This week will mark the 15th anniversary of 9/11. A day that was so horrible we don’t even say the year when we talk about it. We don’t need to. For those around my age and older, the memories are vivid. Clouds of smoke pouring out of the buildings, hoards of people sprinting down the streets covered in debris, and the image of the second plane barreling toward the tower, the third at the Pentagon, and the fourth in Shanksville.
As a seventh grader, I could tell it was bad. My teachers were crying. My wife, then a sixth grader in a Connecticut suburb of New York City, had a different experience. Parents who could escape the madness rushed to pick up their kids from school. Everything shut down. Some of her classmates lost their moms, dads, aunts, and uncles that day. Grief counselors came in, and for a long time, their community wasn’t the same.
Fifteen years later, and the world still seems like a pretty dark place. There’s war, famine, disease, slavery, torture, natural disaster, and violence. No one escapes suffering. Some people just seem to have it worse than others. But everyone knows it’s there.
How, then, does God – all powerful, all loving, good God – allow this stuff to happen? This is a question folks have been wrestling for such a long time that it has its own name. Philosophers and theologians call it theodicy. There are volumes of literature on this single question that stretch back centuries. But this is a blog, and you should probably be doing that thing you need to get done, so I can only hit on the tiniest fraction of what is an age old conversation.
You can go lots of places with this topic, but there’s only one place you can start – with a question: “What do you mean by evil?” No, this isn’t some kind of smart-ass rhetorical trick. I mean the question exactly how it sounds. What does evil mean to you? It turns out everyone I’ve ever asked answers the same way. In 2016, we can all agree on something – evil sucks. It’s immoral, wicked, and just plain wrong. It’s tragic. It hurts. It makes us swell with anger. It makes us break down and cry.
But we can’t leave it there. Evil, alone, doesn’t make sense. The only way we can know what is immoral and wicked and wrong is if we’ve perceived what is moral and virtuous and right.
As CS Lewis says:
“A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.”
If we’re sure that this world is cruel and unjust, we are assuming the reality of some standard by which we make this assessment. Whether we’re pointing out the suffering in 9/11 or in a malignant tumor, we’re essentially saying, “This isn’t how it is supposed to be.” Good is the standard. Evil is the deviation.
So where does good come from? In a naturalistic worldview with no God, this is a difficult question. For the benefit of the human species? No, there are too many problems with that view. First, selfishness is often more beneficial for survival than good. And this kind of “goodness” isn’t the kind we believe in anyway. When a famous athlete grants a Make-A-Wish for a dying child, it’s not “good” because it prolongs the human species. It’s good because each living individual is born with intrinsic worth and dignity.
Secondly, if “good” were defined as that which benefited the survival of the species, we should ask – “To what end?” In the naturalistic worldview with no God, the whole universe is the result of a random explosion of mass with no purpose, destined for a grand implosion into eternal nothingness. If that is what you believe about life, what good does “good” really do? It’s like washing dishes on the Titanic.
Fortunately, good is much deeper than that. Good transcends the bounds of this life. Evil is deeper than that too, but according to the Christian worldview, this life can be where evil ends forever.
And why the focus on evil? There’s another question we should be asking. It’s the reverse of the original question. It’s this: How could the world be so good without a good and loving God? No matter what you believe in, you feel something special when you see one of those soldier-reuniting-with-family montages. Ever climbed a mountain? It’s hard to forget the magical sensation while gazing down at the scene below. What about the feeling you get when you hold a newborn? When you wake up on Christmas morning? When you serve someone who cannot help himself? This is goodness, and it’s everywhere, all around us. Where does it come from, and why are we wired to gravitate towards it? This is a question everyone has to answer, regardless of what you believe in.
I agree with you – it’s not supposed to be this way. The world shouldn’t be full of hatred and violence and suffering. But those things happen because God gave us free will. Stay with me here! Every day you can make choices because you’re a free agent. If you want to go to work, you can. If you want to stay home and play Madden17, you can. You can choose to buy your friend a hot coffee or pour hot coffee on her face. God won’t intervene. We have the license to make choices every second of our lives because we are free will persons, not robots.
With the ability to choose, we allow the best possible good as well as the worst possible bad. That’s just the way it is. It’s a necessary feature of free will. But why couldn’t God just allow ALMOST all of our choices and prevent us from making the evil ones? Well, that would be a violation of free will.
Theologian Greg Boyd puts it this way:
“If I gave Denay (his daughter) five dollars, can I completely control the way she spends it? If I stepped in every time she was going to spend this money unwisely according to my judgment, is it really her money at all? Did I really give her anything? If the only things she can buy with her money are the things which I decide are worthwhile, is it really her money at all? Is it not rather still my money which I am indirectly spending through her?”
See, if God gives us freedom, it must be, at least to a significant degree, irrevocable. He’s got to have a “hands off” attitude about it, giving people the chance to choose freely to do amazing good, horrible evil, or anything in between. This evil we experience in life is a necessary possibility of choice. If that possibility wasn’t there, we wouldn’t have free will, and we wouldn’t have good.
This is meant to be an intellectual conversation about an emotional topic. and that’s not really fair. Reasoning can only bring so much comfort to a mother who lost a child or a refuge forced out of his home. I believe the Christian worldview makes far and away more sense that any other explanation for evil, but I also believe it offers the most hope.
The truth is we are not alone in our suffering. It’s all over the Bible. Even the closest people to Jesus suffered tremendously. Evil knocked them down as they were imprisoned, ridiculed, beaten, and tortured. Many of them died at the hands of evil. And then for two thousand more years, Christians suffered. Still some are being oppressed and killed for their beliefs today. If someone told you aligning with Jesus would prevent suffering, he didn’t read the Bible.
Moreover, the Scriptures attest to the suffering of another man, a man who would suffer tremendously on our behalf. At the very core of Christianity is a suffering God-man, Jesus. What could be more offensive, more obscene than the all powerful, all loving God submitting Himself into the hands of men He knew would brutally murder Him? Betrayed by friends, mocked by scoffers, hated by the religious elite, tortured and crucified by captors – Jesus endured pain and humiliation that most of us will never fathom. Then He was separated from the Father, enduring the ultimate penalty we deserve, so we would have the opportunity, or the choice, to love Him back. But again, that is a choice, the most important choice we will ever have in our lives.
Romans 8 shows Paul’s words to a church that would be severely persecuted:
“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us… For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (18,38-39).
God gave us free will. Free will allows for both indescribable, unfathomable, fall-to-your-knees-in-awe good and horrifically devastating, tragic rip-your-hair-out evil. Sometimes evil chooses us. But when we choose Jesus, evil receives a death notice. And until that day, our hope rests in the good, good God who loves us.
Wheat vs Chaff 