God doesn’t have a dark side.

1 John 1.5-7.

The thing about gnostics is they’ve always prioritized weirdness over Jesus. After all if these were commonsense teachings we could learn from the bible, be guided into by the Holy Spirit, or figure out on our own, we wouldn’t need to pay the gnostics a fistfull of money for their secrets. We wouldn’t need to buy their videos, attend their seminars, or pay tuition to their unaccredited universities.

Well, some of the gnostic ideas have leaked into Christendom. Some of them were affecting the first-century church. Hence the apostle John’s first letter, correcting his church. Something we still gotta read, because loads of these ideas are still around—either held over from the first century, or new gnostics came up with them independently. Still misinforming Christians.

Some of ’em are outright heresy. Others aren’t technically heresy… because heresy is defined by the creeds, and for whatever reason the creeds didn’t get to that particular error. Often because the ancient Christians figured, “Well of course that’s wrong; haven’t you read a bible?” But, then as now, people don’t read. (So read your bible!) Their favorite teachers did all the reading for them, and they blindly followed these teachers without double-checking any of their proof texts. It’s how gnostics have always got away with it.

And one of the more popular errors, still commonly believed, is about God having a dark side.

It’s based on determinism—the belief God is so sovereign, he controls absolutely everything in the cosmos. God’s the “unmoved mover” of Aristotle of Athens, the first cause of everything, and nothing in the universe happens without his permission. Really, determinists insist, if he isn’t wielding total control of everything, we can’t legitimately call him almighty.

But if God’s in charge, what about sin? Why is evil, chaos, and death part of our universe when God’s pulling every single string of our cosmic puppet show?

If you’re not a determinist—and I’m not, and neither is St. John—there’s a really simple answer: He’s not pulling every single string of the show. He’s not so inept a creator that he built the universe, yet constantly has to fiddle with it lest it go awry. Imagine a clockmaker who, instead of building a clockwork that effectively keeps time, always moves the arms himself. It’d make him the worst clockmaker. Likewise a micromanagerial creator would be an incompetent creator, not a masterful one.

So when creation goes wrong, God’s not at fault. He made it profoundly good, Ge 1.31 but he granted his creation free will. It can legitimately make its own decisions—and choose to do either what God told it to, or its own thing. That’s the cause of evil, chaos, and death. Not God.

Determinists insist no, God’d never cede control of his domain like that. (Certainly they never would, were they God.) And since he doesn’t stop or mitigate the evil (again, not like they would, were they God) he must’ve determined this evil, chaos, and death oughta happen. He wants it to. It’s not the fallout from our bad choices; it’s part of the plan. A plan full of evil, chaos, and death—so much so it’s really an evil plan—but it’ll all turn out in the long run. It’s just in the short run, God sovereignly decrees evil, chaos, and death.

You’ve seen this in sitcoms and superhero movies, like The Incredibles: Somebody wants to look like a hero, so he creates a disaster, fully intending to “solve” the problem himself so everybody can laud him as a hero. This is exactly the same way determinists describe God. He’s gonna solve all the evil in the world, and as a result receive all the glory. But wait… didn’t he create the problem in the first place?

And y’notice in the sitcoms and superhero movies, the mastermind gets exposed as creating the crisis in the first place. And universally denounced as a fraud. ’Cause he totally is. Yet for some reason, determinists think it’s way different with God: Even though God’s totally behind the evil, he’s not evil. He can’t be; he says he’s not!

Eventually their blasphemous explanations get a little too incredible for even them to believe. Which is why so many determinists quit Christianity or turn atheist. And y’know, if God really were the way determinists claim, I can’t blame people for rejecting him: That’s not a good God!

But I would counter that’s not God. The true God doesn’t have a dark side. Doesn’t have a secret evil plan. Far be it from him to even imagine a secret evil plan. And yes, he’s still sovereign and almighty; just not deterministic.

If God has a dark side, can we have one too?

Here’s a dirty little secret you’re gonna see among too many determinists: A lot of ’em legitimately believe the ends justify the means. It’s okay to do evil, so long that something good comes out of it in the long run. Because isn’t this exactly what they believe God does? In the deterministic worldview, God himself incorporates every last act of evil into his sovereign plan, and turns it into good. So maybe, just maybe, we can do likewise.

Y’might call this a case of “monkey see, monkey do”: If God gets to dabble in evil and not get burnt, maybe we can do it too. At least with small, manageable, non-felonious evils. Only God is mighty enough to mitigate vast evils, like genocide and institutional racism, so let’s not go there; maybe we should stick to small evils like white lies and minor fraud. Anything bigger can spin out of control.

And yeah, if you grew up in a church which taught you God has a dark side, this is definitely a case of poisonous fruit taking root. But frequently Christians choose deterministic churches. They love the idea God makes all things work together for good, that everything happens for a reason, that nothing in this universe is as meaningless as Ecclesiastes says. Finally, here’s a church which tells ’em what they want to hear!—what they’ve always wished or hoped was true. And if they’re this willing to choose an interpretation of God which suits ’em best, stands to reason they’re just as willing to embrace a God who dabbles in evil because they kinda think it’s okay to dabble in evil.

Pharisees had a lot of determinists among them, and y’notice they tended to make this very same error, and be just as corrupt. It’s why head priest Joseph Caiaphas, the president of the the Judean senate, was able to sway the Pharisees on that council to help him go after Jesus of Nazareth. Caiaphas was Sadducee, not Pharisee, but he’d be a sucky president if he didn’t know how to manipulate Pharisees—and he knew what made ’em tick.

John 11.47-51 NET

47So the chief priests and the Pharisees called the council together and said, “What are we doing? For this man is performing many miraculous signs. 48If we allow him to go on in this way, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away our sanctuary and our nation.”

49Then one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said, “You know nothing at all! 50You do not realize that it is more to your advantage to have one man die for the people than for the whole nation to perish.” 51(Now he did not say this on his own, but because he was high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the Jewish nation, 52and not for the Jewish nation only, but to gather together into one the children of God who are scattered.) 53So from that day they planned together to kill him.

It was okay, Caiaphas figured, to murder one guy than have him trigger a Roman invasion. Which, y’know, later happened anyway.

Ends-justify-means is a popular mindset among immoral people, ’cause it permits them to do evil “for the greater good,” rather than choose the moral option, which they don’t like as much. Contrary to those who insist sometimes there are no moral options—that sometimes we’re trapped in a tragic moral choice where all our options are bad or evil—the scriptures plainly tell us God always provides his followers a moral option. 1Co 10.13 There’s always a way to avoid sin. But these folks don’t wanna go that way. They wanna sin. They wanna use the darkness for “the greater good.” And feel morally right because they sinned in a way that benefited people. And in fact be quietly, cancerously corrupted by how they sacrificed their character and soul for others.

Yep, wrong ideas lead to even more wrong ideas. Sometimes much worse ideas.

Christians: Stay out of the dark!

God is the source of good in the universe. Only good. Never evil.

God isn’t the first cause of everything in the universe. There are multiple first causes. Satan, fr’instance, is the first cause of lies. Jn 8.44 And humanity’s the first cause of all the sin in the world; you can try to blame the serpent for it, but the humans totally could’ve said no to the serpent had they wanted to. Nobody predetermined the fall of humanity. They had free will!

Blaming God for these things, directly or indirectly, may appear to keep all the power in his hands. And it gives people comfort to think nothing happens without God’s permission. But God doesn’t permit evil. He forbids it all the time. Not stopping it from happening in the first place, is not the same as permitting it. Inaction isn’t action. (No, not even passive action.)

God’s gonna eventually judge the world for its evil behavior. It’d be pure hypocrisy if he permitted this evil, or suborned it, or manipulated us into committing it for his own purposes. It’d be evil on top of evil. God’d be nothing but darkness. But as John pointed out, God doesn’t do darkness. At all.

1 John 1.5-7 KWL

5This is the message which we heard from him,

and report to you:²

God is light.

“Darkness in God” is not a thing.

6When we say we have a relationship with God,

yet we can walk in darkness,

we lie.

We’re not doing truth.

7When we walk in the light,

like God himself is in the light,

we and God have a relationship with one another,

and the blood of Jesus his son

cleans us from all sin.

My former grad school roommate is legally blind. He can see, but not well. The brighter the lights, the better he sees. Our dorm room was dimly lit by 450-lumen bulbs; this was back when we used incandescent lights, and the school provided us bulbs which only used an inexpensive 40 watts. So one day I went to the hardware store, and got a 200-watt, 2,500-lumen bulb. It risked melting the light fixtures, but he could see way better. This sucker was so bright, when you opened our door it lit up the entire dorm hallway, and the bathroom down the hall. Of course the sun did the very same thing every day, but we were still mighty impressed with this bulb.

God’s the same way. Light wipes out darkness. God beats evil. Gnostics, other religions, and even many Christians make spiritual warfare sound like a tremendous cosmic battle. A Götterdämmrung, to use the German term: The gods fight, the bad gods fall, but the old gods also fall, to be replaced by new gods. In reality there’s no such thing. At the End, the Almighty says, “Kids, we’re done,” and evil stops. It’s no contest. God wins. The end.

I get paranoid email all the time from Christians who are scared witless of one stupid thing after another. The government’s up to something, the president’s up to something, the media are up to something, the Europeans or Chinese or Iranians or North Koreans are up to something, the devil’s up to something. There’s so much irrational fear, and it’s completely antithetical to people whose faith is supposed to be in God. That’s because it’s not placed in God. They may trust him to save them from hell, but nothing else.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t stay up on current events, and try to fight evil in our communities and nation. But Christians really need to stop flinching in panic every single time we hear of sinners being sinners. How else should we expect sinners to behave? And just because they behave like the pagans they are, doesn’t mean evil is winning. Our God is still infinitely more powerful than evil. To him, their darkness is nothing.

If we believed this, we wouldn’t freak out over every dark and scary thing. Or every semi-dark thing. We shouldn’t see the fruitless, scaredy-cat mania I so frequently see among Christians. Being in the light should make it quite clear these worries are unfounded.

Assuming we’re actually in the light. John made a fairly obvious point: If God’s light, and we have a valid relationship with him, we shouldn’t see dark behavior.

Gnostics used a lot of twisted logic to justify and cancel out their sins. Christians do it too. We argue the Old Testament commands no longer count, ’cause we’re under grace. We argue the Sermon on the Mount doesn’t matter, ’cause that’s how life in God’s kingdom works… but that kingdom won’t arrive till Jesus returns. We’ve come up with all sorts of reasons why sins are no longer sins, ’cause grace. Which isn’t logical. Grace means God forgives us. If sins aren’t even sins anymore, what’d he forgive us of?

John cuts through our crap and makes it clear: If we claim any relationship with God, yet act like every other pagan, we have no such relationship. Doesn’t matter what we claim. God’s influence should’ve transformed us and borne fruit. If it hasn’t, we don’t have him. Behavior implies salvation. No, we’re not saved by works, but when we lack the works, we have no evidence of salvation. Faith without works is dead. Jm 2.26

Those of us in relationship with God can’t be involved with the dark. We literally can’t: We’re surrounded by his light, which wipes it out. Our close proximity to God means any temptation the dark used to hold, isn’t there. Our focus is on God, only God. We see sin through his eyes: It’s small, stupid, unnatural, and foul.

Note how it’s not sin which hinders our relationships with God. It’s us. In order to be tempted by darkness, we gotta walk away from light. The light’s still there; God hasn’t gone anywhere, and he’s not leaving. He’s like the friend who still texts you even when you never text back. Even though you’re plotting to do all the things you promised him you’d never. Even after you did a few of ’em.

We need to stop reducing our relationship with God to this contractual “I call you Lord and you get me saved” deal. God doesn’t want a business arrangement. He wants children. He wants a real relationship, not an acquaintanceship with frequent name-dropping, where our testimonies consist of God-trivia instead of something we actually did together. (And not something we did together decades ago, ’cause there’s been nothing since.) That’s no relationship. It’s hardly a relationship worth appealing to at the Last Judgment. Yet many of us will try… and sadly for some it won’t work.