Part 5 - The Problem of Evil

CUMULATIVE APOLOGETIC
It began before time. God decided to create a world inhabited with humans who would be created in His likeness and be given the choice to love Him but with that choice would also come the ability to reject Him, choosing sin. This choice was the risk to be run in order for man to have the chance to freely love God.
God had choices. He could have created the world with a mankind who would not been able to choose sin. He could have created the world without the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil; no temptation, no sin. He could have just avoided it all together, skipping earth, the sun, moon, people, etc.
But He chose to make us, and I think it is cogent to point out that when He created us, he created us without sin and in perfect condition with His full image alive in us. This does not sound like a malevolent God to me. “God can create free creatures, but He can’t cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they aren’t significantly free after all; they do not do what’s right freely.”[1]
So does God have a responsibility like that of an adult who sees a child about to be hurt and doesn’t warn that child? I don’t think so. Genesis records that, for days, God enjoyed His perfect creation, and descriptively spells out the warning that God gave.[2] But Adam and Eve chose to sin. The result of which was the collapse of the world as it was; nature collapsed, physiology collapsed, the Imago Dei or image of God was marred in man, and His good was retracted from His creation.
This retraction resulted in privation. The deprivation of God’s goodness, which was in keeping with His holiness, resulted in evil. Evil is a byproduct of the absence of good.
Take a thermometer for instance. It measures degrees of heat. But when heat drops we call it cooling and eventually cold. Cold isn’t measured though, only degrees of heat. Cold is a state of the privation of heat. Another illustration of privation is seen in a comparison of light and dark. Light has essence and nature. It is governed by laws in the universe. Darkness is just an absence of light and though it affects us, it is extrinsically manifested.
Evil is not ontologically measurable. “Christian thought has traditionally, of necessity, defined evil as a privation of the good, possessing no essence or nature of its own, a purely parasitic corruption of reality.”[3]
When God’s goodness was separated from this world, man began his struggle with suffering. We struggle because we weren’t designed to live in this residue of the original earth that was created. We were not built to deal with sickness and disease, the feeling of loss when a loved one dies. Those things were never supposed to happen in the world God created. They are all results of The Fall. Did God know that man would choose to sin? Yes, He knows all things, but God also knew He was giving us a choice not to sin. We were not obligated to sin because we had the choice and opportunity. We equally had the choice and opportunity not to sin.
That’s why Christ was the fulfillment of God’s redemption plan. Having fully the nature of God and the nature of man, He became the second Adam. Because Jesus fully had the nature of humanity, He could have chosen to sin, but He did not.
I believe the nugatory views of Voltaire and Hume, which are expressed a thousand times over by many brokenhearted people, are really unjustified. “Augustine suggests, however, that we probably have too anthropocentric a starting point to easily perceive a divine purpose within such events. Rather than occupy ourselves with detailed questions that could be painful for us, we should seek to view our own misfortune in light of a universal plan.”[4]
We measure God against an imperfect standard. Who are we to question Him? Albion King suggests that it is a view of two paradoxes: one, that there is evil in a world created by a good God, and two, the grace of God to men.[5] F.D.E. Schleiermacher expressed, “Sin and God’s grace are in our consciousness so they lead us to reconciliation.”[6]
Even in light of our sin, even though man broke away from God, bringing himself evil and suffering for ourselves, God allowed the ensuing chaos to lead us to Him. What mercy! In God’s sovereignty, He designed a world that was perfectly in order but even in disorder, due to sin, He provided the framework for the salvation of mankind. “It is within His power…to take or perform the action and within his power to refrain from it.”[7] It is God’s mercy that he chooses not to act. If God were to enact justice without mercy, all of mankind would be condemned to hell. Instead, he is patient giving his redemption plan time to work in order that as many people may be delivered from evil. It is not a deliverance that can interfere with the natural evil unleashed by the act of sin. That would be a violation of God’s attribute of righteousness, but ultimately the situation will be made moot by the coming of Christ and the end of this world as we know it.
So what is the hope for the hurting mother who has lost a child, or the devastated sojourner forced to pick up the pieces after natural disaster? Placher states, “In light of the cross, we may still not know how to tell the story of the world in which we live, but we cannot tell it as a story of God’s indifference to our suffering.”[8]
God is not indifferent to our suffering. He looks on us with compassion. It was this love for us, the same love that made Him desire to create us, that created a way for our redemption.
The onus of responsibility for evil in this world rests squarely on the shoulders of humanity. It is our sin that resulted in the evil and suffering all around us. In His mercy God has made another way for man to be rejoined to Him. And while we have to endure these “light and momentary troubles”[9] we know that there is a surpassing glory that is ours through Christ.
[1] A. Plantinga, 30.

[2] Genesis 2:16 NIV.
[3] Hart, 9.

[4] Hans Schwartz, Evil: A Historical and Theological Perspective. (Minneapolis: Fortress,
1995), 102.
[5] Albion King, The Problem of Evil. (New York: Ronald Press Co., 1952), 101.

[6] T. Plantinga, 46.

[7] A. Plantinga, 29.

[8] Placher, 209.

[9] 2 Corinthians 2:14 NIV.