Why Doesn't God Stop Suffering? Six Bad Answers

 Suffering 19

 

Auschwitz

          While out soul winning recently with one of our men I met a rather harsh individual. He stridently insisted he did not believe in God. How could he if God let little children be born without arms? How could he if God allowed dictators like Hitler to live? How could he believe in a God Who allowed people to suffer all over the world?

          His corrosive attacks did not surprise me. The existence of suffering is a key piece of the atheist armor. “If an all-powerful God exists and he refuses to stop suffering He is a lousy God. If God exists and He is unable to stop suffering He is a lousy God. Alternatively, He does not exist at all and that is why suffering continues unabated.” In Randy Alcorn’s excellent If God is Good he phrased the supposed conundrum this way: “If God is good, then he would want to prevent evil and suffering. If he is all-knowing, then he would know how to prevent it. If God is all-powerful, then he is able to prevent it. And yet a great deal of evil and suffering exists. Why?”

          Over the next two weeks I want to answer that question. We begin today with some bad answers. In other words, these are concepts posited in an attempt to answer the problem of evil and suffering but they are bad answers. They are the wrong answers.

          The first wrong answer to the problem of evil and suffering is that there is no evil or suffering. In the late 1800s, the infamous Mary Baker Eddy of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, essentially offered this argument. It is a foolish argument for one simple reason: there clearly is evil and suffering in this world. The Bible tells us evil and suffering exist from one end to the other as does our human experience. To assert there is no evil and suffering is to reject the truth of God’s Word. Our Saviour said, For ye have the poor always with you. (Matthew 26.11) Job, who knew a bit about suffering, said, Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward. (Job 5.7) This side of eternity we are shades wandering a vale of tears.

          The second wrong answer is that there is no God. But there is. The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. (Psalm 14.1)

          The existence of the cosmos proves God is. It so happens I am reading an old treatise at the moment, Stephen Charnock’s 1682 The Existence and Attributes of God. In it, he makes a lengthy and compelling argument against Darwin’s evolutionary theory centuries in the future. Darwin, as revealed in Benjamin Wiker’s 2009 work, The Darwin Myth, launched his theory on the world specifically in order to attack the existence of God. Charnock deconstructed Darwin centuries earlier by walking the reader down a faultless chain of reasoning that must end ultimately in the existence of God. In short, everything has a producing cause except the First Cause. That alone is uncaused, and must be eternal and all-powerful. Ergo, God.

          The orderly design of nature proves God exists. C. S. Lewis famously suggested this with his mid-twentieth century illustration of a man strolling through a field. Suppose that man comes upon a watch lying in the middle of the path. Would he assume the watch had always lain there, quietly ticking the world’s seconds away one by one? Of course not. The watch clearly had a maker, a designer; its complexity demands reason assume as much. Just so it is with this world. Creation is an orderly and intricately designed masterpiece, and as such is clear evidence of the existence of the Creator. To this the psalmist agrees. The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament sheweth his handywork. (Psalm 19.1)

          Yet another natural proof of God’s existence is seen in the way men are different than animals. We are born with a conscience, a basic morality. The squirrels gamboling in my Arborvitae and wreaking havoc on my porch do not. This conscience is built into us from birth, and the only explanation of its existence is that Someone put it there, a Creator.

          Additionally, the Bible proves God exists. How else can you account for its miracles and its prophecies? How else do you account for Christ’s civilizing influence on world history? How else do you account for the Jews jaw-dropping perpetuity against vicious hatred over millennia?

          The third wrong answer to the problem of evil and suffering is that God exists, yes, but He has only limited goodness. But this is manifestly false for God is always good. Thou art good, and doest good. (Psalm 119.68)

“But even the Scripture records actions of God’s which are not good!” No, it does not. You have confused kindness for goodness.   

          “But there are things going on in my life that are definitely not good.” You may, perhaps, be right, but do not say God caused them. God may not always appear to be good, but He is always good.

          “But you yourself said evil and suffering exist. If they exist how can you say that all that God does is good.” Because God is so amazing He can and does use even that evil and suffering to produce good. We have spoken of this already in this series. We know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. (Romans 8.28)

          The fourth bad answer to the problem of evil and suffering is that God has limited power. But He does not. And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. (Matthew 28.18) It is not that He cannot stop evil and suffering; it is rather that He chooses to allow it for His own (good) reasons.

          “Ha! Can God build a rock so heavy He can’t lift it?”

          That is not a limitation; it is an absurdity. An omnipotent God cannot do what is intrinsically impossible. He cannot make a square circle or a round rectangle. God is rational and has created a rational universe. He can suspend gravity if He chooses but He cannot move a rock downward and upward at the same time. To assert this undermines His omnipotence is not unassailable logic; it is nonsense.

It is true God cannot lie (II Timothy 2.13) and God cannot deny Himself. (II Timothy 2.13) Yet it is not His lack of power that causes this; it is His nature. I wrote earlier in this series that God has created man with a free will. He chose that Himself and He cannot violate Himself. But that does not mean His power is limited; He is still sovereign. (Daniel 4.17)

The fifth bad answer to the problem of evil and suffering is to assert God has limited knowledge. But He does not; He knows all and sees all. (Psalm 139.1-16)

The idea that God’s knowledge is limited is an attractive one to those who argue with atheists. It seems to allow for a continued belief in God while not having to account for His lack of desire or inability to stop evil and suffering. It is not only an attractive option, intellectually, it is also a growing one. It is generally known by the phrase open theism.

Essentially, open theism operates like this: God can know with certainty what He plans to do, but He cannot know with certainty what we will do in response. Why? Because He made us with a free will. How can an individual's will be genuinely free if God knows ahead of time what we are going to do? Hence, God’s knowledge is limited by our unknowable future choices.

          With such intellectual sophistry open theists assert that God was only partially aware of my daughter’s death before it happened, and thus His existence and integrity are undamaged by my ensuing suffering. But such a lousy answer holds zero comfort for me. After all, once He did know about Abigail’s death why did He not do anything about it then? No, there is no comfort here. There is only the hollowness of an unbiblically bad “answer.”

          “See here, Pastor Brennan. God knows you are going to drink a white chocolate mocha at 10 AM tomorrow. You cannot not do that or else God would be wrong. So the only way a genuine free will can exist is if God does not know the future.”

          Au contraire. God’s foreknowledge is not cause. God lives outside of time. There is no past, no present, no future with Him. He is eternal in both directions and exists everywhere at once. (I have a theory of physics related to the omnipresence of God but I shall spare you in this already too long post.) God can and does know what I will decide to drink or not drink at any certain time tomorrow without causing that action on my part. I am bound by linear time; He is not.

          Open theists respond by saying there were some things Jesus did not know. He had to, for instance, grow in wisdom and stature and knowledge. (Luke 2.52) Which means there were things He did not initially know. Even in His maturity He did not know the day of the Second Coming, for example. (Matthew 24.36)

          Right. Because Christ laid aside some attributes of deity in order to be enfleshed at the incarnation. He did so while still retaining that deity. Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. (Philippians 2.6-8) This does not prove that God does not know everything; it proves the humanity of Jesus while still retaining the deity of Jesus.

          The simple truth is Scripture tells us repeatedly God knows everything. He is perfect in knowledge. (Job 37.16) God knoweth all things. (I John 3.20) Indeed, He even knows what we need before we ask Him. (Matthew 6.8)

          “Sure, bud. He knows everything that can be known but He does not know the future for that cannot be known.”

          Really?

Psalm 139.1–4, 16

O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, Thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, And art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, But, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; And in thy book all my members were written, Which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.

          God not only knows what will happen, He also knows what would have happened if you had made a different choice. Joash struck the ground with an arrow three times instead of five or six, grieving Elisha. And God tells him what would have happened if he had made a different choice. Jesus did no miracles in Tyre and Sidon yet He knew what would have happened there if He had done so.

          The simple truth is God’s omniscience encompasses all knowledge, past, present, and future. The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is. (Revelation 17.8)

          The sixth bad answer to the problem of evil and suffering is that God has limited love. But He does not. His love is without limit or extent. (John 3.16, Romans 8.37-39, Ephesians 3.19)

          I recognize we cannot be intellectually honest and ignore the atheistic attack that the existence of evil and suffering prove either God does not exist or He is somehow severely limited. But to proffer these as answers is to ask me to walk out on the rotten ice covering the Mississippi River in early Spring. They will not hold.

Holocaust Memorial, Berlin, Germany

          I opened this lengthy post referencing a man I met out soul winning. After listening to him attack God at length I finally managed to interject. I said, “You’ve asked me a bunch of questions but you haven’t let me give you any answers.” Quick as a wink, he threw back into my teeth, “That’s because there are no answers.”

          But there are. Not the bad ones proffered in today’s blog post, but good ones. We will look at those next week. Stay tuned.