and freed from all defilement,
are restored to grace and grow together in holiness.

This is the night
when Jesus Christ broke the chains of death
and rose triumphant from the grave.

What good would life have been to us,
had Christ not come as our Redeemer?
Father, how wonderful your care for us!
How boundless your merciful love!
To ransom a slave you gave away your Son.

O happy fault,
O necessary sin of Adam,
which gained for us so great a Redeemer!

From the Catholic Encyclopedia: newadvent.org/cathen/05730b.htm

We are drawn out of cold dogmatic statement into the warmth of the deepest mysticism, to the region where, in the light of paradise, even the sin of Adam may be regarded as truly necessary and a happy fault".

newadvent.org/summa/4001.htm

For such things as spring from God’s will, and beyond the creature’s due, can be made known to us only through being revealed in the Sacred Scripture, in which the Divine Will is made known to us. Hence, since everywhere in the Sacred Scripture the sin of the first man is assigned as the reason of Incarnation, it is more in accordance with this to say that the work of Incarnation was ordained by God as a remedy for sin; so that, had sin not existed, Incarnation would not have been. And yet the power of God is not limited to this; even had sin not existed, God could have become incarnate.

What do you all think?
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👍 This is my understanding-that the happy or blessed fault can result in something even greater for-and within-man. Thanks for the statement quoted from the CE on the Exultet-I hadn’t read that before.
 
dranzal said:
From the Exultet sung every Easter Vigil Mass:

This is the night
when Christians everywhere,
washed clean of sin and freed from all defilement,
are restored to grace and grow together in holiness.

This is the night
when Jesus Christ broke the chains of death
and rose triumphant from the grave.

What good would life have been to us,
had Christ not come as our Redeemer?
Father, how wonderful your care for us!
How boundless your merciful love!
To ransom a slave you gave away your Son.

O happy fault,
O necessary sin of Adam,
which gained for us so great a Redeemer!

From the Catholic Encyclopedia: newadvent.org/cathen/05730b.htm

We are drawn out of cold dogmatic statement into the warmth of the deepest mysticism, to the region where, in the light of paradise, even the sin of Adam may be regarded as truly necessary and a happy fault".

newadvent.org/summa/4001.htm

For such things as spring from God’s will, and beyond the creature’s due, can be made known to us only through being revealed in the Sacred Scripture, in which the Divine Will is made known to us. Hence, since everywhere in the Sacred Scripture the sin of the first man is assigned as the reason of Incarnation, it is more in accordance with this to say that the work of Incarnation was ordained by God as a remedy for sin; so that, had sin not existed, Incarnation would not have been. And yet the power of God is not limited to this; even had sin not existed, God could have become incarnate.

What do you all think?
Click to expand...
Hi!

Though some of it sound very inspired and profound, the mitigating factor is that God does not need evil to be God; God did not create evil–hence, good exists in the absence of evil. Due to our human limitations we are trained to think: black vs. white; dark vs. light; evil vs. good or the other way around…

Yet in the beginning everything was created and Yahweh God saw that it was good. Man was given free reign and if not for his fall evil would not have existed; this fact is proven in Apocalypse as it is revealed that nothing impure (evil/bad) will enter into the Holy City, the Heavenly Jerusalem!

Further, God exists in a pure state, in Him there is no evil; we are commanded to become as He is! (…be perfect, for I AM perfect.)

Maran atha!

Angel
 
rcjones said:
And for a divine person who exists in eternity, how long would three days be? The Father was separated from the Son for three days that stretched for an eternity.
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Hi, rcjones!

…but it was not necessarily so… Jesus’ words to the “good thief” was “Today you will be with me in Paradise.” So while the body may have been buried, His Spirit was back with the Father:

He that hath an ear let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches: To him that overcometh I will give to eat of the tree of life which is in the paradise of my God. (Ap 2:7)

And he took me up in spirit to a great and high mountain: and he shewed me the holy city Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, (Ap 21:10)

In the midst of the street thereof, and on both sides of the river, was the tree of life, bearing twelve fruits, yielding its fruits every month: the leaves of the tree for the healing of the nations. (Ap 22:2)

Blessed are they that wash their robes in the blood of the Lamb: that they may have a right to the tree of life and may enter in by the gates into the city. (Ap 22:14)

…still, no matter how miniscule the length of time may have been, it truly was an extremely agonizing chalice (cup) which Jesus did not desire to partake.

Maran atha!

Angel
 
jcrichton said:
Hi!

Though some of it sound very inspired and profound, the mitigating factor is that God does not need evil to be God;
Click to expand...
I don’t think my post implied this in any way. The question inherent in my post is “Would the incarnation still have occurred had we never sinned?”
 
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