~Columbine
~The Oklahoma City bombing
~The terrorist attacks of 9/11
~The Beslan massacre
~And Monday’s murder of 32 college students at Virginia Tech…evil perpetrated by individuals—senseless, purposeless, meaningless evil.
Why does such evil exist?
People use this question to challenge our faith. How can we reconcile the existence of evil with an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God? If God is so knowledgeable, good and powerful, why does He permit evil? Why doesn’t he stop it? Or maybe he is powerless to stop it…so He isn’t really so great. In fact, maybe God does not even exist.
We do have an answer – but the problem of evil is not just a problem for Christians to explain. How do atheists and naturalists deal with the problem of evil?
Can you honestly believe that man is somehow the random product of millions of years of evolution and that we are reaching the pinnacle of civilization? That man in his current state represents the epitome of goodness? Not unless you have spent your life in a cave. Man’s inhumanity to man is staggering. How does naturalism explain murder, rape, torture, child abuse? What hope does atheism provide for a world filled with pain, injustice and suffering?
So what is our answer?
Clearly, the world is not as it was meant to be. Evil first appears in the creation story of Adam and Eve. God created a paradise for them with but one caveat – do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Notice that he left them open to the possibility of eating from the tree. He didn’t lock it up, fence it off, or put a force field around it. He gave them a choice and explained the consequences -- but they chose to disobey. Man has been intimately familiar with evil ever since.
God gave us free will – a precious gift. C.S. Lewis once said,
Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free, but has no possibility of going wrong. I cannot. If a thing is free to be good, it is also free to be bad. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
Of course, God knew what we happen if his creatures used their free will to do wrong, but he thought it worth the risk. Imagine a world without free will – we all would be robots, puppets, automatons – devoid of all significance and value.
The good news is that God had a Plan B. Knowing where free will would lead us, he decided to defeat evil once and for all through his son Jesus Christ. Jesus suffered terrible injustice, physical pain, torture and evil at the hands of people of his own creation. Although he was completely blameless, he suffered a criminal’s death on the cross.
Why?
Isaiah 53:5 says
He was pierced for our transgressions,
He was crushed for our iniquities;
The punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
And by his wounds we are healed.
Jesus took on evil – head on – as the punishment for our wrongdoing. He spared us the awful consequences of the wrongful exercise of our free will and our fallen nature. By putting our faith in him and claiming his gift of eternal life, we gain significance, meaning and hope.
I Peter 1: 3-5
He has given us new birth into a living hope
Through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
And into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade –
Kept in heaven for you,
Who through faith are shielded by God’s power
Until the coming of the salvation that is ready
To be revealed in the last time.
What an awesome God. He freely chose to become human and bear the penalty for our wickedness. Because of this choice, he is intimately familiar with our pain and suffering resulting from evil in a fallen world.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son,
That whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
John 3:16
