Theology Thursday: Evil and Suffering

Welcome to Theology Thursday! Theology is the study of God, his relation to the world, and our relation to him. I hope these newsletters help enhance your faith and deepen your love for God and his people, the church.

Today's question:
Why does God allow evil and suffering?

Pastor Brady's thoughts:
Well, this is a big one. There’ve been countless books and sermons and whatever else on this subject because the problem of pain and the innate feeling (and reality) of wrongness is so obvious to us. The presence of evil and hardship in our world challenges our understanding that God is good, it causes us to wrestle with our own character and his, and when we experience the difficult and tragic and even nasty parts of life, it tempts us to doubt his love, or even his existence.

I won’t be able to put all that to rest here, because this is just a blog post and - after a few kind requests - I’ve been trying to make them shorter! But we can touch on a few basics that point us to understanding why the world is the way it is.

First, it's important to highlight this word "allow." God does allow suffering, but he does not cause it. Ultimately the devil is to blame for suffering (Job 1:11). Sometimes we cause our own suffering (Genesis 3:16-19). And sometimes other people cause our suffering (Joshua 7:10-26).

As I wrote last week in my post about God and natural disasters, God created a good world, and desired for it to continue to be good forever. And I don’t just mean “good” as in “Wow, these cookies are good!” or “I hope you have a good day!” I mean deeply, intrinsically, thoroughly good - devoid of bad, free of evil, altogether pure and uncontaminated.  

Before we jump into how things went wrong, we must first address the question of why God created the world in the first place. There’s no answer to this explicitly stated in Scripture, but the theory I believe makes the most sense based on what God has revealed to us in the Bible about his character, his will, and the purpose of life goes something like this:

God is a relational God. In fact, his very triune nature is relational: he exists in three persons. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit each interact and complement each other’s unique purposes and activity while sharing the same essential essence and character. Part of what it means to say that God “created mankind in his own image” (Genesis 1:27) is that humans’ natural desire for relationship with each other and with their Creator reflects God’s desire for relationship with them. In this sense, relationships are the very foundation of existence. God did not desire to be alone and did not want humans to be alone either (Genesis 2:18), so he created the world as an act of love, to showcase and express his relational love, and provide his creation the opportunity to find its true relational fulfillment in loving him back and loving each other in his name.

If that’s right or at least somewhat right, then we can say that the primary purpose of our existence is to know and feel and experience God’s love and respond by loving (trusting, imitating, obeying) him in return. That is what God created us for; that was his intent for making all of the cosmos out of nothing. He created the world and especially humans to enjoy his relational love.

And if that’s the case, what type of characteristics would humans then need to have? What are the attributes of relational love?

Love looks like commitment, it looks like forsaking all others, it looks like submission and service, and it looks like sacrifice. Enveloping all of these is the fact that true love is a choice. God chose us, and he created humans with the ability to choose him, or to not. In other words, he gave us free will.

What we call “falling in love” is full of big feelings and dizzying emotional highs, but staying in love for the long-haul is a choice. It’s a daily renewal of commitment regardless of how we feel or what else is out there. This is true of marriage, friendships, and church family - and it’s true of God and us.  

God gave us the freedom to choose to love him. Which means he gave us the freedom not to. And sometimes we exercise that freedom; sometimes we choose not-God.

Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows (James 1:17).

If all that is good about our world comes from God and is of God, then when we choose not-God - when we choose to disobey his commandments, stray from the path he has laid out for us, and reject his relational pursuits - we are choosing to worship and engage with and prioritize that which cannot be good. It may feel good for a time, or we may even be culturally conditioned to believe it’s good or that we’re right and God is wrong or at least certain traditions or accepted wisdom is wrong, but this is an illusion; it’s a lie.

God is God and we are not, and when we choose to replace him in our lives with whatever idol seduces us into believing we know better, we experience the consequences (both now, and for all of eternity if we don’t return to him) of separation from the One who inhabits and defines goodness.

Thus, sin. Thus, evil. Thus, suffering and pain and sorrow and hurt.

Adam and Eve learned this lesson first, and the rest of us keep re-learning it over and over again. There are consequences to sin, and they are often (always?) not limited to our own private lives. The ripple effects of humans choosing not-God extend into communities, through generations of children and families, and across the globe.

We see this all around us on a grand scale: wars, street violence, domestic abuse, corrupt governments and systems; even “natural” disasters. Remember, …all creation groans (Romans 8:22).

But we also see the consequences of sin in our personal lives, in our own hearts. We know we are not as we should be. And not just how we want to be, but how God made us to be. We feel the wrongness, we sense the iniquity, and when we’re really honest with ourselves, we can even acknowledge our own wickedness.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts.”

We are each capable of reflecting the goodness of God, and we are each capable of perpetrating great evil on ourselves and our world. The world is the way it is because we are the way we are. Which is to say, we are not the way God designed us to be.

In my sermon last Sunday I preached that being part of a family - a biological family, but more importantly a church family - is both a gift and a burden, a responsibility. So is free will. God wants our love, He wants our relationship. But He does not mandate it. He did not create automaton robots required to merely follow their pre-set programming. Neither is he a puppet master, looking down from high above and pulling the strings to make his puppets do as he pleases.

He created us to love us, and he invites into that loving relationship. Our reward for accepting his invitation is not a life free of trouble (“In this world you will have trouble…”) but a life full of purpose and an eternity spent in the glory of God (“...but take heart! I have overcome the world!”).

God allows evil and suffering because God allows us to be free. He could have done it differently; he could have created an unfree world with unfree creatures whose moves are dictated and whose lives are simulated. But these creatures, by their nature, could not experience love, only control. And they could not return love, only compulsory response. That is not what a real relationship looks like.

When we are angry at injustice, when we are heartbroken at illness or tragedy, when we despair at the state of things and the state of ourselves and we cry out “Why God!? Why!?” We are why. Not him. We did this. We are doing this.

We are all great sinners in desperate need of a great Savior. Do you know where we can find one?

TO KNOW GOD AND TO MAKE HIM KNOWN!
- Pastor Brady

Have a question for Theology Thursday? Send an email to office@minierchristian.org and we'll respond, or we'll include in a future Theology Thursday Buffet.