Introduction & Five Views
What is theodicy? A theodicy is an argument that seeks to vindicate God’s goodness through reasonable explanation considering all the evil and suffering that is in the world. The question we must all face is this: If God is real and true, all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving, then why is there evil in this world? It’s a topic relevant for Christians and skeptics alike. It is for the very existence of evil that many agnostics refuse to accept the existence of God. It is also because of the sufferings in this world that cause many Christians to struggle in their faith and have some of them abandon the faith all-together. For these reasons, the theological study of theodicy is very important to convince the skeptic and to build and solidify a strong foundation for the believer. We must also keep in mind that when discussing reasonable answers to why God allows evil and suffering in the world, we must be sensitive to the emotional nature to this issue and not just the intellectual one. It is usually more than an intellectual quandary that cause people to turn away from God. Many people have experienced great loss and tragedy in their lives and the suffering has hit them so hard that they really need to be loved and comforted through it, not just receive some cold-hearted whimsical intellectual response from you that wins the argument. What people really need is the love of Jesus—not our mere intellectual prowess. However, I do not say this to diminish the intellectual response. The intellect very important too and what we think effects the way that we feel and cope. Having a weak or untrue intellectual foundation could lead to the building collapsing. Many Christians may make it fine in life through many years and find it easy to accept the existence and goodness of God through their intellectual responses but once a severe tragedy strikes, it could be a whole different story. The suffering becomes personal and real and questions linger. The death of a child. Parents who die leaving children without a mother or father. Rape, murder, physical and sexual abuse. Natural disasters. Freak accidents. What do we make of all these things? How do we reconcile them? If God saw these things coming, couldn’t He have prevented them? If He had the power to prevent them, couldn’t He do it? If He is all-loving and good, how is allowing evil to happen loving and good? This is the essence of what theodicy attempts to explain.
Within Christendom, many people offer their various explanations and views. There is the Classic view which has an Augustinian / Calvinistic view of God’s providence where His providence is meticulous—He has a reason behind everything and whatever He allows, He allows because there is a wise or good reason to allow it. That reason might be for His glory or for some greater good down the road that we can’t see yet. In the Classic view, all events that happen in life are determined by God—nothing happens without His say-so. There is a reason for everything. Many Christians find this explanation comforting and decide to simply entrust themselves to God’s wisdom and decisions and that’s sufficient for them to be at peace and receive comfort. However, other Christians find this repulsive. After all, how on earth could it glorify God for a little girl to be kidnapped and raped, especially if it was your own child? How could God have a good reason for this to purpose it in His divine plan and meticulously allow it to happen for the express purpose of His glory? This self-serving egotistical god doesn’t sound like the humble and loving God we know through Jesus Christ. Jesus came into this world to put an end to sin not to stoke the flames of sin or stack the cards against us so that sin reigns so that we will simply be more grateful and thankful one day when sin is completely done away. In the Classic view of God’s providence, it’s really hard to defend the blamelessness of God. How is God not somehow responsible for evil if He’s the one who meticulously purposed that very evil to happen? In the Classic view, God’s power and knowledge are strongly defended yet at the expense of God’s love and goodness. I actually know of a Calvinist pastor who had taken this view and came to the logical conclusion that God simply does not care about us. Most Christians who hold the Classic view don’t go that far or express it in that way but this man apparently did because He couldn’t reconcile His own suffering with the nature of God and His providence. Unfortunately though, that is the result of a logically consistent Calvinistic theodicy whereby God does and allows all that He does for His own glory. All this God does at our own expense no matter the cost of suffering. However, the God we know through Jesus Christ is the One who emptied Himself, taking on the form of a man, who was born in an animal’s feeding trough, and experienced all the human sufferings of this life so that one day we might be delivered from all suffering. He did this all, denying Himself and taking up His cross unto death to save and deliver us, because of the joy that was set before Him that He would see us set free and reconciled to God. His incarnation and death revealed to us God’s very nature—selfless love—and that selflessness is incompatible with the Classic view of theodicy. Therefore, I do not find the Classic view to be true. God has shown to us that He suffers at His own expense and He did that because He loves us.
The next view of theodicy is the Open Theist view. If I understand this view correctly, it essentially proposes that God experiences time similar to the way we experience time. God experiences the future the way we experience the future. Though He can predict the future, He does not yet know the future since it hasn’t happened yet. This is called dynamic omniscience. There are certain things that He can plan for and influence events to make them happen through the free-agency of creatures, yet the sure result isn’t obtained until those events take place. God has foresight into the future through His present knowledge and understanding of human nature and mathematical probabilities and so in that way He can foresee many things to come. Since God does not know the future with absolute certainty, evils take place and events progressively unfold. People respond in ways that God does not intend or desire for them to respond because of their own free-agency.
Most Christians I have come across often use the argument that God exists outside of time and space and so He experiences past, present, and future all within a single gaze in His omniscience. The future, therefore, has already been experienced by God and He knows what certainly will take place because He is beyond time and space since He created these things. Now, that is certainly a nicely put philosophical answer to God’s omniscience, however, since I do not find a sure way to biblically defend it, I can only acknowledge it as a philosophical theory. We don’t know for sure how God experiences the future. There’s no way to really prove it. For that reason, we can only speculate. That may leave Open Theism open for more discussion. However, this is not a view I hold to since I see the biblical evidence pointing to the fact that God knows all future events. However, this truth does not have to be predicated on the fact that God exists outside time and space. There are various ways to know a certain future like having and exercising the power to bring that future about or having such extensive knowledge and wisdom that the future is entirely predictable.
However, even if one were to believe that open-theism were true, I do not see how it would help with theodicy because the fact remains that there are still many if not most evils that God foresees will happen. If He foresees them, He certainly has both the power and the will to stop them, so why doesn’t He? The belief in dynamic omniscience makes God less majestic but it certainly doesn’t make Him powerless; and so, a greater reason must be provided besides dynamic omniscience alone to have a good theodicy. Dynamic omniscience only slightly helps the problem by putting more of the emphasis on individual human choices effecting the future rather than God being the one who determines every choice. However, all other theodicies besides the Classic view would reject divine exhaustive determinism anyway, so that’s not anything particular to Open Theism.
Another view of theodicy is the Essential Kenosis view. In this view, God is at His very nature loving and self-giving, who has the ability to control others but chooses not to. God self-restricts Himself to allow for human freedom, autonomy, and the laws of nature to persist. To fail to do this would be to deny Himself as a self-giving God of freedom and love to all. This nature of God is logically primary to all other actions that He decides to do. This means that the principle of giving freedom of choice to all and allowing humanity to govern the world freely, requires that God limit His actions to not interfere with human choice. While I agree in principle with this theodicy in the sense that it is a free-will theodicy, I do not find Essential Kenosis all that helpful in answering our questions for evil because the fact remains: Sometimes God does interfere with this world supernaturally or prevents a tragedy from happening through the action of people or angels. In that way, the free choice of human volition is prevented from being actualized in at least some occasions. So, if God is permitted to do it for some occasions, then why didn’t or doesn’t He do it for my occasion? Kenosis cannot really offer a helpful solution here except to say that God has a general policy of not interfering with human free-will. But this makes God seem very aloof and distant from our struggles as if He doesn’t really care or that He cares more about policy than helping those in need. But God is not only our Creator but for we as believers, He is our loving Father; and as a loving Father, wouldn’t He be more than willing to help us in our suffering and great time of need much more than an earthly father would? I believe that He would. So then if He would, why doesn’t He? Why does He allow us to suffer and be unprotected at times if we are His very own children? I have biblical answers and reasons for this but I will save that for later.
The next view of theodicy is a Molinist view. This view comes from Molinism and the term middle knowledge, which is God’s knowledge of all counterfactuals. That is, God foresees all possible worlds and all possible decisions made by free creatures and orders the best possible world given the fact of human freedom remaining. For all people to have true freedom, sin would be an inevitable consequence and all the evils that it brings to the world. Therefore, God did not make a perfect world but rather formed the most ideal world given all the counterfactuals of human choice. God is able to bring about His ultimate ends through creaturely freedom despite all the evil they would bring about. This view maintains God’s complete knowledge of the future while also not infringing upon human freedom since the counterfactuals of human freedom were considered in the mind of God prior to Him creating the best possible world to bring about His ultimate ends. I find this view appealing for God’s providence since it maintains God’s knowledge and power while offering free-will as the explanation for why the world is the way that it is. There was no possible feasible world for God to create that didn’t involve evil coming into being since that is a by-product of free choice. Sin often frustrates God’s purposes and desires but yet even despite that, God is able to bring about His good purposes. God, therefore, foresaw all the sins that would happen and allowed them to take place by virtue of creating a world of free creatures but those individual choices of those creatures were not determined by God. God did not cause or tempt anyone into evil; that is a result of their own choices. In this way, God is not a puppet master but rather a strategic card or chess player. He doesn’t need to deterministically control every piece or every detail in order to win the game but yet He is also in total control of the outcome because He is all-knowing and all-wise and can trump all of His opponents. There are two main reasons for God permitting evil. (1) to allow for human freedom to exist and (2) because unbeknownst to us, God has a good reason for permitting it considering all counterfactual knowledge of how one event can cause ripple effects in the world to cause or prohibit other events. What may not seem good to us at the time may later produce a bountiful harvest of good things down the road. At this time in my life, I find the Molinist view of God’s providence to be the most biblically accurate regarding God’s nature and interaction with the world along with being the most comforting regarding God’s power, wisdom, and control that He maintains in the world. It maintains a sense of mystery and majesty in God while permitting human freedom.
The last view we shall consider is the Skeptical Theist view. This isn’t properly a theodicy since theodicies deal with giving some kind of answer to a question. This would be more properly defined as a defense of God’s goodness. It gives a reasonable explanation for how a good God can possibly exist in an evil world. Rather than answering the question “why this?” Or “why that?” it instead seeks to make the existence and goodness of God understandable and to be received with at least some level of acceptance considering all the evil that exists. Stephen Wykstra puts it like this:
First, there is the claim that if the God of theism exists, we humans should not expect to see or grasp very much of God’s purposes for divine actions—including the divine actions of allowing or even causing events that bring much of the horrific suffering around us. Second, there is the claim that if the first claim is true, then much of what otherwise looks like strong evidence against theism isn’t very strong at all.
(God and The Problem of Evil, 99-100)
The assessment that Wykstra makes aligns very much with Job’s experience of God. Job wanted answers for His suffering and God answered him but He didn’t answer Job with the real answers that Job was seeking; instead, God answered him by giving an explanation for God’s ways being higher than our ways and beyond our comprehension to fully understand. As a result, we are simply encouraged to trust and accept who God is and that His wisdom and understanding is way beyond our own finite minds to grasp.
Wykstra says that the first claim of skeptical theism is this disproportionality thesis:
If such a being as God does exist, what our minds see and grasp and purpose in evaluating events in our universe will be vastly less than what this being’s mind sees and grasps and purposes. (111)
This understanding can leave us humbled at the mystery and grandeur of God. As finite and limited humans, we don’t have all the answers and the answers we do have we ourselves are not fully capable of understanding. But if God is truly to be God, would He still be God if we could fully understand His nature and wisdom and ways? Would a fully-comprehendible God even be worth worshipping? And if He did give us the answers that we are not fully able to comprehend, perhaps that might be worse than having no answer at all and to just accept the mystery of suffering while trusting God. It would be healthier and better for us to simply trust the goodness and wisdom of God rather than constantly question or be cynical of His reasons as if our wisdom and rational mind were greater than God’s… Yet without realizing it, people do this all the time. They think, “I see no point for such and such tragic event to happen. There appears to be no reason for it. Therefore, there is no reason for it.” Because of this, the skeptics argue, “Because there appears to be no reason or point for evil, then a rational God does not exist; otherwise, there would be a rational reason for evil.” But this argument presupposes several things. It presupposes that you are entitled for God to give you an answer. But He is God—He owes no one any answer for why He does or doesn’t do what He does. Second, it presupposes that there is no reason for evil simply because there doesn’t appear to be one. But as Wykstra points out:
If I casually look around a classroom and see no horse in the room, it is entirely reasonable for me to assert, “It appears that there is no horse in the room.” But for other things, it’s not legitimate at all. If I look casually around the classroom, for example, and see no flea in the room, am I rationally entitled to say, “It appears there is no flea in the room?” Or think of it this way: you are in a health clinic getting your daily methadone shot, and the health worker drops the hypodermic needle on the floor. She picks it up off the floor, does a close visual inspection of it for contamination, and says—what is incontestably true—“I see no hepatitis or other viruses on this needle.” She pauses and then adds, “So it appears that there are no hepatitis or other viruses on this needle—and so it is apparently virus-free!” She then adds, as she puts the needle in the syringe and begins to inject you, “So probably, it is virus free.” (114)
Just because we can’t see something, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Just because we can’t perceive it, that doesn’t mean it’s not there. We would be jumping to conclusions to say that a good God doesn’t exist simply because we cannot find an explanation for the questions that trouble us.
These five views of responding to evil that have been presented here come from the book God And The Problem Of Evil: Five Views: Contributors: Phillip Cary, William Lane Craig, William Hasker, Thomas Jay Oord, and Stephen Wykstra.
In the next section, we will diverge from these broad-range viewpoints of God’s providence and move in closer to more specific arguments of theodicy. This, I will be able to do without the specific constraint of trying to fit certain arguments neatly into various theological categories; so, I will take more liberty in explaining theodicies according to my conceptual viewpoints. Some of those viewpoints have been expressed in the previous book I mentioned but I didn’t mention them here because I did not see them as viewpoints expressly specific to those particular five views.
The Free-will Theodicy: Stop Blaming God
Psalm 115:16 says, “The heavens are the heavens of the Lord, but the earth He has given to the sons of men.” In view of this psalm, God has delegated earth to the authority of mankind. He did this from the very beginning when He told Adam to cultivate the garden, to fill the earth and subdue it. We’re not given all the specifics of God’s playbook of why He does or doesn’t do every single thing that He does, or why or when He decides to allow Himself to intervene in the affairs of our lives. However, this psalm does indicate to us that the earth is supposed to be ruled by us. You could say that the earth is our rodeo. It’s our job to run the place and make it better. There are many ways we have failed to do the best job that we can and that can result in all kinds of future problems, disasters, and illnesses. We could make jobs safer, reduce hazards, stop manipulating the weather, causing air pollution, radioactive contamination, and manufacturing deadly viruses in labs. God allows us to run the world and make it better or worse because the heavens are the Lord’s but the earth He has given to mankind.
You can’t blame God for everything, even if you wanted to, because the truth of the matter is we live in a world where people make free choices of their own. Don’t blame God for still being single because there are people that you have freely rejected and others who have freely rejected you. There may be situations that you’ve decided not to put yourself in to meet someone or maybe that person isn’t ready for you yet or maybe they don’t live in your area to cross paths because they’re not listening to God who is trying to get them there. You can’t force someone to have feelings for you and enter into a relationship and God won’t force that on them either if they decide of their own free-will they don’t want you or don’t want to be in a relationship at this time. God does not control us like puppets and so we need to give God a break and stop blaming everything on Him. Sure, there may be a reason your heavenly Father hasn’t brought the right person to you yet and God might have good reasons for that. In such a situation, we must learn to trust God’s love and goodness to us that He always has our best interests at heart and will provide what is best for us at the right time. However, we must also take initiative to be out in the world and meet people. I hardly doubt God will hand deliver to you a girlfriend or boyfriend via UPS or FEDEX. We must be careful that we do not have such a meticulous view of God’s sovereignty that we neglect this aspect of free-will which God works alongside rather than forcing Himself against.
Another example of free-will is every time we sin. James 1:13-14 says, “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God’; for God cannot be tempted by evil, and He Himself does not tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust.” We can’t blame God for our bad choices because God did not tempt us or determinatively cause us to sin or stack up the cards against us so that we would sin. Our sin is the result of our own free choices and these future free choices are not set in stone. We can choose not to do evil things. Otherwise, if God determined our future sinful choices, then God would be partially responsible for our actions and that would make Him a partaker in our evil. This is why I maintain the doctrine of true contra-causal free-will where each person can legitimately choose between either choice A or choice B and there is real potential for either choice. To say that choice A is determined and that choice B is only a hypothetical choice is really not to have free-will at all but only the illusion of free-will—a pseudo free-will; and I strongly reject that notion. One cannot logically maintain the true blamelessness of God with such a belief. Therefore, I reject the doctrine of divine exhaustive determinism where every single molecule and dice roll in life is directly caused and moved by God. One cannot be logically consistent in believing in true free-will while also holding to divine exhaustive determinism because these two things are not logically compatible. While there are among the Calvinists people who call themselves Compatibilists, they do not recognize yet the insanity of their contradictory beliefs. Sooner or later, this contradiction will create a wedge of disillusionment and cognitive dissonance in them that they will not be able to shake off until one day their mind breaks which will lead to more disillusionment in life, doubting God’s goodness, and for some, an abandonment of their faith all together. However, most people just ignore the contradiction to maintain their sanity. But that is not healthy. God did not wire our brains to believe in contradictions.
God did not determinatively cause pastors to fail their congregations through their own sin. That wasn’t God’s plan or desire. He did not cause physical and sexual abuse, murder, and mass shootings, etc. That wasn’t God’s plan to somehow glorify Himself. Even if that was the purpose, how on earth would those sins glorify God? Doesn’t a pastor’s downfall cause more bad to come as a result for the church than good? Why then would God determine that? And what about the pastor himself? How could he in his own mind truly maintain full-responsibility and faith in God after His moral failure if he believed that even this sin of his was determined by God to fulfill some greater purpose so that he in all actuality could not do otherwise? This would mean that God set him up to fail and he could not resist the will of God since it was God’s plan after all. Such a view has major implications for questioning and vindicating the goodness of God. I find the doctrine of divine exhaustive determinism to be the greatest nightmare of all theodicies. One cannot maintain God’s goodness while in the same breath saying that God determined these sins to happen. I’m not saying that those who are high Calvinists would actually say this but it would nonetheless be the logically consistent result of their beliefs.
Oftentimes in Calvinistic circles, the only theodicy that is shared by people to comfort others in times of grief or the loss of a loved one is this: “God is sovereign.” Unfortunately, that is not the most comforting thing to hear when you lost someone you love. It’s like saying, “God wanted your loved one to die for some greater purpose like glorifying Himself and that’s why He allowed it to happen.” But that is totally just speculation, not to mention, intellectually cold-hearted. We don’t know the specific reason. It’s not comforting to know that God either caused or allowed someone’s death because that’s ultimately what He wanted to do. At that time, it would be better to reassure them of God’s love and presence even in our pain rather than God’s power. That is sure to bring more healing. God’s sovereignty can be a theodicy but used alone or on the wrong occasion or time, it’s not a sufficient one. God’s sovereignty is an explanation but it is not the definitive or all-conclusive answer to why such a tragedy occurred. Therefore, it’s not always helpful.
In response to the Israelites adopting Canaanite worship of Baal and sacrificing their children alive in the fire, God said, “I had not commanded them nor had it entered My mind that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin” (Jer 32:35). Earlier, He said, “a thing which I never commanded or spoke of, nor did it ever enter My mind” (Jer 19:5). What God is saying here is that He had absolutely nothing to do with this abomination of child sacrifice. He did not decree it because He never spoke it and if it never entered His mind, He would never have determined it. Therefore, it was not decreed. It was not determined. This was not the plan of God for some greater purpose. No! God punished Israel for this sin. He did not prevent them from exercising their free-will directly but He did punish them so that they would stop sacrificing their children to Baal. That is how He orchestrated circumstances to stop their evil. But one might ask, “well, why didn’t He stop it sooner? Or why didn’t He prevent it from happening in the first place?” The thing is, God placed laws for Israel to obey so that it wouldn’t come to this but the problem was that they were not obeying the laws. They were living rebelliously. Then the God we know as gracious and compassionate and slow to anger, was slow to anger in dealing with Israel’s sin because of His abundant grace. He gave them time to repent rather than punishing them immediately. That is why the evil went on longer, because of God’s patience with them. And that is a reason for why evil goes on in our world today. God hasn’t stopped it yet because He is giving people opportunity to repent. In 2 Peter 3 it mentions how in the last days there will be people who mock the idea of Jesus coming back to judge the world just like there were people who were mocking in the days of Noah before the great flood cleansed the earth from evil. “So much time passes by and nothing happens,” people say, “the world just keeps turning and turning. Will God ever come back to judge the world?” Well, yes, He will, because “the Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance” (2 Pet 3:9). That is the reason we are given for why all evil has not yet been dealt with—it’s because of God’s patience towards evildoers because He is giving people ample opportunity to repent before He brings His judgement to set all things right.
Some skeptics ask, “why does God allow evil if He is truly good?” Well, what do you want? Do you want God to take away the evil by taking away the people who do the evil like He did in the great flood? Or like He will do in the future in cleansing the world by fire? Because He can do that and that’s what it would take to rid the world of evil. Or would you prefer to continue living in your evil and rejecting God in this short life you have to live on this earth? God could bring all things to an end right now and if you refuse to repent, you will be brought to an end as well. But God is gracious and is giving people time to believe in Him and turn from their sin. Take the opportunity while you can. God wants as many people as He can get to enter into His eternal kingdom and He is waiting for the fullness of the harvest to be reached before purging the world of evil. But don’t complain when you hear about events in the Bible when God judged evil by destroying people while at the same time complaining that God doesn’t do anything about evil. It’s just not logically consistent. God has done something about evil and He will do something about evil. One day, all His goodness and wisdom will be vindicated when He sets everything right by doing away with all sin, death, and suffering forever. Lamentations 3:22 says that it is “because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail” (NIV).
On the topic of providence and free-will, some clarity needs to be added. In the story of Joseph, his brothers became jealous of him, threw him into a pit, sold him into slavery, and then he lived as a slave for many years, was falsely accused of evil, and falsely imprisoned. He suffered greatly for most of his life because of his brothers’ actions and yet once he became Pharoah’s right-hand man, he saw his brothers again and said to them, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive” (Gen 50:20). The result of Joseph’s sufferings brought about the right set of circumstances so that his dreams would be fulfilled, Egypt would be warned of the drought that would be coming, and they could prepare for it by stocking up food, and this would save many lives. It was also through the line of Joseph that Jesus would be born and so if Joseph would have died from starvation, then theoretically, Jesus never would have been born to save the world. All of these events were necessary to take place to bring about the final result. Now, I believe the events could have been re-ordered or other aspects could have changed to bring about the end result but this was the possible world and set of events that God chose to have actualized. It is for this reason that Joseph saw how God was working the good despite the evil of his brothers. That word “despite” is very important because God did not directly cause these things. God is not the author of evil. What really happened was that God used the evil and decided to bring good out of it. He redeemed the evil. He turned the bad and molded it into something good. This is very important to have a correct theodicy; otherwise, we’ll be blaming God for our suffering, accusing Him for why our lives are the way that they are.
Why Did God Create the World if He Knew the Outcome of Adam and Eve’s Actions?
First, we must acknowledge that evil is not a substance, it is a choice. For this reason, God could not have created evil. Moral evil is the result of not choosing God’s good. Evil is the absence of good like darkness is the absence of light. Wherever there is the possibility of good, there is the possibility of evil because we live in a world not of robots and puppets but of creatures possessing free-will. Therefore, evil is the inevitable consequence of the possibility and actualization of free creatures. God did not want to create a world of robot servants but of creatures who freely choose to love and worship Him who can give and receive relationally because God is a relational God. If He were to remove evil choices, then He would also have to remove the moral good as well because free-will has the capacity for both. I believe it was C.S. Lewis who said something of the nature that free-will allows for the possibility of some of the greatest joys, emotion, and pleasures in life. A world without such things wouldn’t be any world really worth having. So then, we have two theodicies here: the free-will theodicy and the greater good principle where God calculated the cost and decided that making such a world would be ultimately worth it. Of course, God also had the eternal perspective in mind, not just the present and passing time which we finite creatures often fail to look beyond. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was in the middle of the garden because it (1) offered humanity a choice between good and evil and (2) it was meant to be partaken of later once Adam and Eve had matured into the ability to handle and grow into such knowledge without it corrupting them. God did not set them up to fail but because of the nature of free-will, failure was at some point or another an inevitable outcome in any possible world that God could have created.
But what about natural disasters, killer wasps, venomous snakes and spiders? How does that fit into the picture? How did we get here? Did God create these deadly creatures? Did God make tigers with sharp carnivorous teeth and roses with thorns at the very beginning of creation? I do not believe so. When God made everything, He said that it was good and very good. As far as we can tell from the biblical evidence, animals did not kill each other before the fall of man. This can be gleaned from Genesis 1:29-30 in which God says that humans and all creatures were given plants to eat for food and Isaiah 11:6-9 mentions that in the renewed earth in the future, animals like lions, bears, and cobras will not hurt or kill anyone anymore. From this, we can infer that this is the way it was supposed to be from the beginning before the curse came into the world. Then, when the curse came, death came along with it and pain and suffering (Gen 3:14-19; Ro 5:12). Before the curse, there were no thorns and thistles but after the curse, there were (Gen 3:18). This would have to mean then that plants and animals developed hurtful and deadly qualities over time after the world was cursed. This could be seen as mutative and adaptive qualities being formed within the new animal species that developed after their own kinds (i.e. all felines came from a common ancestor while all canines came from a common ancestor, etc.). As for the venomous critters, that venom could have developed over time as a mutation. From our current understanding of science, we are aware of viruses that have the potential to evolve into something more deadly given the necessary circumstances and input. We even know that some viruses are deadly to some people and animals while absolutely harmless for others. We know that when Adam and Eve sinned, it brought sickness into the world and sickness is a direction headed towards death, which is the result of the curse. And like death, sickness is the absence of God’s life which all humanity was severed from once they were prohibited from entering into God’s paradise to eat from the tree of life. The curse itself is a severance from the life and power of God. Without the fullness of God to properly sustain life, the order of the world turns into disorder and destruction. And that’s how this world is the messed up place we see today. But it wasn’t just Adam and Eve’s fault. Every one of us has sinned and brought corruption upon ourselves and this world. The cycle of sin away from God’s lifegiving power continues unbroken because each and every one of us continues to make corrupt choices to not abide in God’s purity and the damage has already been done. All things were created good originally but those good things became spoiled, corrupted. As C.S. Lewis has said, “badness is only spoiled goodness.”
As for natural or supernatural disasters, it could be God’s judgement like in the case of Sodom and Gomorrah where fire and brimstone rained down from heaven or where water flooded the whole earth. Or, it could be from the devil as we see in the example of when Satan killed Job’s family and servants with fire from heaven and a strong wind that blew his house down (Job 1:16-19). Or, the disasters could serve a greater purpose such as keeping the circle of life going to maintain the correct conditions of the atmosphere, air, water, and soil to maintain life and keep things in balance as if the earth were a complete living organism that must keep itself alive.
Or, it could simply be the result of this cursed and fallen world where I have previously just explained that order turns to disorder. Regardless, we are told that “the creation was subjected to futility” by God (Ro 8:20). He is ultimately in control of governing the whole world in His providence, allowing disasters to take place, allowing this present world to be what it is, since He created it and approved the curse from the beginning. But that doesn’t mean that this is at all meaningless. There is a hope and future for this world to be set free from its corruption one day (Ro 8:21). In anticipation of that day drawing near, the earth is said to metaphorically go through birth pains (Ro 8:22; Mt 24:8). The earth wants to be set free from this corruption even as we ourselves do but that will not yet happen until “the revealing of the sons of God” (Ro 8:19). It’s a time we must be patient for but also a time that we can bring closer to reality through reclaiming our true identities and authority and bring the gospel of Jesus to the ends of the earth as we can hasten to coming day of God (2 Pet 3:12). These are some of the various answers regarding the occurrence of natural disasters. Ultimately though, we don’t know the specific reason for why each disaster happens and so we just have to see it and accept it as a mystery.
The Problem of Pain and Suffering
Here are some reasons for the existence of pain and suffering and their purpose:
(1) It is a good thing that we have it because it serves as a warning device to let us know when something is wrong and needs to be attended. In this way, it aids our survival. This can also include depression since our brains do not have pain receptors, depression is often a warning sign that something in our life or diet is off and needs to be changed for our benefit and survival. To ignore depression and pain will ultimately lead to our own self-destruction.
(2) If people have evil in their hearts and choose to do evil, who would stop them if pain didn’t exist? Suffering is a means to help our morality.
(3) Without suffering to inhibit our moral evil, what need or desire would humanity find to come back to God? They would be lost in their sin and become ever more prideful and be driven further away from God. If that be the case, who would ever be saved unto eternal life? And if none or hardly any are saved and reconciled back to God, what would be the point of creating the world to begin with? God desires to share His goodness with others and be relational with them. But how much could He do that if none want to believe in Him? The purpose for creating mankind would be in that case a vain endeavor and the results of that creation would not last into eternity.
(4) Suffering can lead to people’s breaking point so that they finally become humble enough to ask for and require God’s help and salvation so that they would receive what is ultimately good for them. If this be the case, they should stop resisting and submit to God.
(5) Suffering can be a form of punishment or discipline from God (Heb 12:6; Isa 59:18; Ezek 11:21; 22:31). There is this principle in life that we reap what we sow (Gal 6:7). The evil and suffering that people have caused to others will turn back upon their own heads. This is sort of like a cosmic karma except God is the one ultimately in control.
(6) Trials or difficulties in life help to teach us, to purify us, and mold us into something better (James 1:2-4). Suffering prepares us and empties us of self so that God can more fully use us to bring good to the world and to show the greatness of God. We must be mindful of this purpose so that we do not resist the purifying and thereby lengthen our suffering.
(7) Suffering shows us the value of joy, compassion, love, and God’s good graces. Without ever have knowing suffering, we would not so fully appreciate all the good that God gives. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4:17 that “momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison.” That is, in comparison to the joys of heaven, all the things we suffer through will have been like a drop in a bucket compared to the vast sea of goodness awaiting us. Our pain is only momentary—only temporal, but one day our joy and bliss will be eternal without all the grief, loss, and hardships of life.
(8) Since free-will still exists once we die and go to heaven, God may have devised pain to purge us of any reason or desire to sin once we reach our heavenly home, since we have been awakened to understanding all the evil and destruction that sin truly causes and how it grieves God’s heart. We must live a life of saying “no” to ungodliness while trusting that only through Jesus can we be saved. Otherwise, we will not be worthy to enter eternal life. And if we do not live lives worthy of the gospel by denying ourselves to live for Jesus, then our wills will not have been forged by the flames of this life sufficiently to always be humble in heaven by always freely choosing God. But since God cannot allow another uprising and rebellion again like what happened with the devil and the angels who followed him, entrance to heaven is only permitted by those who have made Jesus both Savior and King of their lives. The King must have loyal subjects if heaven is going to stay heaven for everyone. The will of man that is free must be forged unto righteousness. This method was to ensure the everlastingness of heaven for all who truly believe and trust in Jesus; and that forging of the will is a grace given by God through the Holy Spirit if we continue to abide in Christ and endure unto the end.
General Policy Theodicy
We want an answer as to why God allows natural disasters, untimely death, and instances of suffering that seem purposeless. Surely, if God is all-powerful and all-knowing and all-loving, then why does He allow these things? Surely, He could prevent them and does not delight in our suffering, so He would want to prevent that, so why doesn’t He? He intervenes for some people so why doesn’t He do it for me or for the person I’m praying for? One answer for this is the general policy theodicy. If God were to intervene too much or too directly, then He might subvert the free-will of people. It is sort of a mystery how this policy works and what balance He must maintain to be sovereign over the world while at the same time allowing for free-will creatures. Err on one side and you have a puppeteer. Err on the other and you have a powerless God who in every instance exalts the decisions of mankind over His own purposes and will to bring them about. There is a fine line between sovereignty and free-will that must be maintained to allow both to exists without crossing too far into the other. What that threshold is we do not really know but we do know that God often uses secondary causes to bring about His purposes. An example of this would be using Babylon to punish the sins of Israel. Babylon and King Nebuchadnezzar exercised their own free-will to conquer Israel while God ensured that Babylon would be successful in their mission to bring Israel judgement through divine empowerment and provision. The Bible also mentions how God hardened Pharoah’s heart to bring judgement to Egypt and to humiliate all of their false gods. But this must be understood correctly. The Bible says that Pharoah hardened his own heart before it says that God hardened his heart. So in reality, it was Pharoah’s free-will decision to resist God all along. God allowed this rebellion to continue, not offering to Pharoah the grace of a softened heart since that is not what Pharoah wanted anyway. This action of God withdrawing His sustaining grace to him who was already resisting and refusing grace, ensured that all the plagues would be brought upon Egypt before Pharoah let the Hebrew slaves go free. We could think of it more like an insurance policy to make sure certain events were to take place but this was completely in alignment with allowing the free-will of Pharoah to operate and for him to achieve what he desired. In this general policy theodicy, God allows free-will because it is in His loving nature to not be forceful. Therefore, evil cannot be prevented unilaterally.
Spiritual Warfare Theodicy
There is a spiritual reality in our universe—a war going on against good and evil. I am not a dualist in this sense. I do not believe that Satan has equal opposite power to God. God is much stronger and wiser. The devil is a created being who was once good but chose to rebel against God. Whereas God, is uncreated and His existence—eternal; and His moral character, unchanging. But nonetheless we find ourselves in this situation where the devil fights against God and His angels and attempts to thwart God’s plans and to destroy the sons of God—humans. He hates humans most abhorrently because we were created in God’s image and endowed with authority over the earth. He hates anything that represents God and is envious of God’s favor upon us. The reality of the devil means that when bad things happen to us, sometimes it is a work of the devil coming against us to destroy our lives or destroy our faith in God. Jesus said that the devil “comes only to steal and kill and destroy” (Jn 10:10) and that the devil “was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him” (Jn 8:44). Jesus said that while the devil comes to do this, Jesus on the contrary comes to bring abundant life and to save the world. Ephesians 6 also mentions this spiritual battle that we are in and how we need to stand firm against the devil and his schemes through faith, hope, prayer, and righteousness. Not every bad thing that happens to us is the devil’s fault, as some Christians tend to focus on; but neither is God responsible for every meticulous detail in life, as other Christians tend to focus on. There are some plans that God has for the future that will come to pass no matter what but there are many other things that could go down different ways in which God has given humanity and spiritual beings freedom to decide which path that they will take. If we decide to yield to our sin and the devil’s desires for us, then God permits that free action and God is not responsible for it. The devil wants to take us out and contrive evil thoughts about God but we must resist. Both God and Satan seek allegiance and we must choose which master to serve. Making a deal with the devil, you may attain fame and fortune. But only with God can you attain eternal life. For many people, the devil has a legal right of access to oppress them and wreak havoc in their lives because of their continual doubt in God, unbelief, and partnering with sin; and that is why they continue to suffer. We must continually keep in mind that it isn’t God who is the enemy or destroyer—the devil is. One of the reasons for our prayers being unanswered is because the forces of spiritual darkness resist the spiritual forces of good. An example of this is when Michael the archangel appeared to Daniel after he had fasted and prayed but it took him awhile to get there because of the spiritual opposition that he was facing. Michael said that the first day when Daniel began to pray, God heard him and Michael was dispatched from God in response to his prayer but it took twenty-one days to get past the prince of the kingdom of Persia (Dan 10:11-13). For this reason, we must not lose faith when we don’t see an immediate answer but should continue persevering in prayer. We must understand and accept this principle of spiritual warfare.
To further understand how we as Christians may suffer as a result of spiritual warfare and also the limits of spiritual authority that the kingdom of darkness has, check out this video sermon by Vlad Savchuk here
A Thought Experiment
What do you think, is it better to have known love and lost than to have never known love at all?
What if you were God? How would you run the universe? Would you intervene? Would you allow the death of a child if it were to prevent mass genocide in the future through compounding events? Would you allow the death of a child if it were to prevent an extreme and purposeless suffering that you knew that child would have to grow up to endure and without salvation? Would you choose particular individuals for a purpose, allowing their lives to be difficult so that they can be used by you to lead many people away from destruction? Would you allow suffering so that people would search out and find the answers to their existence and what might be beyond this life so that they could attain eternal life?
In the Star Wars universe, Qui Gon decided to train Anakin and instructed Obi Wan to train Anakin in his last dying breath because of the prophecy that Anakin would bring balance to the force. Anakin did many evil things along the way and turned to the dark side but eventually he defeated Darth Sidious and through his progeny of Luke and Lei, balance was restored. If Anakin never went down the path that he did, he never would have had sufficient power to defeat the Sith and darkness might have ruled the universe forever. So, if you were Obi Wan and knew all these things would take place, would you still train the kid anyway? You see, the answer is not that easy. Oftentimes, we just see things from our short-sighted and limited perspective and make judgements based upon that but the reality of the matter is, it’s not so easy to play God, thinking that if this or that happened, things would be better and would lead to the ultimate good. There is much suffering that we can’t make sense of because we don’t see the entire picture and we can’t see the purpose in all of it. But, that doesn’t mean that there is no purpose. At this time, we must come to understand that God has everything figured out in His infinite knowledge and wisdom and He has the purity of character of love and goodness to bring about the best ending and ultimate good while working with free-will creatures to bring about that end. As Charles Spurgeon has said, “When we can’t see the hand of God, we can trust the heart of God.”
Jesus Intimately Knows Suffering
Whatever our thoughts of God might be or might have been, there is a world of difference between other religions and Christianity because in Christianity, Jesus is God. Without Jesus, the God we might contrive in our minds seems cold and aloof; uninterested or unconcerned with the affairs of our existence in this grand cosmos. But with Jesus, we cannot accuse Him of being cold and distant from our suffering as if He just sits on His high throne and turns His face away from our trivial existence. He is very near. He knows our pain. He has experienced pain and the suffering of life first-hand when He came to live a life on this earth and die through roman crucifixion. He lost His earthly father. His good friend Lazarus died. He had someone very close to him betray Him. He had people He cared about reject Him, falsely accuse Him, mock Him, and beat Him. He was well acquainted with human suffering and this God, Jesus, cared for us so much that He proved His love for us through that suffering. He can empathize with us because He endured suffering with us and for us. But what kind of god would do such a thing and go to such lengths to save creatures of such small significance? He traded heaven’s throne for a cross to show us how much He loved us. So, although we cannot see and understand all of God’s ways and dealings within the universe, we can trust God’s heart that He is overwhelmingly for us to help us and bless us and save us. This God is overwhelmingly good and we can trust Him. It is enough for me to believe in God’s love for me and then to submit the rest of my mind in humility to say: As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are His ways higher than my ways and His thoughts higher than my thoughts (Isa 55:9).
This is the theodicy that I find most helpful: God is near and God cares; and because He cares, I can wholly trust what He does with His infinite power and wisdom. Secondly, bad things happen in life because of the fallen world that we live in with free-willed creatures—both human and non-human. Third, the perfect and eternal world to come will have been worth all the suffering to get there and so I can always have hope despite the suffering (2 Cor 4:17). Fourth, God is a God of justice and He will avenge and bring to justice all who have done evil against me, especially the devil (Ro 12:19). Fifth, God is equitable and because He is equitable, I know and trust that whatever loss I have experienced in the past will be made up to me in the future. I will be rewarded double or ten-fold or more for whatever the devil has stolen from me and for whatever life has taken away whether in this life or in the life to come (Isa 61:7; Joel 2:25; Lk 18:30). Sixth, I know that God can do all things and that no purpose of His can be thwarted (Job 42:2). No one and no thing can trump God and He has good reasons for everything. Because of these things, I don’t have to worry about the future and can rest in God’s sovereign plan while also taking responsibility for my own choices. Seventh, many times it is better for us to not know the answer and just accept the mystery of not knowing because even if we did have the specific answer we were looking for, our finite wisdom and understanding may lack the ability to comprehend it in a way that would be useful and helpful to us. Like with Job, God spoke to him yet without giving him a specific answer to his suffering but left him with the understanding and acceptance that God’s wisdom is unfathomable and we just have to trust Him through the process.
For more questions and answers addressing a good God in the face of evil and suffering, check out my teaching series on the atonement, hell, and God’s justice. I intermingle theodicies everywhere within those writings. The questions about this evil or that evil can be almost endless because of the vast number of evils that exist in the world. But sooner or later when the skeptic has been given a sufficient reasonable response for a good God, he or she must come to terms with the reality of God and make a decision; for when such reasonableness for God’s existence exists, arguments are merely excuses for not believing. The reluctance to accept God must also not be hindered by whether you believe in an old earth or young earth. Christians themselves are divided on this issue as some interpret the creation account in the book of Genesis more literally and others more metaphorically. The real question is: Do you believe God? I personally believe in a young earth and so did the early church fathers. For more on the scientific answers to all of that, you can check out answersingenesis.org if that seems to be an issue troubling you about Christianity. Regardless, this is a secondary issue. The primary issue is: will you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?
Resources:
What I have found helpful in difficult times of uncertainty are these two songs:
You Know Better Than I – Joseph King of Dreams
I have these songs on the first Spotify playlist: