We Must Believe God is Good in Spite of the Rampant Evil in the World

20 Jun We Must Believe God is Good in Spite of the Rampant Evil in the World

Blog Series

Moving from Checkers to Chess

Five Steps to Unleashing the Power of an Eternal Perspective

This week we’re continuing our series: “Moving from Checkers to Chess ~ Five Steps to Unleashing the Power of an Eternal Perspective.” Unless we have an eternal perspective, viewing life as God does, we are playing checkers in life while God is playing chess. And, if that’s the case, two things are certain: (1) we will consistently make the wrong moves, and (2) we lose in the end. I’d like to help avoid that.

We’ve spent the last number of posts looking at the first part of Step 1. “Believe the unbelievable”, establishing the fact that it is safe to believe in God in spite of the fact that He cannot be proved.

Now, we progress to the second issue that we must come to grips with in “believing the unbelievable” if we are to unleash the power of an eternal perspective:

We must believe that God is good in spite of the rampant evil in the world.

Atheists Point to Evil as Justification for Rejecting the Idea of God

If there is a silver bullet against God, it is the problem of pain, suffering and evil in the world.

Innocent children die from disasters and disease. Hundreds of millions of citizens have been killed by their own governments and wars have ravaged the span of history. What’s more, God’s own children are murdered, raped, tortured, beheaded and come to countless other shocking ends. Pain, evil and suffering are hallmarks of history.

This problem is irresolvable for many people: “How could a good God tolerate so much evil in the world? Why doesn’t He fix it? Even worse, why did He allow it in the first place?!?”

In a YouTube video that has gone viral, the British comedian Stephen Fry delivered a vicious attack on the Judeo-Christian God when asked what he would say if it turned out, after he died, that God did in fact exist. He called this God a “maniac”, pointing to the large amount of unnecessary suffering in the world which He, by definition, created and allows.

What kind of God, atheists ask, has created a world in which innocent children die in floods, starve to death, die in agony from malaria? What kind of God allows His own children who worship Him to be murdered, raped, tortured, beheaded, and come to countless other shocking ends?

Atheists argue that the existence of suffering is an impossible problem for believers in an all-good, caring God to solve. Even if they try to argue that without some suffering there can be no love and compassion, or that people who do wrong are eventually punished, they cannot justify the suffering of innocent children or atrocities against sincere believers.

Atheists contend that a God who is benevolent and loving, as they are told the Christian God is, would never create the world we live in. Believing in Him requires either ignoring or excusing an ominous dark side.

The conclusion is that either God doesn’t exist, or that if He exists, He must either not be all good or all powerful. The thinking goes, “If He were all good, He would not want pain, evil and suffering to exist, and if He were all powerful, He would fix it!”

The Bible insists that God is good

Yet, against all this atheistic/agnostic reasoning, the Bible insists that God is good:

• “Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good! For His mercy endures forever.” 1 Chronicles 16:34
• “Good and upright is the Lord.” Psalm 25:8
• “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man who trusts in Him!” Psalm 34:8
• “You are good and do good.”   Psalm 119:68
• “No one is good except God alone.” Mark 10:18

The Bible promises that God will ultimately resolve the pain, evil and suffering in the world

Revelation 21:4 says, referring to heaven, “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain…”  What a comforting thought!

But while perhaps that works going forward from that point, what about all the pain, suffering and evil until we get there? How can we reconcile the goodness of God with the present presence of rampant evil in the world?

We do not know what was in the mind of God when He allowed evil in the first place. For reasons that (frankly) we either have not been told or cannot comprehend, He allowed evil to begin, and allows it to continue until the day He finally ends it.

We can resolve the tension of God’s goodness in the meantime

We must admit that this is a challenge. But pressing ahead toward God rather than retreating from Him, we can consider these things: even though God allows evil for the present time, He nevertheless stepped into it and allowed the consequences of evil to touch Him. He did not, and does not, leave us here to suffer alone (Hebrews 4:15-16). We see this in three ways.

First, Jesus, God’s Son, died to deliver us from evil (Romans 5:8).

And He didn’t have to die! He could have chosen not to do so. So why in the world did He? Because He loved us and was willing to pay whatever price was necessary to deliver us from evil.

That is not the act of Stephen Fry’s maniac. That is the act of towering moral courage and character. That supreme act of love demonstrates that, while we may not be able to explain why God allowed evil in the first place, if Jesus did not exempt Himself from it, there must be a reason that we do not currently know or understand.

Second, the Father also stepped into the evil for our sake.

The Father made the decision to send Jesus to die for us (“I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent me.” John 6:38).  Jesus willingly came down from heaven, but it must have been a terribly painful decision for the Father to ask Him to do so.

Third, God the Father witnessed the suffering and death of His son… something any loving parent would recognize as an agonizing thing to do.

Even more, the Father loves all of us… all the people who have ever lived. And, He has had to witness all the pain and suffering of all people in all places for all time.

It is an agonizing experience for anyone to witness the suffering of someone they love, let alone all people of all places for all time. Why does God endure that? Love seems the only conceivable answer (John 3:16).

God is not a maniac

So, God allows evil, but does not exempt Himself from it. Therefore, either God is a maniac (creating a system of senseless suffering that even He has to endure), or there is a rationale that is beyond our knowledge or comprehension.

I do not believe God is a maniac. I look at the evidence that points to just the opposite:

1. Love can explain His actions rather than insanity (John 3:16)
2. His teachings are of the highest order
   • Love your neighbor as yourself. (Matthew 22:37-39)
   • Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. (Luke 6:31)
   • Love does no wrong to a neighbor, therefore, love is a fulfillment of the law. (Romans 13:10)
3. Everywhere God is followed authentically, goodness, peace, love, and joy break out, overflow, bubble up, and wash over.

Many testify of God’s goodness, even in the midst of pain

And on a personal level, millions testify to the profound positive change God has made in their lives when they gave themselves to Jesus… even those in terribly trying circumstances.

Corrie ten Boom testified to God’s goodness in the darkness of a concentration camp. Joni Erickson Tada testifies to God’s goodness even in physical paralysis and chronic pain. Countless believers in areas of persecution in the world today testify to the sufficient, sustaining grace of God, even in the face of tragedy.

Then, on a historic level, D. James Kennedy wrote, in What if Jesus had Never Been Born, of the things that were brought to the world as a result of following Jesus’ life and teachings: literacy, health care, legal justice, protection for the disabled, equality of personhood, compassionate government, etc.  These things were unknown for common people until Christianity started affecting the world.

These are not the marks of a maniac!

Conclusion

So, why did God create a world in which evil would be present and innocent people would suffer terribly? The fact is, we don’t know. The answer is either something we have not been told, or having been told, we do not yet comprehend. But the rationale by which we can trust God in this difficult place is illustrated by Corrie ten Boom, a Dutch believer who helped Jews escape Nazi Germany in World War II and was eventually caught and sent to a concentration camp.

In her book, The Hiding Place, she told the story of her father, Casper, who was a watchmaker and repairman.  But more than that, he was a kind, gentle, wise man who led his family with dignity, respect and joy.

Corrie writes of a special experience she had when she was a little girl traveling with him on the train from their home town to Amsterdam, to purchase watch parts for his repair shop:

“Once –I must have been ten or eleven– I asked Father about a poem we had read at school the winter before. One line had described ‘a young man whose face was not shadowed by sexsin.’ I had been far too shy to ask the teacher what it meant, and Mama had blushed scarlet when I consulted her. In those days just after the turn of the century sex was never discussed, even at home.

“So the line had stuck in my head. ‘Sex,’ I was pretty sure, meant whether you were a boy or a girl, and ‘sin’ made Tante (Aunt) Jans very angry, but what the two together meant I could not imagine. And so, seated next to Father in the train compartment, I suddenly asked, ‘Father, what is sexsin?’

“He turned to look at me, as he always did when answering a question, but to my surprise he said nothing. At last he stood up, lifted his traveling case from the rack over our heads, and set it on the floor.

“’Will you carry it off the train, Corrie?’ he said. I stood up and tugged at it. It was crammed with the watches and spare parts he had purchased that morning. ‘It’s too heavy,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It’s the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger you can bear it. For now, you must trust me to carry it for you.’

“And I was satisfied. More than satisfied –wonderfully at peace. There were answers to this and all my hard questions — for now I was content to leave them in my father’s keeping.” (Excerpted from the book, The Hiding Place, by Corrie Ten Boom).

Corrie took the utter and complete confidence she had in her father from all that she understood about him from observing him in all other areas of life, and applied that confidence to this one area in which she did not understand.

We can do the same. We can take all the utter and complete confidence we have in God from observing Him in all the other areas in which we do understand Him, and apply that to this area we do not understand. And like Corrie, we can be at peace.

So, we see that there is no silver bullet against God. While challenging issues will always create a need for clear and deep thinking… when we do think clearly and deeply, God is revealed to be just who He says He is… one who is good and who does good (Psalm 119:68).

If you want to look more deeply into this topic, three books I’d recommend are:

• Where is God When It Hurts, Philip Yancey
• The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis
• Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering, Timothy Keller (Joni Earickson Tada says this is the best book she ever read on suffering)

Next week, we’ll look at the third “unbelievable” thing we must come to grips with: We must believe God loves us in spite of the fact that He does not make our lives go better. I’ll see you then.

Get a Moving from Checkers to Chess At-a-Glance-Overview: Click Here

As we have been studying these concepts for quite some time (including in some prior blog series), and I am excited to now be connecting all the “moving parts” from those posts and combining them into a “spiritual game plan” in this “Moving from Checkers to Chess ~ 5 Steps to Unleashing the Power of an Eternal Perspective” series.

For an overview of the game plan, so you can see at a glance where we begin and where we’re headed, I’ve created an overview/outline you can download for free: Click Here

For the full discussion of each of the steps, begin with the first post in this series, Moving from Checkers to Chess, and then continue with the following posts thereafter.

In case you’re new here, below are two resources I’ve created for additional help in your Christian discipleship journey:

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