If God is loving, why does he allow so much evil in the world?
This is an old question, a classic objection to Biblical Christianity, and it’s one that we have talked about on Sunday mornings before today. It’s the kind of question that keeps coming up.
The questions of evil and suffering are, of course, very closely linked. Most suffering in the world is caused by the evil actions of people, and we only struggle with the reality of evil in so far as it causes suffering. No one says, ‘I cannot believe in a good God because Bobby cheats on his spelling test.’ No, it’s the evil that causes suffering – war and murder and oppression and such things – this is the evil that people can’t reconcile to idea of a loving God.
When we speak of ‘evil’ with respect to this question, there are two categories of evil we usually have in mind, and though they overlap, they are distinct. One you might call ‘natural evil’, and the other ‘moral evil’ or ‘personal’ evil.
Natural evil includes those destructive things like earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, droughts, and so on. These kinds of things strike and leave sometimes thousands dead in their wake. New Orleans has still not recovered from Hurricane Katrina. Heavy rain triggered a landslide that killed ten or more people in Mexico last week. We all remember the tsunami of two years ago in Southeast Asia.
It’s impossible for me to give a pat answer for God’s love in the face of such disasters. But I do want to raise a couple of things that help me to wrestle with it. Maybe they’ll help you, too. They may not.
The first is that much of what we might call ‘natural evil’ is actually human in origin, and falls under the umbrella of what we’ll talk about in a few moments, ‘personal’ or ‘moral’ evil. A couple of examples:
The devastating fires that recently ravaged California were, according to authorities, caused by arson, and one by a boy playing with matches.
The famine situations that we regularly her about in parts of Africa have drought as a contributing factor. But there is no question that human selfishness as manifested in corrupt or negligent government, war & civil unrest, global economic systems, the lack of political will in the west to mobilize resources, make it impossible to farm. These things are what turns a drought into a famine.
Earthquakes cost more lives sometimes in part due to corrupt or incompetent building practices.
So not all ‘natural’ evil is necessarily natural. Perhaps there is more human responsibility than we realize even in these things.
But that doesn’t cover everything: what about earthquakes and other truly ‘natural disasters’? Some people have considered this evidence of a creation that is broken. The Bible talks about the fact that creation is ‘groaning’, and that the reality of a sin-tainted world impacts even the non-human created order, and that all creation needs redeeming. I believe that. Pollution, for example, is one clear example of how our sin has hurt the whole created order. But I don’t like the broader implication that volcanoes and hurricanes are the world mal-functioning. Long before the creation of man there were ‘natural disasters’. These are not evidences of a broken creation. So they are not rightly called ‘evil’, even when they are terribly destructive.
So the question becomes, then, ‘Is a good God obliged to intervene when these things happen, if human lives are at stake?’ And I can’t help but wonder if he actually wouldn’t just love to intervene, if only we’d let him. Here’s what I mean:
The Biblical history of humanity is that God created people to live with him in a relationship of mutual intimacy. Even though he is the supreme Creator God and therefore in the order of things it would be appropriate for us to worship him and serve him, even in our service there would be a joyful contentment in our profound love for God and the knowledge of his profound love for us.
But Adam and Eve chose to reject God’s good Lordship and to make their own way. Human beings ever since have been almost defined by that same decision: rather than heed the word of God who says, ‘Trust me, I love you and this is the single best life available to you’, we are fiercely determined to live life on our terms. And our history demonstrates how well that’s worked for us.
But what if things played out differently? What if the history of humanity was a history of a fellowship with God that had never been broken? What if people knew God well, and listened to him, and he was present to our consciousness in such a real way we can hardly begin to imagine it? What if all 8 billion of us were on the same page in terms of our knowledge of him, our trust in his love and therefore our commitment to live according to his will?
Is it possible that we would not have placed our great cities on fault lines? or that we would have the necessary wisdom and knowledge to prevent or avoid other disasters? Would we have been able to build New Orleans differently, or evacuate it sooner? Would we have known a year ahead of time that there would be a tsunami on December 26th, 2005? In other words, would we have had God’s wisdom and direct guidance to know how to live in God’s world?
Would a loving God intervene?
There’s two ways he could intervene: he could prevent the earthquake or volcano from happening. But why should he be obliged to adjust his creation?
Or, he could intervene by communicating to us and helping us prevent or deal with things in such a way as to prevent loss of life. And who’s to say he doesn’t want to do exactly that, but that we’ve told him we don’t want his interference in our lives?
As an extreme, and very literal example, think of the Egyptian plagues in the days of Moses: they were sent by God, but Pharaoh had been warned about them, and it was his resolute refusal to release the Israelites from slavery that kept the plagues coming. His whole nation was almost destroyed because he refused to acknowledge God.
The Apostle Paul was on a ship and warned the people to not set sail. They did anyway, and when a storm hit they were only saved because God did in fact graciously intervene.
I don’t want to sound like what I’m saying that it serves people right when tragedy strikes. I’m saying that I’m just not willing to assign God the responsibility for human life lost due to natural disasters. I just don’t have enough data to be able to do that. It is, to my mind, probable that even these kinds of things are natural consequences – not punishments, but consequences – of our historically consistent pattern of plugging our ears to God.
Those are my thoughts about so-called ‘natural evil’. It’s not a specifically Biblical answer, except to say that in light of what we read in the Bible about both God and humanity, how he wants to relate to us and how we have chosen to relate to him, to discount the possibility of a loving God based solely on the destruction caused by natural disasters is to be hasty, and leaves out important considerations.
Now, what about what I’m calling ‘moral evil’ or ‘personal evil’, the suffering that results from the evil actions of people?
Last week marked the one year anniversary of the murder of a girl I went to high school with.
In the news on Tuesday were two accounts of the shooting deaths of police officers, another police officer who sells illicit drugs, a serial rapist, a missing mother of two toddlers who either left her family for another man, or was murdered by her husband, either scenario which is evil and could scar the children for life. There was a three-year-old unidentified girl found murdered, left in a box on a deserted island. There was a story about the war in Iraq: this year has seen more US casualties than any previous year. There were the recent bombings in Afghanistan and the political unrest surrounding the elections in Pakistan.
Then, of course, there is the ongoing sagas of other military unrest, the realities of AIDS and poverty, the historical realities of genocide and two world wars, and the myriad of personal evils and sufferings brought on by abuse, alcohol, crime, gossip and the like.
Faced with all of these things, it is not easy to believe in a loving, all-powerful God. If God were truly good and loving, these things would horrify him as they do us, and he would intervene. Wouldn’t he? How can God allow the suffering of the innocent: the Jews in World War 2, the persecuted Christians of our own day, the abuse of children?
Well, let’s say for the sake of argument that God in fact can intervene and does want to intervene to stop the suffering caused by evil. How might he choose to do that? There are, it seems to me, only three options available to him:
First, he could override the free will of people. He could simply make it impossible to choose to do evil. One of the police officers I mentioned earlier was shot when he inadvertently interrupted the robbing of a store. Now, God could have frozen the will of the robber and said, ‘No, I will not let you do that.’ He could have prevented Stalin or Hitler or Hussein from choosing what they did. God could determine our actions so that we do only good or neutral actions.
But that’s not a God of love, either. And frankly, none of us would choose for God to remove our ability to make our choices.
So when we are hurt by the actions of someone else – some of you know the realities of abuse, or someone’s dishonesty, or a drunk driver – and we ask, ‘How could God let someone do that to me?’ It is God who gives to humans the dignity of allowing us to choose our actions, and the fact that people often choose what will hurt others is a price we pay for our own freedom to choose. Would we really want God to intervene in such a manner? We would hate him if he took away our freedom and made us robots. We are glad he does not choose that option.
His second option would be to remove the consequences of our choices so that they do not impact others negatively. But how does that work? I fire a gun at your head, but God makes sure that the bullet bounces harmlessly off? Or in a drunken rage I beat my wife and abuse her verbally, but God makes sure my blows don’t hurt and that my words don’t bother her at all? We can’t imagine such a thing!
Besides, if God could just prevent our actions from impacting others negatively, wouldn’t that only increase the evil in people? Can you imagine a world in which people knew that their actions would have no negative consequences?
If God intervened in this way he would not be just. He would be ignoring the cause-and-effect nature of his creation. There would be no meaning to concepts of ‘relationship’ or ‘interdependence’ or ‘responsibility’.
Nor would it be loving of God to remove consequences in such a way, for his heart couldn’t bear to watch us spiral downward into a bottomless depravity of character, as would surely happen. You who are parents, imagine who your child would become if you could ensure that their actions never impacted anyone else negatively. None of us would wish that on our kids. None of wants our child to grow up thinking, ‘My neighbour and my planet are not my responsibility. I can do what I want and it makes no difference to anyone but me.’
No, God cannot remove the consequences of our choices and at the same time leave us with a society worth living in.
So we don’t want a God who would override our wills so we cannot choose evil. nor do we don’t want a God who would prevent our evil actions from having harmful consequences.
That leaves him with the third remaining option: and that is to do a work of transformation in the hearts of people, so that a) they increasingly choose that which is right over that which is evil, and b) give themselves to the alleviation of suffering of others. If God really is loving, and he is able to intervene in a world of evil and suffering, then this really is the only other option available to God, and we should expect to see this kind of transformation in people.
Therefore, if we do see people’s lives and character changing, and we see people actively working to alleviate people’s suffering, and doing it in the name of God, then this is pretty compelling evidence for the existence of a loving, all-powerful God. And the fact is, that is exactly what we do see.
The heart of the Christian gospel is that in Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the Son of God, God is reclaiming people from the grip of evil and transforming them from the inside out so that their very character increasingly aligns with his own. There are ample references to this in the Bible.
Take for example the Apostle Paul who, by his own admission was a blasphemer and a violent man and the worst of sinners, persecuting, imprisoning and participating in the deaths of Christians, became, upon his encounter with the risen Jesus, a man who was, again in his own words, eager to remember the poor, and instrumental in organizing a system of famine relief for various churches. What makes such a transformation in someone like Paul? He said, The life I live I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.
The Bible talks about all things working together for good as God conforms us to the likeness of Jesus. It talks about our participating in the divine nature and escaping the evil desires of the world. It talks about our being made new, reborn, and living out this new life in a pattern of active love for God and others.
So we discover in the Bible that God’s great agenda for the world is exactly what people claim he is not doing: actively intervening to rid the world of evil and suffering.
You remember my earlier description of what we were created for: a mutual love relationship with God. This relationship would be characterized by adoration, worship and obedience on our part… and loving leadership, help and blessing on God’s part. And there would be a deep affectionate love flowing both ways.
But Adam and Eve decided not to trust God’s good lordship and opted to live life on their own terms. They disobeyed him, and since any relationship is built upon trust, by their active distrust of God, they estranged themselves from God, and human history ever since has been the story of our living separate from God. I read last week that sin is, in essence, the assertion of one’s own will in opposition to God’s will. That is a great definition. And as we have consistently and defiantly asserted our own will over God’s, we’ve become entrenched in sin, and evil has carried the day.
But here’s the beauty of God: he intervened. His perfect Son Jesus came to earth, and lived his life in perfect loving obedience to his Father’s perfect will. In other words, he lived the life we were made for. Then he was crucified, and in his death he took upon himself the punishment for our sins. His life of infinite value was given for the infinite debt of our sins, and by his death the way was opened for us to be restored to relationship with God, and God begins the work of transformation in us. Not all at once, because I’m not sure we could handle it. But as we acknowledge Christ’s death for us we step back under God’s loving Lordship and our status changes from enemies of God to loved children of God, and God actually takes it one step further in that he takes up residence in our life and births his own character in us.
(Of course, if we refuse to acknowledge Jesus and continue to assert our own will, we are still in our sins.)
As God’s character grows in us…. which again, by the way, God still gives us the freedom to choose to cultivate it or hinder it. Most of us understand the difficulty we sometimes have in letting go of our old selfish ways of thinking and acting…. But he also helps us, and as we find ourselves slowly growing in his character, we find that evil has less a grip on us, and that we begin to share God’s love for other people, and we give ourselves to seeking to draw others to him, and to alleviating their suffering.
Jesus once said, in Matthew 25, that at the end of all things, he would recognize those who were genuinely his by the fact that they would be the ones who routinely gave water to the thirsty, food to the hungry, and visited those who were sick and in prison, and so on. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and love your neighbour as yourself, is how Jesus summed up the whole of the Christian life.
Christians who are worth their salt have always taken this to heart.
Mother Theresa, who gave her life to the care of the untouchable destitutes of Calcutta, or those who go and care for refugees, or who go minister to people rescued from the sex trade. Others who feed and clothes those who are without them in our city, who visit the sick or those in prison, who ease the suffering of people in any one of a hundred ways.
These are ways in which God has intervened in a world of suffering by transforming sinful people into agents of grace and love and action. 2 Corinthians 5 says that God has reconciled us to himself in Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. That is, it is through us that God wants to deal with the reality of evil in the world.
This happens one life at a time, in our witness, as we live a transformed life and speak to others of the love of God and what Jesus has done. It happens across the globe as we are moved to take responsibility for the realities of hunger, AIDS, the child sex trade, the persecuted church, and other world issues. A compelling case has been made that both poverty and AIDS could be erased from Africa within a generation is the North American Church mobilized our resources and our political will.
I’ve been studying in the book of Acts lately, and am struck by how the early Christians were passionately committed to the care of the sick and hungry, both among their number and outside the faith community. They gave themselves to the healing of people, the freeing of people from demonic oppression, and so on.
Philip Yancey has rightly said that the question ‘Where is God when it hurts’ could be better phrased ‘Where is the church when it hurts?’
God is concerned with evil and suffering in the world, moreso than we often realize. And he is both calling and empowering us to be his agents in intervening in our world. The Bible says that when history comes to a close and the eternal age is ushered in, God will put an absolute end to suffering and sin and death and tears and pain. Until then, we are his chosen means of intervention. And he has let his reputation in the world rest on the job we’re doing.
In a world of suffering, what can we do?
Three things:
First, in your own heart and life, deal ruthlessly with the evil that lurks there. What God said to Cain in the beginning of our history is true for each of us today: Sin is crouching at your door. It desires to have you but you must master it. All the evil in the world starts in the hearts of people, and the place to start change is in ourselves. As a spouse, selfishness is my issue. As a parent, anger and frustration is my great danger. As a pastor, I learn to recognize pride or laziness. All of these things, if dismissed or left unchecked, have the potential to cause suffering. I need to pay attention to my own character, and train myself to let God lead me in what the Bible calls paths of righteousness. If I do not address the evil that seeks to rise in my own heart, I cannot address it in the world.
Secondly, in your local life: be a person of grace in your work and home communities, and in your church. Let your words be encouraging, loving. Even when rebuke or accountability is called for, let there be no doubt that personal love underlies it. Support those who are in crisis. Help where you see a need: food, emotional care, a listening ear. Have integrity and a good work ethic in your place of employment. Be friend at school, and be quick to forgive those who speak against you. After all, they are themselves hurting inside.
And thirdly, in your global life: pray for the persecuted church. Come and have your eyes and your heart opened to the needs in the countries of the world. Or be a part of our sending a group overseas to actually get physically involved in alleviating suffering.
Amen.