I am having a real struggle with understanding and accepting today’s verses, especially verse 7b: “I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do all these things” (NRSV). In The Message, the wording is, “I make harmonies and create discords. I, God, do all these things.”
I had to look up what “weal” means, and the meaning is different when it’s combined in the phrase, “weal and woe.” According to my sources, the weal refers to good times of joy, success, and prosperity while the woe refers to tough times of sadness and adversity.
With that understanding of terms, I read the verses as the Lord makes the harmony of good times that include joy, success, and prosperity, and He also creates the discord of tough times that include sadness and adversity.
I am having a tough time with the idea of God making/creating all of those good and bad circumstances. Didn’t God create and make all the good things? But the bad things–I thought they were on us humans. What about humans having our own free will to make our situations better or worse?
I believe the intent of the verses is to show how big and powerful God is so that the people could trust Him to lead their way. In verse 2, He told them that He is going to level the mountains and clear the path for their journey.
But, today, it’s really hard to read these verses without wondering about how they apply to what is happening in Ukraine. Where is God in that situation? Is He creating the woe? I cannot accept that. I don’t see His stepping in to make weal, or a harmonious resolution, either, though. I don’t see any reports of His leveling the bad guys and clearing the path to peace and prosperity for the people of Ukraine like the verses say He was going to do for King Cyrus and the Israelites. I thought the responsibility was ours, as God’s people, to make a positive difference. But, those verses say that God is making and creating both the good and the bad in all this.
Does God create–or even simply allow–evil to win the day?
I am feeling unsettled with these verses.
Ellen, you put your finger on the thorniest of theological problems. Theologians call it the problem of theodicy--how can a God who is both loving and powerful (all-powerful) allow so much undeserved suffering to go on in the world? (If you have Catherine Keller's book "On the Mystery," she addresses this from a process theology approach in chapter 4.)
First, on the Isaiah passage: Biblical Hebrew uses a lot of merisms (the use of two contrasting or opposite elements to refer to the whole). "Heaven and earth" = all creation. "Night and day" = the whole 24-hour period. So when God says in Isaiah "I form light and create darkness; I make weal (the Hebrew word is shalom) and I create woe" it is a way of saying "I create everything." That does not solve the problem of theodicy, but it affirms a belief that there is only one God. From a biblical perspective, we cannot thank God for the good things and blame the bad things on "the Devil." Everything, good and bad, has its ultimate origin with God.
In general, biblical writers believe that when bad things happen they are brought on by human disobedience. God created a world that is good (Genesis 1), but humans mess things up (everything that follows Genesis 1). God gives us instructions on what we should do and not do (the Ten Commandments and other laws in the Pentateuch). Jesus repeats and expands upon that instruction. We should know the difference between right and wrong, so the problem is doing it.
Second: thinking theologically to push this further. The enormity of human cruelty that became visible in the twentieth century with the Holocaust forces us to think further on the problem of theodicy. We have to ask, how could God allow such cruelty to occur. That is the question many of us are asking about Ukraine (just as we asked it about other genocides of the 20th and 21st centuries).
Theologians say we have to give up either the belief in a loving God or the belief in an omnipotent God. I am not willing to give up a belief that God's essential nature is love. I am willing to give up the notion that God could and would fix things to eliminate and prevent all innocent human suffering. From a process theology perspective, Catherine Keller says we need to revise our understanding of God's power. She proposes replacing a theology of God's coercive power with a theology of God's persuasive power. She speaks of a God of Love who calls forth--but does not coerce--our human cooperation with God in the world. Everything has its origin with God (Isaiah), but humans are called to be co-creators with God of the world that God wants us to inhabit (Genesis 1, humans are the image of God in the world).