The Problem of Evil

The Problem of Evil

James 1:13-14

"Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man. But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed."

Therefore, God is not the author of evil.

If God hardened Pharaoh, myself or Peter to cause us to be unbelieving, then God would still be perfectly good, because He is the Source of all knowledge of any goodness (even the superlative thoughts of a humble child), so that we don’t know how to imagine anything more good than He is. That's the bigger issue with all this.

If a single person, after being called by Christ, calls back to Him, that means that evil human beings can be saved by calling on Christ, which takes away any thought that God made Lucifer become Satan due to the way God made him or that God makes humans not go to Him due to our sinful state. Christ's lack of call on some is based on His Father's foreknowing. The reason Father does this is not evil as is supposed by those who connect His choice to some filthy thing they think.

Suffering is the natural outcome of our evil.  Suffering's application in moral development is a secondary usage. The primary good that comes from suffering is not our moral development, but the good that proves that God is glorious, which is proven by the good that He is mercifully giving us (wherever goodness is found), because the nature of evil is to consume all reality; so, wherever good is found, it is added to that place by God in this evil World.  The fact that life exists here is evidence that God is standing against the evil.  God does not apply evil to us in order to make us better, He takes us in our state of being affected by evil and turns it to goodness when He decides to, but, if He does not, we are merely experiencing our default state.

God loves us even though we are THIS sinful.  His love is great.  He is glorified by His reaction to our evil.  The nature of evil is explained to us by its natural outcomes of pain.

Satan's freedom of action to make offensive wars is his way of doing whatever he wants in order to be like God.  God is allowing all manner of evil, even by ensuring there is time and other structural supports for the evil in this Universe, and He is doing it to prove to Satan that the power and wisdom of God is beyond whatever that former angel could produce with all latitude of possible motion within the boundaries of that Universe that he knew (with all the Universe's supports of time and structure).

That's why there's evil in the world even though God is good.

Christians, don't do what Satan did.  Have your freedom away from sin and not in arbitrary motions that hurt.

Comments

  1. Israel ImayeliaAugust 26, 2021 at 1:36 PM

    Humans always fall short, can never be perfect enough, don't you think? Humans always fall short one way or the other. But the difference is this: when you are in Christ, God sees his son through(or in) you. You are perfect in his eyes. Then being evil now becomes a choice.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jeremy BickelAugust 27, 2021 at 9:21 AM

    That's partly true with some exceptions.

    Christians have died to the Law and are reborn - so the curse of sin has been lifted from us, and we have power over it in a way that the World doesn't (they can't resist all the different types of sin, but we can see them resisting some types to some extent), but Christians have been given power to resist all sin, and we grow in righteousness by believing the Resurrection (Romans 10:9b-10a).

    Secondly, your last sentence isn't right - the body of the Christian is still as it was before our salvation, and we must fight it, but if we sin, it is our body that sins, not us. We still serve Christ in our mind even as our body serves sin. No matter what we do, we can't keep our body from dying, and death is the outcome of sin, so we do not have a choice in absolutely keeping our body from sinning. Read Romans 7 on Paul's anguish that he still sinned - but we go to God about them and chip away at them, and we Christians (unlike the World) are able to repent of them.

    When God sees the saved believer, He sees Christ's righteousness, even though we still commit sins. But if we continue to indulge in sin against our own new nature, then He will thoroughly beat us (but we still won't lose our salvation so long as we continue to trust Christ's good work, according to the gospel Paul first learned and then preached). And He knows how to help us one way or the other. But the World, He doesn't know at all (what an utterly wretched state!).

    The philosophical problem of evil says the existence of evil proves that our good God doesn't exist. I've given reasons in this post that break down that assumption, showing how God's goodness dovetails with His allowance of our evil.

    ReplyDelete

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