I don’t mean to oversimplify this issue, though this is how I see it and I believe this is how God sees it: the problem of evil:
At the first simplistic level, we must understand that God is correct. We are evil at the heart and we initiated evil from the beginning of creation. The results of evil in Genesis 3 were that Adam blamed his wife, his wife blamed the snake and both hid from God. Now, our proclivity as fallen creatures (to speak of ‘evil’ in mild terms) is to blame somebody for evil except ourselves. Therefore, the problem of evil lies within us. We would rather blame God than blame ourselves.
No matter whatever philosophical acrobatics you do with your mind concerning the problem of evil, the fundamental principle remains the same (and don’t you feel a sense of this?): we are sinners and God is perfect. God is perfectly good and yet we don’t trust Him. Isn’t this the real source behind the problem of evil? We don’t trust God, although He’s good. Although He’s good, and clearly we’re bad, we’re the evil ones, we don’t trust Him and yet we trust ourselves. God would tell us not to trust our own reasoning. We can’t even understand the Gospel or spiritual things unless God grants us the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 2, Matt. 11:27). So do you think us fallen creatures who dwell with deceitful hearts (Jer. 17:9) have the ability to assess evil? (We can’t even assess God’s good news correctly!) So we always assess evil in scrutiny of God’s goodness as if He could be the bad One. Well if He could be, then our only God is the Devil in which case all of us are little Hellions, literally, we are the children of Satan and the whole world was made by Him too.
And yet that would bring up a greater dilemma: “The problem of good!” Nobody likes to ask that question because we attribute the good so naturally to us, leaving God out of the equation. But we attribute the question of evil to God, and leave us out of the equation! Every debate that I hear on the question of evil is focused on God. I can’t help but think that even Christians like to put God on trial. I cannot think of a better answer to the problem of evil than, ‘faith.’ Take God at His Word. I am condemned as a sinner. God is completely sovereign and permits evil. You may well say that He caused it then because He’s omnipotent and decided not to stop it. Yet, it’s absurd to attribute Him with evil, for then God’s attribute would be evil, and hence the devil himself. God is Holy, not evil, and eternal at that. So His purposes far outreach our limited perspective.
Plus, I always come back to this simple reasoning when trying to condemn God for evil in the world that He created. Could I make a world any better? Do I really have the right to critique Somebody Who made me (Rom. 9:20!), first of all, and Who has made a world much more wonderful than I’m capable of, and what’s more, who could prove that any human being would make a world as beautiful and lovely and less evil than the one that God’s world became? We assume that we could make a world better than God when we point the finger of blame at Him for what it has become. Yet, we who complain about the problem of evil are born adding to the problem–fighting with siblings, disobeying parents, etc. And if it wasn’t for the preventative grace of God, we would all turn out much worse than we have. Therefore, if we created a world, would we really create it without evil? (look at the families we produce!) So no, we could never, since we are as human beings the first responsible cause for evil (not including Satan) and an additional thrust to evil.
I will say this. The problem of evil is not a problem to God at all, since He permitted it. He throws into Hell, and that won’t bother Him forever. It saddens Him, albeit true (look at Gen. 6!), but He doesn’t lose sleep over a lost creation. Why? Because although people are made in God’s image, we are still made and we are not His image. We are NOT God! I think it’s a very hard thing to grasp because we are people who love ourselves more than God. But the problem of evil can be summarized with just that too: we love ourselves first, and then love God. If we were to love God and then people, we would rejoice in His glory, His justice, and His way. But instead we make the problem of evil one that only exploits our evil. We are inclined to blame God for it. However logical that may be in our head, it’s fallen reason, it’s abominable logic, it’s abysmal arguments, and we are the one’s to blame.
It’s a wonder that the world is still as beautiful as it is, filled with love and any amount of justice. That’s called grace and without evil, we would know nothing of it like we do today.
Praise be to God for bringing the greatest evil on His Son Jesus Christ on our behalf! The problem of evil brings us to the wonder of love. And in my estimation, that is the solution to our problem of evil. Look to Christ and look no further. He carried our evil on Himself. And that is called gracious justice.
You can either have straight justice in which we would all be condemned. Or you can experience gracious justice, where God in His love took it upon Himself to bear our guilt and blame for us. He didn’t need to do that. But praise God He did!
paraklesisblog 