Topic : Evil, problem of

God is not the source of sin; he neither commits nor wills nor prompts it (James 1:13). God made rational creatures who were capable of loving him freely and by choice and that meant they could freely choose not to love him—which is what some angels and all our race have done. How such disobedience is possible, while God is Lord of this world, we cannot conceive; that it is possible, however, is undeniable, for it has happened.

How did sin enter the cosmos? Scripture tells us that Satan and his angels rebelled against the Creator before man was made (2 Pet. 2:4; Jude 6), so that when the first human beings appeared “that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan” (Rev. 20:2) was there to trip them up (Gen. 3). And “the tempter,” the “ruler” and “god of this world” (1 Thess. 3:5; John 14:30; 2 Cor. 4:4) still marauds with serpentine cunning and lion-like savagery. It is right to trace moral evil back to Satan as its patron, promoter, producer, director, and instigatory cause.

Where do the inclinations to evil which I find in myself, and so often yield to, come from? The Bible says their source is my own heart (James 1:13-15; Mark 7:21-23). Just as a cripple’s twisted leg makes him walk lame, so the motivational twist of my fallen heart—anti-god, anti-other, self-absorbed—constantly induces wrong attitudes and actions.

Your Father Loves You by James Packer, (Harold Shaw Publishers, 1986), page for February 24

• Unraveling the Big Questions About God, K. Boa, Zondervan, 1988, p. 75
• The Satan Syndrome, Nigel Wright, Zondervan, 1990, p. 33ff
• Between Two Truths, Klyne Snodgrass, Zondervan, 1990, p. 141
• The Finger of God, Hugh Ross, Promise Pub., 1991, p. 171ff
• Tales of the Neverending, Mark Littleton, Moody, 1990, pp. 11ff
• A Holy Rebellion, T. Ice & R. Dean, Harvest House, 1990, pp. 37ff
• God, Evil, and Dispensations, N. Geisler, in Walvoord: A Tribute, Donald Campbell, ed., Moody, 1982, p. 95.
• God in the Dock, C.S. Lewis, p. 21f
• Decision Making and the Will of God, pp. 204ff

There is a fundamental sense in which evil is not something that can be made sense of. The essence of evil is that it is something which is absurd, bizarre and irrational. It is the nature of evil to be inexplicable, an enigma and a stupidity.

The Satan Syndrome, Nigel Wright, Zondervan, 1990, p. 66

[God] is not the author of evil, but he is the author of creation and of the risk inherent in it.… The significance of the cross of Jesus is that the one who suffers most because of sin is not mankind but God himself and it is by his own action in the cross that the power of evil is actually overcome.

The Satan Syndrome, Nigel Wright, Zondervan, 1990, p. 68

Evil is the product of the misuse of God-given freedom and that the possibility that free beings might choose evil rather than good is a necessary part of human freedom .As it is logically impossible for God to create a free being who automatically does what is right (in this case there would be no freedom) he has therefore introduced into the creation a freedom which is neither conditioned nor predetermined .he has chosen to create a world in which there are free creatures because it is the best possible way towards the kind of people God ultimately desires .God is omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good but that it was not within God’s power to create a world containing moral good without creating one containing the possibility of moral evil. The risk of evil is therefore a necessary part of free existence and is incompatible with neither the power nor the love of God.

The Satan Syndrome, Nigel Wright, Zondervan, 1990, pp. 81-2

As C.S. Lewis wrote,

“The greatest evil is not done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to pain. It is conceived and moved, seconded, carried, and minuted in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.”

Against the Night, Charles Colson, p. 46

“The Scriptures indicate that evil has been permitted by God in order that His justice might be manifested in its punishment and His grace in its forgiveness (Rom. 9:22,23). Thus the existence of evil is a reminder of the fact that the universe is designed not for the production of happiness among rational creatures but for the manifestation of the manifold perfections of God.”

Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent.

Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?

David Hume

Source unknown

On February 15, 1947 Glenn Chambers boarded a plane bound for Quito, Ecuador, to begin his ministry in missionary broadcasting. But he never arrived. In a horrible moment, the plane carrying Chambers crashed into a mountain peak and spiraled downward.

Later it was learned that before leaving the Miami airport, Chambers wanted to write his mother a letter. All he could find for stationery was a page of advertising on which was written the single word “WHY?” Around that word he hastily scribbled a final note. After Chambers’ mother learned of her son’s death, his letter arrived. She opened the envelope, took out the paper, and unfolded it. Staring her in the face was the question “WHY?”

No doubt this was the question Jesus’ disciples asked when He was arrested, tried, and crucified. And it was probably the question Joseph of Arimathea asked himself as he approached Pilate and requested the Lord’s body (v.58).

It must have nagged at him as he wrapped the body in a linen cloth, carried it to his own freshly hewn tomb, and rolled the massive stone into its groove over the tomb’s mouth.

In the face of his grief, Joseph carried on. He did what he knew he had to do. None of Jesus’ relatives were in a position to claim His body for burial, for they were all Galileans and none of them possessed a tomb in Jerusalem. The disciples weren’t around to help either.

But there was another reason for Joseph’s act of love. In Isaiah 53:9, God directed the prophet to record an important detail about the death of His Messiah. The One who had no place to lay His head would be buried in a rich man’s tomb.

Joseph probably didn’t realize that his act fulfilled prophecy. The full answer to the why of Jesus’ death was also several days away for Joseph and the others. All he knew was that he was now a disciple of Jesus—and that was enough to motivate his gift of love.

Today in the Word, April 18, 1992

When asked why God created man when He knew he would sin, Martin Luther replied, “Let us keep clear of these abstract questions and consider the will of God such as it has been revealed to us.”

Source unknown

The story is told of a farmer in a Midwestern state who had a strong disdain for “religious” things. As he plowed his field on Sunday morning, he would shake his fist at the church people who passed by on their way to worship. October came and the farmer had his finest crop ever—the best in the entire county. When the harvest was complete, he placed an advertisement in the local paper which belittled the Christians for their faith in God. Near the end of his diatribe he wrote, “Faith in God must not mean much if someone like me can prosper.”

The response from the Christians in the community was quiet and polite. In the next edition of the town paper, a small ad appeared. It read simply, “God doesn’t always settle His accounts in October.”

William E. Brown in Making Sense of Your Faith

Almost 50 years ago Elie Wiesel was a fifteen-year old prisoner in the Nazi death camp at Buna. A cache of arms belonging to a Dutchman had been discovered at the camp. The man was promptly shipped to Auschwitz. But he had a young servant boy, a pipel as they were called, a child with a refined and beautiful face, unheard of in the camps. He had the face of a sad angel. The little servant, like his Dutch master, was cruelly tortured, but would not reveal any information. So the SS sentenced the child to death, along with two other prisoners who had been discovered with arms. Wiesel tells the story:

One day when we came back from work, we saw three gallows rearing up in the assembly place, three black crows. Roll call. SS all around us; machine guns trained: the traditional ceremony. Three victims in chains—and one of them, the little servant, the sad-eyed angel. The SS seemed more preoccupied, more disturbed than usual. To hang a young boy in front of thousands of spectators was no light matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was lividly pale, almost calm, biting his lips. The gallows threw its shadow over him. This time the Lagercapo refused to act as executioner. Three SS replaced him. The three victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses. “Long live liberty!” cried the two adults. But the child was silent.

“Where is God? Where is He?” someone behind me asked. Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting. “Bare your heads!” yelled the head of the camp. His voice was raucous. We were weeping. “Cover your heads!” Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive.

Their tongues hung swollen, blue-tinged. but the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive .For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes were not yet glazed.

Behind me, I heard the same man asking: “Where is God now?” And I heard a voice within me answer him: “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.”

Elie Wiesel, Night, Bantam, 1982, pp. 75-6, quoted in When God Was Taken Captive, W. Aldrich, Multnomah, 1989, pp. 39-41.

Let us suppose that God’s resources are so much beyond what we can imagine that he can produce a situation in which we can honestly say, “I see now that even the butchery of six million Jews doesn’t matter. This is why he didn’t do what I would have done if I had had the power to strike dead every Nazi in order to prevent it.” This line of thought does not solve the problem of evil. But it points in the direction of a solution.

The idea goes back to Jesus. “A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world” (John 16:21).

Christian Theology in Plain Language, p. 97

At some point, every human being confronts the mysteries that caused Job to tremble in terror. Is God unfair? One option seemed obvious to Job’s wife: “Curse God and die!” she advised. Why hold on to a sentimental belief in a loving God when so much in life conspires against it? And in this Job-like century, more people than ever before have come to agree with her.

Some Jewish writers, such as Jerzy Kosinski and Elie Wiesel, began with a strong faith in God, but saw it vaporize in the gas furnaces of the Holocaust. Face to face with history’s grossest unfairness, they concluded that God must not exist. (Still, the human instinct asserts itself. Kosinski and Wiesel overlook the underlying issue of where our primal sense of fairness comes from. Why ought we even expect the world to be fair?) Others, equally mindful of the world’s unfairness, cannot bring themselves to deny God’s existence. Instead, they propose another possibility: perhaps God agrees that life is unfair, but cannot do anything about it.

Rabbi Harold Kushner took this approach in his best-selling book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. After watching his son die of the disease progeria, Kushner concluded that “even God has a hard time keeping chaos in check,” and that God is “a God of justice and not of power.”

According to Rabbi Kushner, God is as frustrated, even outraged, by the unfairness on this planet as anyone else, but he lacks the power to change it. Millions of readers found comfort in Kushner’s portrayal of a God who seemed compassionate, albeit weak. I wonder, however, what those people make of the last five chapters of Job, which contain God’s “self-defense.” No other part of the Bible conveys God’s power so impressively. If God is less-than-powerful, why did he choose the worst possible situation, when his power was most called into question, to insist on his omnipotence? (Elie Wiesel said of the God described by Kushner, “If that’s who God is, why doesn’t he resign and let someone more competent take his place?”)

A third group of people evade the problem (of God’s unfairness) by looking to the future, when an exacting justice will work itself out in the universe. Unfairness is a temporary condition, they say. The Hindu doctrine of Karma, which applies a mathematical precision to this belief, calculates it may take a soul 6,800,000 incarnations to realize perfect justice. At the end of all those incarnations, a person will have experienced exactly the amount of pain and pleasure that he or she deserves.

A fourth approach is to flatly deny the problem and insist the world is fair. Echoing Job’s friends, these people insist the world does run according to fixed, regular laws: good people will prosper and evil ones will fail. I encountered this point of view at the faith-healing church in Indiana, and I hear it virtually every time I watch religious television, where some evangelist promises perfect health and financial prosperity to anyone who asks for it in true faith.

And finally, there is one more way to explain the world’s unfairness. After hearing all the alternatives, Job was driven to the conclusion I have suggested as the one-sentence summary of the entire book: Life is unfair!

Disappointment With God, Philip Yancey, Zondervan, pp. 179-181

1. Perhaps God keeps us ignorant because enlightenment might not help us.

2. Perhaps God keeps us ignorant because we are incapable of comprehending the answer .We remain ignorant of many details, not because God enjoys keeping us in the dark, but because we have not the faculties to absorb so much light Faith means believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse.

Disappointment With God, Philip Yancey, Zondervan, pp. 189ff

“We have met the enemy and he is us.” - Pogo

Source unknown

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago.