Pleasant Stone Devotional Meditation: November 5

“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace and create evil. I the Lord do all these things” ~ Isaiah 45:7

The formation of some natural stones is so strange as to cause confusion even to the expert when he tries to identify them. This must be true of this “many-colored” verse.

Being no expert, I [Eugenia Price, the author] dreaded the verse for a long time. In one sense part of it frightened me. I know God is light. I know He said “let there be light” and darkness. Day and night are not sources of confusion. There must be night before there is day. Night does not produce day, but it defines it. Night is merely the consequence of our part of the earth leaving the light.

No cause for confusion either when God says “I make peace.” We who belong to Jesus Christ, know that he is our peace. But my heart tightened at the next statement of God. “… and [I] create evil.” Did God create the very thing that caused Him to send His Son to earth to die? Did God create a monster which got so out of His control that He had to take a step as drastic as Calvary to defeat His own fiendish creation? No.

God created all things for His own Son (Colossians 1:16). He created joy and comfort and love. All good. All desirable. But because they are so good and desirable, their absence creates sorrow and misery and hate! The absence of joy means sorrow. The absence of comfort means misery. The absence of love means hate. No, God did not willfully create evil, except as He created its opposite, good. He did not create evil, but He has taken full responsibility for it when He took sin into His own heart on the Cross. He is ---

“The God of all comfort … Comfort ye, my people.”