n the Royal Mile in Edinburgh you will find a statue of the Scottish philosopher David Hume.  He famously framed the problem of evil in these words: “Epicurus’s [341-270BC] old questions are yet unanswered: Is God willing to prevent evil but not able?  Then he is impotent.  Is he able but not willing?  Then he is malevolent.  Is he both able and willing?  Why then is there evil?”

Stephen Fry also colourfully expressed the objection to God because of evil recently on national television.

Now let’s be honest, this is a hard issue, because we’ve all tasted the bitter reality of suffering.  This church is a community of people filled with experiences of suffering: cuts and bruises, miscarriages and infertility, broken bones and broken hearts, the deaths of loved ones: young and old, cancers, depressions, self-harm, and anxieties.  Yet notice how their pain has not driven them FROM God but TO God.

The problem of pain confronts every culture, worldview, philosophy or religion – because we all live in a world of tears.  The question is: which has the resources to best deal with the problem?  I am absolutely convinced that Christianity has the resources that can help us as we walk the road of pain in this world – better than any other:

(1) IS THIS A GOOD ENOUGH REASON TO DISBELIEVE IN GOD?

Now, if you stop and think about it, we are really privileged to live in this advanced part of the world, at this time in history.  We’re insulated from suffering more than ever before.  And yet curiously we are struggling to cope with suffering and explain evil more than ever before too.  Why is that?  Part of the reason is we live and breathe in the air of a secular society.  That worldview says all there is to life is the here and now.  Suffering, then, has no purpose, it is inconvenient fact of nature that frustrates your ability to realise your own meaning and happiness in life.  Yet our struggles with suffering suggests more than that…

One philosopher observes: “only we human beings spell P-A-I-N the way we do” (Ravi Zacharias) – it’s not just as a fact of nature but as a moral problem.  We don’t talk about the weather that way – Scotland’s rain isn’t a matter of right or wrong, good or evil.  However, when we encounter suffering or see evidence of evil in this world, we instinctively recognise that it is wrong.  One atheist writer tells us the logical result of disbelieving in God: “In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference” (Richard Dawkins).  And yet, when bad things happen to us, we don’t greet them with “pitiless indifference”.

We feel wronged; we know things shouldn’t be this way; we want justice.  You see we instinctively know that we live in a moral universe with moral laws and standards.  And there is no moral law apart from a law-giver – who is God.  That’s why Oxford academic Amy Orr-Ewing says: “the question of suffering assumes the reality of the God it is trying to disprove”.  Put more simply by a former sceptic: “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” (C.S. Lewis).  So this question far from disproving, actually requires a Good God to exist.

We only recognise that evil suffering are wrong, we can only ask this question, because a good God exists, who has inscribed on our consciences His good moral standards.  The real question is why is the world like this?  Why God do you allow Syria to happen?  Why cancer in children?  Why my pain?  Why my grief?  Few of us ask these questions as sitting in our armchair as a philosopher, we ask it on our knees with heavy hearts and wet eyes as victims of pain.

(2) WHAT GOOD REASONS MAY GOD HAVE FOR ALLOWING SUFFERING?

Two things:

The Goodness of God’s Creation

The Bible consistently and unreservedly tells us that God is perfectly good:

“He is the Rock, His works are perfect, and all His ways are just.  A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is He” (Deuteronomy 32:4).

“It is unthinkable that God would do wrong, that the Almighty would pervert justice.” (Job 34:12).

If God is truly good, then how come this world has turned out so very bad?

The Bible records this verdict on the world that God originally created: “God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good” (Genesis 1:31) – no evil, pain or death.  So where does evil come from?  It’s important to know what evil IS and is NOT.  Just as darkness is the absence of light, and just as cold is the absence of heat – evil is not a thing in itself that God created.  Rather it is the corruption, distortion and perversion of something that God created as a good thing.  Evil was never God’s desire.

Also the Bible reveals a mystery about God: God is one and yet within Him are three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  This isn’t a mathematical problem to solve, but rather the simple fact that “GOD IS LOVE” (1 John 4:8).  He is a being of love and relationships.  And the world He created was also one intended for love and relationships.  God made us to know Him, love Him and enjoy Him forever in the good world He made.  But something went wrong…

The Fall-Out from Humanity’s Sin

People often ask me: But couldn’t God have created a world in it where evil could never arise.  Well maybe, but you wouldn’t want to live in a world like that!  Why’s that?  Well because that would be a world of robots: loveless and freedom-less.

Love always requires a choice if it is to be genuine.  Love cannot be coerced.  Think of it this way: Kirsty and I are expecting a baby.  One day I hope that little one will say: “Daddy, I love you”.  However, if the child says those words because I have threatened it or forced it – then those words are meaningless.  Likewise, love always requires choice, so God gave us freedom: to live for and love Him, or to reject Him and live for ourselves.

Unfortunately the human race chose the latter path and got into bed with evil.  We turned our backs on God the giver of life, thinking that life without God would be heaven on earth, but instead we discovered that apart from God there is only hell on earth.  That is the essence of what the Bible calls sin.  It not only affects human life resulting in decay and death, but the corrupting cancer of sin has also spread to every corner of creation bringing it into ruin and instability also.  This world is beautiful and filled with wonders, but it is like unstable ruined castle that does not reflect God’s design.  We live in a good world that has gone wrong.  This world is not the way it’s meant to be because we are not as we were made to be.

So this is our dilemma: we are a part of the problem of evil that we demand God fixes.  Let me assure you the God of the Bible is a God of justice, who cares about the wrongs and evil that have been done against you.  But God also cares about the wrong things that we have done to others.  Each of us in our own smaller or bigger ways, contributes to all that is morally wrong with the world.  One day we will be held accountable for that and face the consequences.  One survivor of the barbarity of the Russian Gulag sums up why solving the problem of pain is so difficult because it implicates all of us: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn).  Think of it another way: Maybe you’ve heard the story of Anne Frank or read her diary from her days hidden in the Secret Annexe in occupied Amsterdam.  She reflects in her diary not just on the presence of evil patrolling the streets outside, but also on the selfishness, jealousy and unkindness that she experiences within the Annexe.

So here’s our dilemma: We demand God stops and sorts out evil and injustice… but if God returns to judge and destroy evil then he must deal with us too: “I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realise what it will be like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks on to the stage the play is over…. It will be too late then to choose your side… it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it or not” (C.S. Lewis).

The dilemma for God is how can He who made us and loves us, destroy evil but spare us whose hearts are tainted with evil?

(3) HOW CAN GOD RESOLVE THE PROBLEM OF EVIL AND SUFFERING?

Two things:

Solution To Suffering: The Incarnation & Cross of Jesus

The good news of Christianity is that God has not remained distant from our pain.  He could have left us to die in the dark, all alone.  Rather in an act of incredible love He has pursued us and come into this world to rescue us, in His Son, Jesus.  Tim Keller puts it well when he says: “Christianity alone among the world religions claims that God became uniquely and fully human in Jesus Christ and therefore knows first-hand despair, rejection, loneliness, poverty, bereavement, torture and imprisonment”.

God loves us so much that He has willingly suffered, and by His sufferings we can be rescued from evil within us and around us.  I don’t mean His physical and emotional pain will rescue us.  Instead, it is what He has suffered for us as He died on the Cross.  Speaking of Jesus, the prophet Isaiah says: “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows… he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.  All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned – every one – to his own way; and the LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:4-6).  He was an innocent victim of human evil and injustice.  And the just punishment for every sin, every evil thought, word or action, that we deserve He has instead received on our behalf.  God’s judgement against evil has been absorbed by the God-man Jesus, so that we can be saved from it and reconciled with God our maker.

Hope Beyond Suffering: Resurrection of Jesus & Heaven

The good news of Christianity records the fact of history that Jesus not only died, but He rose again three days later.  His resurrection assures us that there is coming a day when our greatest longings will be satisfied: good will triumph over evil, death will die, tears will cease, pain will be healed.

I love how J.R.R. Tolkein, a Christian and author of the Lord of the Rings saga expresses this.  After the quest to destroy the Ring and defeat the powers of evil has been successful, Sam is reunited with his resurrected friend Gandalf and asks: “I thought you were dead!  But then I thought I was dead myself!  Is everything sad going to come untrue?”

Truly, through the death and resurrection of Jesus everything sad in this world is going to come untrue.  It will be like waking up from a bad dream.

Of that day God promises: “I will wipe every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4).

Even the pain that we have experienced will not be wasted: “Some say of temporal suffering: No future bliss can make up for it, not knowing that Heaven once attained will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory” (C.S. Lewis).

< div class="note">

“For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Corinthians 4:17)

“For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18)