Isaiah makes the God of Israel say: "I make peace and create evil.... I, the Lord, do all these things." *** Nor did it in the least disconcert another prophet to admit that "the Lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets." **** Like people, like God. It is not religion that shapes and molds a people, but the people who make their religion. This explains such passages as the following, which the Jews attributed to their God:
And if the prophet be deceived when he hath spoken a thing, I the Lord have deceived the prophet. (v)
Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I frame evil against you, and devise a device against you. (vi)
* Jeremiah xv, 18; iv, 10.
** Amos iii, 6.
*** Isaiah xlv, 7.
**** I Kings xxii, 23.
v. Ezekiel xiv, 9
vi. Jeremiah xviii, 11.
In one of his letters, St. Paul does not hesitate to write that God purposely causes people to believe in a lie that he may have an excuse to damn them for not believing the truth. That people could read such a passage without protest and abhorrence, shows how effective has been the blight of this Asiatic cult upon the mind and heart of the western world. "And for this cause," writes the Apostle Paul, "God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be damned." *
The God who in the Old Testament hardened the heart of Pharaoh that he might ruin him and his people, leads people, in the New Testament, to hug a delusion to their souls that he might damn them. And this is the being who is not only to be our pattern for morality, but it shall also be considered impossible for any one to be better than he is. To try to improve on this "divine" pattern is blasphemy, both to the Jew and the Christian.
To teach that no one can be better than Jehovah, as he is depicted in the bible, is the most hopeless pessimism. Morality is born of hope and courage. It is the idea of human perfectibility and the idea of progress which give wings to human effort. The bible denies to man the privilege to transcend the ideals of the past, or to be better than his Asiatic gods.
* II Thessalonians ii, 11, 12.