This is our pastor’s next article for the Stone County Gazette, partly in response to the recent shootings in Aurora, Colorado.
“If God was such a loving God, how could He allow…” You fill in the blank or the perpetrated evil. Such a question presumes that God should run the universe according to our set of rules. It’s the clay critiquing the work of the potter. For if we were God, we wouldn’t allow such and such to exist in the world.
Of course, this is a human-centered view of the universe, which fails to consider the presence of sin and the unbridled chaos it unleashes. Such a human-centered view also fails to see ourselves at the root of such evil. We perpetrate, that is, someone in the human race perpetrates some horrific evil, but then we want to blame another (such as God) for what we did.
Does that sound familiar? That rationalizing takes us back to our first parents in the garden. Adam blamed Eve. Eve blamed the serpent. Our fall into sin not only made us inherently sinful beings, it also disrupted the inherent harmony of the created order (Romans 8:18-25).
Suffering exists because sin exists. Suffering exists because sin, and it’s after effects, has distorted and ruined the inherent harmony of creation. Even when we don’t have a direct hand in the cause of suffering, such as an earthquake or a hurricane, sin is still the source behind the tear in creation’s fabric.
So what is God to do about what we have messed up? What He doesn’t do, at least regularly, is intervene. God doesn’t block bullets from finding their targets. He doesn’t direct a tornado away from some city. What He does, instead, is to restore order to the universe by reconciling everything to Himself through the death of His Son, Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 5:18-19). In His Son, God unites everything under a new Head of creation (Ephesians 1:10). In Christ, the God who suffers, evil and pain are ultimately turned for good, trumped by the all-reconciling death of Jesus.
When we try to deal with the problem of evil in this world apart from the cross of Jesus Christ, we run into trouble. For then, the discussion turns into a philosophical abstraction. It pits God’s mercy and love against His omniscience and power: How could a loving God allow…” We then think that if a powerful God does exist, He can’t be merciful and loving; or if He is, He’s has to be a gutless wimp.
The cross of Jesus brings silence to such speculation. On the cross, the Innocent One suffers for a guilty humanity. On the cross, in His own crucifixion, God Himself bears the supreme injustice and evil, which He uses to reconcile to the world to Himself. Jesus Christ sets the disordered universe back into order by His own dying and rising, gathering all things into His death (John 12:32).
In Christ, we find is no problem of evil and suffering, for we know that “God works all things together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28). The presence of evil does not refute the existence of God. Instead, the presence of evil proves the universal reality of sin, fully reconciled in the death of Christ Jesus.
