Why Does God Allow Evil?

Hard Questions: “Why do you allow evil and suffering if you don’t have to?”

Review: “Isn’t it intolerant to say you’re the only true God?”
"All views have equal merit and none should be considered better than another."
Keller: Christianity is the most exclusive-sounding but the most inclusive-acting of all religions.
Antioch: called them Christians because the faith crossed all ethnic lines.
The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.
--G.K. Chesterton

1. Does the presence of evil mean that there is no God?
2. Who is evil?
3. What is God doing about evil?

1. Does the presence of evil mean that there is no God?
a. Some argue that a GOOD God, if He existed, would necessarily eradicate all evil. If evil continues to exist, therefore, then either the God who exists is NOT GOOD, or there is no god at all.
This is not necessarily true.
b. Assertion is not proof: Alvin Plantinga: God, Freedom and Evil
A good thing/person always eliminates evil as far as it can.
“There are no limits to what an omnipotent being can do.”
BUT, an omnipotent person cannot create a square circle, etc.
There are no non-logical limits to what an omnipotent god can do.
God cannot make false claims true.

Therefore, there ARE LIMITS to what an omnipotent god is able to do.
There are circumstances where an omnipotent God cannot eliminate an evil without also eliminating a more important good.
Social workers struggle with this: should we remove an endangered child from a family that has the potential to provide more good for the child than any foster or adoptive family?

Bottom line: it is NOT logically necessary that a good God eliminate all immediately.
What if…
God is omniscient, omnipotent, and wholly good… and
God creates a world containing evil and has a good reason for doing so?
Augustine:
As a runaway horse is better than a stone which does not run away because it lacks self-movement and sense perception, so the creature is more excellent which sins by free will than that which does not sin only because it has no free will.
BUT, we need NOT KNOW WHY God might choose to create a world in which evil exists in order to believe that an ALL-POWERFUL GOD could do such a thing without being self-contradictory.

c. The more intriguing question is not why is there evil? But why is there good? Why do I recognize beauty? Why is truth attractive? Why is purpose satisfying? In a random, godless universe why should any of us care whether truth, beauty, order or purpose exist?

2. Who is evil?
a. Romans 3:10–18 [Isa. 53]
“as it is written,
“There Is None Righteous, Not Even One; There Is None Who Understands,
There Is None Who Seeks For God; All Have Turned Aside, Together They Have Become Useless;
There Is None Who Does Good, There Is Not Even One.”
“Their Throat Is An Open Grave, With Their Tongues They Keep Deceiving,”
“The Poison Of Asps Is Under Their Lips”; “Whose Mouth Is Full Of Cursing And Bitterness”;
“Their Feet Are Swift To Shed Blood, Destruction And Misery Are In Their Paths, And The Path Of Peace Have They Not Known.” “There Is No Fear Of God Before Their Eyes.””

b. GK Chesterton:
…after seeing a series of articles on "What's Wrong with the World?" Chesterton sent a letter to the editor. "Dear Sir: Regarding your article 'What's Wrong with the World?'
I am. Yours truly, G. K. Chesterton."

c. Lee Strobel—I won’t ask God what He’s going to do about evil, for fear that He might ask me the same question.

3. What is God doing about evil?
1. The Psalmists ask God how long evil will reign.
Psa 13:1—“How long, O Lord? Wilt Thou forget me forever?
How long wilt Thou hide Thy face from me?”

2. The narratives tell the story of what God has done and is doing to address the problem and the presence of evil.
3. At least three expressions of evil and divine response:
a. Idolatry
b. What wicked people do.
c. What the Satan does.
Evil and the Justice of God, NT Wright
The OT isn’t written in order simply to “tell us about God” in the abstract. It isn’t designed primarily to provide information, to satisfy the inquiring mind. It’s written to tell the story of what God has done, is doing and will do about evil.
4. The Occurrence and Visibility of Sin and Evil.
a. Fall in the Garden, the Tower of Babel, etc.
5. God’s reaction:
i. The Call of Abraham: a promise of restoration.
a. Abraham is flawed.
b. Israel is clearly part of the Problem of Evil.
c. Individuals within Israel and all nations are personally sinful, idolatrous, etc.

ii. David and his dynasty are to be seen as God’s answer to the problem of evil. They will bring judgment and justice to the world. And yet the writers are all too aware of the puzzle and ambiguity of saying such a thing. The greatest royal psalm, Psalm 89, juxtaposes 37 verses of celebration of the wonderful things God will do through the Davidic king with 14 verses asking plaintively why it’s all gone wrong. The psalm then ends with a single verse blessing YHWH forever. That is the classic OT picture. Here are the promises; here is the problem; God remains sovereign over the paradox.

iii. A SERVANT will stand for justice and salvation…Isaiah 40-55.
YHWH’s Servant, the one through whom YHWH’s purpose of justice and salvation will be carried out.

iv. A Son of Man, corresponding to the Servant, comes to bring saving justice. Dan. 7:13

v. Book of Job… whereas Israel was…emphatically guilty, the whole point of the book of Job is that Job was innocent. The normal analysis of the exile was that Israel thoroughly deserved it; the whole point of Job is that Job didn’t.
…it is a contest between Satan and Job. Satan is trying to get Job in his power, to demonstrate that humans are not worth God’s trouble, while Job for his part continues to insist both that God ought ot be just and that he himself is in the right.
vi. God’s justice:
Isaiah 10:5-19---he used pagan Assyria to punish Israel
He punished pagan Assyria.
Psalms 76:10 “For the wrath of man shall praise Thee;

NTW: And yet ever since the garden, ever since God’s grief over Noah, ever since Babel and Abraham, the story has been about the messy way in which God has had to work to bring the world out of the mess.

CONCLUSION
Imagine there’s no evil……NTW: it’s not so “easy if you try”; precisely because of our muddled thinking about evil itself, we find it hard to imagine a world from which evil had been removed.
Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us 4Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

TAKEWAYS Forgiveness and Reconciliation
pp. 132-33: Miroslav Volf,Exclusion and Embrace
…faced with the question of how he, as a Croatian Baptist, could love his Serbian Orthodox neighbor after all the terrible things the Serbs had done to his country.
Volf’s basic argument is this: Whether we are dealing with international relations or one-on-one
personal relations, evil must be named and confronted.
…Only when that has been done, when both evil and the evildoer have been identified as what and who they are—this is what Volf means by “exclusion”—can there be the second move toward “embrace”: the embrace of the one who has deeply hurt and wounded us or me.

Isn’t it intolerant to say you’re the only true God?

Hard Questions: “Isn’t it intolerant to say you’re the only true God?”
Deut 6:1-16

Joanna Sears and Brian Lima are engaged to be married! The date for the wedding is Dec 11.

1. Establish “exclusive” claims of the Bible and of Jesus.
a. Exodus 20:2-3—“no other gods before me…”
““I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before Me.”

b. The nations will come to Jerusalem to worship the one, true God…
i. Psa. 22:27 All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the LORD [YHWH], And all the families of the nations will worship before You.
ii. Is. 2:2 Now it will come about that
In the last days
The mountain of the house of the LORD
Will be established as the chief of the mountains,
And will be raised above the hills;
And all the nations will stream to it.
iii. Rev. 15:4 “Who will not fear, O Lord, and glorify Your name?
For You alone are holy;
For ALL THE NATIONS WILL COME AND WORSHIP BEFORE YOU,
FOR YOUR RIGHTEOUS ACTS HAVE BEEN REVEALED.”

c. Jesus, John 14:6“Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me.”

2. Explain the tension between divine sovereignty and human autonomy.
a. God is sovereign.
b. Humanity wants to be sovereign.
c. This can only be resolved by a human choice—acknowledge that YOU ARE GOD AND I AM NOT.
3. God is tolerant, God is intolerant.
a. God is tolerant:
i. patient, so that we have full opportunity to seek Him, repent, and choose Him.
b. God is intolerant:
i. patience does not cover the worship of other gods.
ii. He claims to have created what we might call “other gods,” fallen angels the Scripture calls “demons,” and intends to put an end to them after time.
c. Foundation of our tolerance: Matt. 22:37-39

“‘You Shall Love The Lord Your God With All Your Heart, And With All Your Soul, And With All Your Mind.’ “This is the great and foremost commandment. “The second is like it, ‘You Shall Love Your Neighbor As Yourself.’”

4. Our tolerant/intolerant rocker can reflect God’s.
a. We are tolerant of people with whom we disagree.
i. We must not hate people.
b. We are intolerant of ideas that contradict the truths that God has given us about Himself and His good intentions.
2 Corinthians 10:5–6 NASB
“We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ…

i. We aggressively demolish “speculations” and “every arrogant obstacle” as we take “every thought captive.”
ii. Paul is arguing that all philosophies that degrade Christ’s death on the Cross reflect pridefulness: humanity declaring that we are fully autonomous, fully competent; we have no need for God.
iii. We do this NOT with physical violence (2Cor 5:3—we do not war according to the flesh), but by contesting ideas!

THIS HAS PROFOUND PRACTICALITY

"All views have equal merit and none should be considered better than another."
“Jesus is the Messiah and Judaism is wrong for rejecting that.”
…why should it bother me that someone thinks I’m wrong?”

Google: or the name Gregory Koukl

When Tolerance Is Intolerant Gregory Koukl

“Is this a view, the idea that all views have equal merit and none should be considered better than another?” They agreed.
Then I pointed to the second statement—the “intolerant” one—and asked the same question: “Is this a view?” They studied the sentence for a moment. Slowly my point began to dawn on them.
If all views have equal merit, then the view that Christians have a better view on Jesus than Jews is just as true as the idea that Jews have a better view on Jesus than Christians. But this is hopelessly contradictory. If the first statement is what tolerance amounts to, then no one can be tolerant because “tolerance” turns out to be gibberish.
“Be egalitarian regarding persons.” = “civility”, “respect”
“Be elitist regarding ideas”
Tolerance applies to how we treat people we disagree with, not how we treat ideas we think false.
The irony is that according to the classical notion of tolerance, you can’t tolerate someone unless you disagree with him. We don’t “tolerate” people who share our views. They’re on our side. There’s nothing to “put up” with. Tolerance is reserved for those who we think are wrong, yet we still choose to treat them decently and with respect.
Nowadays if you think someone is wrong, you’re called intolerant no matter how you treat them.

Most of what passes for tolerance today is intellectual cowardice, a fear of intelligent engagement. Those who brandish the word “intolerant” are unwilling to be challenged by other views, to grapple with contrary opinions, or even to consider them. It’s easier to hurl an insult—“you intolerant bigot”—than to confront the idea and either refute it or be changed by it. In the modern era, “tolerance” has become intolerance.


TAKEAWAYS
1. It’s okay to disagree!
2. Our faith is based on the exclusive claims of Jesus Himself.
3. Our love for those who disagree is foundational to their faith.
4. Our tolerance is a tolerance of PEOPLE;
PEOPLE ARE WORTH LOVING; IDEAS ARE WORTH FIGHTING FOR.
5. If there is no reason to fear other views, then I can be single-minded in my devotion to Christ.

How Can We Trust The Bible?

Hard Questions: “How can we trust the Bible – Don’t you know what’s in there?!”
Psa. 19:7-14

Three needs to be addressed:
1. For the believer who has been deeply shaken by someone else’s questions.
2. For the believer who wants to answer questions genuinely blocking faith in a friend.
3. For the skeptic who hears that there are such problems in the Bible and wants answers before proceeding.

Importance of Scripture:
1. Our means of knowing the Story.
2. The medium of knowing about Jesus and his life, suffering, death, and resurrection.
3. The source of all our hope.

Authority & Reliability of Scripture
2 Timothy 3:16–17 NASB
“All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.”

Hebrews 4:12 NASB
“For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”

Credibility of Scripture
1. Questions about the history narrated in the Bible.
2. Questions about the miracles described in the Bible.
3. Questions about the apparent contradictions in the Bible.
4. Questions about the ethics of…
a. Hoping for the deaths of babies among the Babylonians
b. God’s desire both for the repentance and for the destruction of the wicked.

Objections to the reliability and therefore the potential authority of the Bible fall into three categories:

1. Premodern objections:
a. Muslims and Hindus will object to the Bible based on their commitment to their own sacred writings.
b. A typical objection by Muslims…Jews and Christians changed the story.
Solution: In 1948, scrolls and scroll fragments were discovered near the Dead Sea in Palestine; those scrolls confirmed the content of the Old Testament Hebrew texts and are dated some 1,000 years before the earliest documents previously known. They preceded the time of Jesus, so there were no Christians around to change the stories in the Old Testament. The earliest New Testament documents were close enough in date to the first century original documents that “changing the story” would have been impossible: there were too many eye-witnesses still living to get away with invention.

2. Modern objections:
a. Historical contradictions: Luke’s record of Jesus’ birth declares that Quirinius was the Governor: prote = “prior”, or an early role of Quirinius there, now lost to us.
b. Scientific impossibilities:
Joshua stopped the sun in the sky to extend the time required to win a battle? 10:12-14
3. Postmodern objections:
a. Who can know what the Bible says, since everything is a matter of interpretation?
i. Either—everyone seems to have a different take on the same statements.
ii. Or—words have no meaning in themselves, only the reader gives meaning.
1. Rooted in Nietzsche and Wittgenstein—since there is no God who can declare reality and therefore give meaning to words, there can be no meaning intrinsically a part of words.
2. BUT—if there is no meaning other than the meaning that I give a text, how could you object to any meaning that I give to the text????
b. Who can teach me, since teaching implies knowing and implies authority and all authority is an EXPRESSION of POWER and is therefore wrong.
i. All the problems of the world stem from this desire to exert power over other human beings.
ii. BUT—how can YOU, then, TEACH me that NO ONE teach anyone else; do YOU have a special authority over us, to TEACH US that WE CAN’T TEACH or exert influence over others?
iii. If there were a BENEVOLENT GOD, wouldn’t it be right and moral if He were to teach us, to influence us to care for the earth, to care for one another, to love Him back?
c. Can’t we all just get along? What about unethical commands in Scripture/what about vengeance verbalized?
i. The perceived difficulties are many…
Psa. 137:8 O daughter of Babylon, you devastated one,
How blessed will be the one who repays you
With the recompense with which you have repaid us.
Psa. 137:9 How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones
Against the rock.
ii. BUT—careful attention, reading the NT for insight, considering the wisdom of others who have given their lives to similarly careful study of Scripture…
1. Hard Sayings of the Bible, by Walter C. Kaiser Jr., Peter H. Davids, F. F. Bruce and Manfred T. Brauch.
2. Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, Gleason Archer
3. Big Book of Bible Difficulties, The: Clear and Concise Answers from Genesis to Revelation, Thomas Howe & Norman L. Geisler
4. Is The Bible Intolerant? Amy Orr-Ewing

4. Practical objections:
a. Love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength.
b. Love your neighbour as yourself: encourage, nurture, care for, weep with, rejoice with…
c. Take up your cross and follow me.
d. Give ten percent of your income (22.3), give generously.
GK. Chesterton: not that Christianity has been tried and found wanting, but that it has been found hard and not tried.
Consequently, many reject the Bible’s authority because of its moral demands, only using supposed historical, scientific issues as smokescreen.
1. Make sure you understand the question
2. Make sure you understand the questions behind the question.
3. Make sure you are reading the Bible…in order to love the Bible…
Jeremiah 15:16 NASB
“Thy words were found and I ate them,
And Thy words became for me a joy and the delight of my heart;
For I have been called by Thy name,
O Lord God of hosts.”