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The
Problem of Evil
2.
Why doesn’t God do something ?
A
series that considers the problem of evil and suffering
in the world
Contents
Introduction
This
is the second of a series of pages on the problem of evil in the world.
We hope you’ll read them all through thoughtfully and carefully
and come to see the reality of how things are and why you can be secure
in God’s love.
In
the first page we asked, “What is Evil” and saw that it is anything
that causes wrong harm to us. We saw that the vast majority of
harm to human beings is caused by human beings.
How
can God allow evil?
This
is a question that many people ask. A man sitting on a bus once
saw a dog caught in a barbed wire fence on his journey to work.
On the return journey he saw the dog was still there and retorted, “How
can there be a loving God who would allow such suffering to continue?”
But
the question is much bigger than a single suffering dog.
There
are millions of starving people in the world. There are millions
of sick people in the world. There are millions of people dying
every day, some very painfully, some very slowly.
Where is God in the midst of all this?
What
do you want God to do?
When
we face all this pain and anguish, and something in us wants to cry
out, “God where are you? Why don’t you do something about this?”
perhaps there is a quiet reply from God that most of us don’t hear:
“What do you want me to do?”
A
conversation with God might then follow the following lines:
(You)
“I want you to stop this suffering!”
(God)
“How do you want me to do that?”
“What
do you mean? 
“How
do you want me to stop people being nasty to other people?”
“Kill
the most evil people!”
“That
will only deal with a tiny part of the evil being done in my world.
”
“Well
stop people being evil!”
“You
mean you want me to take away their free will, their right to choose
how they behave?”
“No…
perhaps just those who are really bad.”
“You
mean child abusers, say?”
“Yes!”
“What
about the screaming mother about to hit her baby?”
“Er….
perhaps. Well you could help her.”
“I
do.”
“You
do?”
“Yes,
I’m there for her the moment she turns to me and asks for help .”
“Can’t
you help even if she doesn’t ask?”
“You
want me to override her mind, her free will?”
“No…
there must be another way.”
“It
sounds like you want me to make you all robots who have no choice, no
option, just to be good?”
“No,
I just want you to help. Many people only do bad things because of their
bad circumstances.”
“It
sounds like you think less of them than I do?”
“What
do you mean?”
“You
say they aren’t responsible for themselves, that they are less than
the responsible beings I created them to be, people less than people.”
“That’s
unfair.”
“Yes
it is! I see them as people with dignity, people able to make decisions
for themselves, people I respect to make their own choices, but you
take away their dignity, you make them irresponsible and undignified.
I see they have great potential and allow them to rise up in their circumstances,
I allow them to rise to their greatness and I’m there to help them achieve
it the moment they ask me to help, but I’m not going to demean them
by overriding them and treating them as slaves.”
The
Problem of our Greatness!
That
is the difficulty, if we’re able to be honest about it.
At
the beginning of the Bible we are shown that God gave mankind the world
to enjoy and to rule over.
God
made the first two human beings much more than mere animals. 
When
you compare human beings with the rest of the living creatures you see
that we have a variety of characteristics that are lacking in animals:
-
We have the ability to communicate in complex forms.
-
We are able to reason, reflect, consider, plan, dream dreams and then
bring them into being.
-
We are creative and produce great works or art, architecture or literature.
-
We consider infinity, meaning, purpose, beauty and other philosophical
concepts.
-
We have amazing potential for good - and bad. As
someone has said, we take the good things given to us and we distort
them “we turn nudity into pornography, wine into alcoholism, food
into gluttony, and human diversity into racism and prejudice”.
This
is the problem we face - mankind has such tremendous potential for both
good and bad.
Mankind
has the ability to choose to live in either peace and harmony, or in
selfishness and dissension.
If
we want God to intervene then we must either ask Him to take away our
free will, or come in some other way that will win us away from our
selfishness and lead us into some other lifestyle.
Reject
the Robots idea!
Let’s
reject this idea of God taking away our free will, making us robots
so that we can only do good.
Once
we remove free will we also remove love, beauty, creativity and so many
of those other characteristics that make us what we are. We would cease
to be human beings.
This
is not an acceptable solution!
Live
by Rules?
Supposing
we could convince every one that the lifestyle God laid out in the Bible
for the nation of Israel was faultless.
When
you read the laws He gave them it should have produced a society that
was full of peace and harmony, full of justice and social care.
The laws are not in question.
But
there are two problems. Problem number one is that most of us don’t
like living according to rules. We find them restrictive and inhibiting
(drivers exceeding the speed limit is a good example).
Problem
number two is that Israel couldn’t live like that! They are the
proof that a society cannot do it!
As we observe their history, as recorded in the Old Testament of the
Bible, we see that again and again they drifted away from their relationship
with God and then the quality of their life as a society also deteriorated.
A
Relationship?
In
fact, what we see by observing Israel historically, is that their ability
to live as a just and caring society relied entirely on their relationship
with God.
What
the record shows us is that they were able to follow the rules when
they were more concerned to please God, as part of their relationship
with Him.
When
they drifted from Him, they found they had no motivation to keep to
the laws of society that God had given them and very soon “every man
did what was right in his own eyes”.
This
meant a self-centred lifestyle, which soon deteriorated into an uncaring,
self-seeking society with a variety of social ills - much like our own
society at the beginning of the twenty first century.
To
Summarise
What
have we seen so far?
•
the majority of “evil” in the world is man’s inhumanity to man.
•
if we want God to intervene to change this we must either ask Him
to take away our free will, or come in some other way that will win
us away from our selfishness and lead us into some other lifestyle.
•
giving us rules to follow doesn’t seem to work; rules without relationship
are inadequate.
The
Central Problem
We
need to keep reiterating the question that so many people ask when facing
the problem of suffering: “Why doesn’t God do something?” We need to
keep facing the alternatives first considered:
•
Remove free will - unacceptable!
•
Provide rules to follow - unworkable!
Try
Harder! 
This
leaves us with a sense of hopelessness, a sense that perhaps there is
NO way out of this problem, a sense that we’re stuck with a self-centred
humanity and a powerless God, so all we can do is try harder!
Yet
in the past century we have seen tremendous advances in education and
in science and technology, but the condition of the human race in many
ways is just as bad, if not worse.
We
have family breakdown, violence sparked by an increasing variety of
“rages”, racial disharmony, as much poverty as ever, and so the list
goes on.
Politicians
keep coming up with new initiatives which fail to solve the problems,
scientists keep making new breakthroughs that promise a better tomorrow
that never comes, philosophers say there are no more answers and sociologists
struggle under ever mounting loads.
Our
godless society is left only with “Try harder!” How depressing.
The
Christian Answer
How
dare a Christian suggest they have an answer!
Well,
it is not their answer but an answer they claim God has provided, an
answer that can be analysed and assessed for value, and for that you’ll
need to read the third page in this series.
Thank
you for reading this far. Please persevere and read the next page
as well.
Can
we help?
This page is one of a series. The four in this series
are:
1.
What is Evil?
2.
Why doesn't God do something?
3.
A Workable Solution
4.
On the Receiving End of Evil
Perhaps you would like to talk further about these things or even have
someone pray with you. If that is so then the leaders of Rochford Community
Church are available to help you.
Remember, if you want to e-mail Tony, it's tony.thomas@rochfordcc.co.uk
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