Our family has been through a lot these last few years. Shortly after our first child was born, I developed one of the most painful chronic conditions in the world. (Unfortunately, that’s not an exaggeration, and it’s categorized as a “suicide disease.”) My wife later developed an autoimmune disorder which, among other things, can cause random blood clots to occur anywhere in her body at any given time. What’s more, we’ve lost two babies in miscarriage, one of them quite traumatically. (Though every miscarriage is traumatic to some degree.) I could go on giving more examples, but you get the picture.

Some of you reading this will be able to relate to our situation, at least in part. But even if your experience has been completely different from ours, we’ve all had our run-ins with evil in this life. This includes both moral evils like adultery, theft, and murder, as well as natural evils like natural disasters, disease, and death.

Many would say that the very presence of all this evil in the world shows that God doesn’t exist. At the very least, not the God of Christianity. They see no way of reconciling the existence of an all-powerful, all-loving, all-good God on the one hand with the existence and persistence of evil in all its manifestations on the other.

Many books have been written and even more debates had on this topic, some of them being quite philosophical and technical in nature. What I hope to do in this short blog post is provide you with some biblically based insights into the problem of evil to give you a starting point for wrestling with this thorny issue. These have greatly helped me and my family through our own experience of evil, and my hope is that they will help you through yours.

Why Does Evil Exist?

I think the first thing we need to recognize is that God did not create evil. Rather, Genesis 1-2 says that God made his original creation “very good,” presumably free from those things which are not very good, including both moral and natural evils.

Put simply, the goodness of the original creation reflected the goodness of its Creator. And since “God is light, and there is absolutely no darkness in him” (1 John 1:5), that original creation must have been very good indeed.

But if it didn’t originate with God, where, then, did evil come from? In short, it came from us. We’re told in James 1:13-15 that “God is not tempted by evil, and he himself does not tempt anyone. But each person is tempted when he is drawn away and enticed by his own evil desire. Then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and when sin is fully grown, it gives birth to death.” By our own sinful choices, we’ve brought forth all sorts of evils into this creation, and it all culminates in death (Rom. 5:12).

Evil, then, originated not with the Creator, but with his creatures—and we see this in the story of the fall in Genesis 3, immediately after God created his originally very good creation.

Why Does Evil Persist?

Not only did God not create the world the way it is now in its fallen state—he also won’t leave it this way. Indeed, the broad-sweeping promise of the gospel of Jesus Christ is one of creation-wide redemption.

Yes, Christ died for our sins and rose from the dead (1 Cor. 15:1-4) to secure our own resurrection from death, both spiritual (Rom. 6:4-11) and physical (1 Cor. 15:21-22). But the great story of redemption doesn’t end there.

The Bible tells us that God will take his broken creation—along with all of us who are in Christ—and restore all of it to the way it was supposed to be. It says that “the whole creation” awaits its redemption (Rom. 8:21-23), and that the redeemed creation will have no more grief, crying, pain, or death (Rev. 21:1-4). Ecclesiastes 3:11 says that eternity is written on our hearts, and no wonder: It’s a return to the way things were supposed to be—and better!

That’s the broad-sweeping promise of the gospel, and that’s what we have to look forward to. In the meantime, God temporarily allows certain evils to continue to exist in our world in order to work all of them together for a greater good (Rom. 8:28; cf. 2 Pet. 3:3-9).

So really, the greatest irony to the so-called problem of evil is that the whole point of Christianity is to provide a solution to that very problem.

But the irony doesn’t end there.

The Problem of Good

A second irony is that the problem of evil is actually a problem for atheism, for the atheistic objection from the existence of evil assumes that there is such a thing as good and evil. But for that to be the case, there must be some objective standard by which to judge things as such.

In his landmark book Mere Christianity, the famous atheist-turned-Christian-apologist C. S. Lewis highlights the self-defeating nature of the atheistic argument from evil when he says, “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?”[1]

We might call this the problem of good, and it seems to me that for there to be an objective standard of goodness, that standard must be rooted in something that is uncreated, unchanging, and incomparably good. Frankly, the only thing which I can think of that fits that description is the objective, unchanging, incomparably good character of the uncreated Creator God of the universe (cf. Rom. 1:28-32; 2:14-15).

So, the existence of good and evil actually presents a problem for atheism, not Christianity. Of the two, only Christianity can properly account for their existence. Only the existence of an all-good and all-powerful Creator God can give meaning and purpose to our experience of both moral and natural evil. And only the promises fulfilled in Jesus Christ can give hope of ultimate deliverance from evil.

Much more could be said, but again, this is a starting point. Above all else, these truths are what have most helped me and my family to endure our own experience of evil on this side of eternity.[2] I pray that they might do the same for you.

 

Notes

[1] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, HarperCollins ed. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001 [1952]), 38.

[2] We’ve also had some amazing friends and family come alongside us to mourn with us (Rom. 12:15) and carry our burdens with us (Gal. 6:2).