God Does Evil, Then Repents
By Marilyn Burge

I just ran into a doozie in the Bible. God can and did do evil things, then he repented. The Bible says so.

"And God sent an angle into Jerusalem to destroy it: and as he was destroying, the Lord beheld, and HE REPENTED HIM OF THE EVIL, and said to the angel that destroyed, "It is enough, stay now thine hand." And the angel of the Lord stood by the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite."

If I understand the word "repent" correctly, it is only appropriately used when the use involves abject regret for sin (or evil). Since God repented the sending of the angel to effect the destruction, God not only did evil (we know that from many scriptures -- especially in the OT), but he regretted the evil he had done (which is, so far as I know, the only instance where he had the balls to actually admit that he had been a bit heavey-handed. Generally speaking, he wiped out whole tribes without ever giving it a second thought.).


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