The Problem with Evil
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As we begin our lesson today, I want to remind everyone about memorial day. It is a day we honor the men and women who have died to protect this country. Our service men and women have defeated dictators with visions of world domination. Men whose names still strikes fear today like Hitler, Stalin, Hirohito, Mussolini. Men who have committed evil acts like Saddam Hessian and Osama Bin Laden. The men and women of our military went around the world and fought some of the most evil people in hopes that the evil would not come to these shores.
We owe a great deal of thanks to these men as our world would look drastically different without their sacrifice. Sadly, evil still strikes our nation. When I was your age, a man by the name of Timothy McVeigh blew up a Government building in Oklahoma City killing 168 people and wounding another 680.
In 1996 a man blew up a bomb in Atlanta prior during the Olympics killing 1 and injuring 111 people. There have been serial killers throughout American History. In 2001, the most Notable act of Terrorism in American history occured on 9/11. And as much as our fallen warriors have sacrificed to keep evil away from our shores, it is an inevitably a losing battle as where evil exists, evil will persist.
This reality brings about a problem in the religious realm that many philosophers and theologians have pondered since there was religion and philosophy. It is a problem that does not have an easy answer and leads to more questions and potentially doubt. However, in light of the events of Tuesday’s school shooting and loss of innocent lives, it is a problem that some of you know have questions about. I am going to be real and I am going to be honest as possible. In our group time, I want to hear the questions that you still have because I want to guide you to the understanding that God has given to this problem.
The problem that we face is the Problem of Evil. When we look back at all these evil events of the past, we come to a question of eternal magnitude. If a good God exists like Christians claim, why and how can he allow such evil to persist? Why does God not prevent these evils? We talked about last week that God is love, but how can a God that loves his creation allow these evils to occur? These, my friends, are not easy answers that come without faith and trust in God.
But to find the answers that we seek we must go back to the beginning of man. We start with the relationship between man and God at creation.
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
What we see here is the beginning of the relationship with man. He does so by creating man in His own image. He goes further to be giving dominion, or authority of the world to man. At this moment in time, everything God created was considered good.
However, there was a point where God said that it was not Good. In Genesis 2:18
Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”
When God sees man alone he recognizes that it isn’t good so he creates a helper for man. God created woman to be with man. In creation, we see the purpose for man. God created man for a relationship with Him. God provided everything that man would need to be fruitful and multiply. God’s desire in the Garden was for relationship with man. This reveal that God created a perfect world without evil.
If this is the case though, where did it all go wrong. Let’s look at Genesis 2:9 ; 16-17
And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
What we find here is that God gave man a choice. He gave man the free will to choose between option A or option B. Option A was to live in the Garden with God. Option B was death and destruction. If God had only given man one choice, he would not have free will to choose option A or option B.
I want to pause here to answer a couple questions that is important as we continue. Why did God give man free will to choose evil? Did he not know that man would choose evil? Isn’t God omniscient? Yes, God is omniscient and you could say that he knew that man would fail in his choice. The question then reverts back to why did God give man free will.
The answer is in what happens with an ability to choose. Let us consider a robotic system. Wouldn’t it be awesome to have robots that could do everything we could ever want. Cook, clean, drive. Today we have robot vacuums. Now the vacuum cleans the floor of the house as planned. The robot has no choice in the cleaning. Does it bring us any glory in creation that we created this robot to do exactly what we say?
Maybe a little. But what brings more glory is if we created a robot that freely chose to do what we commanded out of it’s own free will. That’s what happened with God at creation. He gave man free will to be obedient out of our desire to please God.
Man was not disobedient out of hatred to God, but was deceived by the evil one.
But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.
This is the origin of sin. Satan tempts us. Even today, Sin is a part of our nature. We are subject to the temptation of Satan. Satan tempts us to do what God has commanded us not to do. When we fall to this temptation it is sin. When we fail to do what God commanded it it sin.
This is the birth of all evil in man. The evils that we discussed to begin with today, all have came because of this original sin. From this sin, the evil grows and becomes worse. Genesis 4 reveals that in one generation sin goes from an act of simple disobedience to murder. Genesis 5 reveals that there were 10 generations between Adam and Noah. In those 10 generations, the world became so evil that God was ready to destroy the earth.
The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.
When God looked at the world when before the flood, he only saw evil. This reveals that when man allows evil in it overtakes him. Small evil becomes overwhelming evil. As the world continues to reject God, they allow evil to persist. If not for Noah trusting God the world would have been destroyed.
After the flood the world was still plagued by the temptation to sin. With the continued sin in the world, it is fair to wonder why God didn’t just end the world to prevent these great evil. The reality is that God loves man. God wants relationship with man of man’s own free will. But for this to happen, Man must be cleansed of sin.
It is for this reason that the law was given. In the law, God explained to man what is and is not sin. In this law, God laid out a plan for removal and forgiveness of sins against God and man. This was through a sacrificial system that pleased God. This Sacrificial system was the system that ultimately Christ fulfilled on the cross for all sins, for all time. This leaves the only requirement of man is to accept and believe in the freely offered Sacrifice of Jesus for our sins.
After serving in the Military for 20 years I have come to a conclusion, Wars and violence, though sometimes necessary to reign in evil and take out evil people, will never defeat evil. The greatest weapon that we have against evil is the revelation of the love of God. This revelation is only possible through God’s people. Because we know His love, we are called to share His love.
If you think about my messages up to this point, We are to be Kind. We are His Children and as His children we are to love others. When I think about most teenagers who commit acts as we saw on Tuesday. We tend to find out that they were treated unkindly and did not feel the love. Imagine if someone could have reached out to them in love and kindness throughout their life. That is our goal.
To reach people who need to see the love of God. When people meet the love of God and accept it, the evil within them is replaced by that love.