Lesson Nine: The Problem of Evil Part 1

Lesson Nine: The Problem of Evil Part 1 ⁽¹⁾

• Is There a Problem of Evil? Is There an Answer?
  • The typical argument:
    • Premise 1: If God were all-powerful, he would be able to prevent evil.
    • Premise 2: If God were all-good, he would desire to prevent evil.
    • Conclusion: So if God were both all-powerful and all-good, there would be no evil.
    • Premise 3: But there is evil.
    • Conclusion: Therefore, there is no all-powerful, all-good God.
  • Problems of expectations: We simply feel a terrible discrepancy between our experience and what we believe God to be.
    • Theodicy: Attempts to justify (vindicate) God’s ways to humans, demonstrating His goodness. Probably not possible, but we can continue to trust God despite unexplained evil.
    • Defense: Shows that the existence of evil does not disprove the God of the Bible. Requires a careful study of the Bible.
  • Moral evil (Gen. 3:17-19) preceded – and resulted in the curse causing – natural evil (earthquakes, floods, diseases, injuries, death and other natural causes of suffering, unpleasantness, or difficulty in the lives of creatures).
    • The whole creation “has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth” (Rom. 8:22) “with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God” (v. 19).
    • Remember that in redemption, God’s purpose is no less than “to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven” (Col. 1:20).
• Focus on the Bible: The Bible is largely preoccupied with the problem of evil.
• What the Bible Does Not Say
  • The Nature of Evil: The Unreality-of-Evil Defense: The Bible does not say that evil is an illusion (nonbeing) or is merely the absence of good (privation).
    • God works all things after the counsel of his own will (Eph. 1:11), including sins and evils (Gen. 50:20; Isa. 10:5-10; Luke 22:22; Acts 2:23; 4:28; Rom. 9:1-29).
  • The Contribution of Evil
    • The Best-Possible-World Defense: The Bible does not teach that our world is the “best possible world” or that all evils are necessary for its perfection. The Bible does tell us that the original creation contained no evil (Gen. 1:31), and that the consummate new heavens and new earth will also be without evil (Rev. 21:1-8).
    • The Free-Will Defense: The Bible never uses the free-will defense in any passage where the problem of evil is up for discussion. Scripture does teach that man is, or can be, free in certain senses.
      • Adam had the freedom or ability to choose either good or evil. The fall removed this freedom from us, for fallen creatures can do only what is evil (Gen. 6:5; 8:21; Isa. 64:6; Rom. 3:10ff.). But redemption restores this freedom to those who believe (2 Cor. 5:17).
      • Redemption brings to us an even higher freedom, a freedom from sin and its effects altogether (John 8:32). “Freedom from sin” is the usual meaning of freedom in the New Testament. And we are, in all our actions (1 Cor. 10:31), responsible to obey the Lord.
      • Still, the blame for sin rests on man, rather than on God. Even when Scripture specifically mentions God’s foreordination of an evil event, the blame for the evil rests exclusively with the human perpetrators (see Gen. 50:20; Acts 2:23; 4:27). See Romans 9: 11-19. God has full rights over us to do whatever he (sovereignly!) chooses to do.
    • The Character-Building Defense: The Bible does not say that man was created in a state of moral immaturity. Adam was created good, and had he obeyed God, he would not have needed to experience suffering. Suffering is the result of the fall (Gen. 3:17). Believers are created anew in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17) as gift of grace, not a “purgatory” of suffering.
    • The Stable-Environment Defense: The Bible does not teach that evil is the necessary consequence of a stable environment where, for example, the law of gravity can result in harm if someone falls down the stairs. Heaven, on the other hand, will be another stable environment, but one without evil.
  • Evil and God’s Agency
    • The Divine-Weakness Defense: The Bible does not say that God lacks sufficient omniscience, omnipotence or sovereignty to overcome all of the evil in the world.
    • The Indirect-Cause Defense: The Bible does not propose that God is not responsible at some level for evil because He, like the Mafia boss, is sufficiently remote from the direct and proximate causes of evil and suffering. On the contrary, the Bible teaches that enticing someone else to sin is itself a sin (Deut. 13:6ff.; Rom. 14).
    • The Ex Lex Defense: The Bible does not say that God is ex lex, that is, “outside the law.” Although God has the right to do many things that seem evil to us, even things that contradict scriptural norms, the law actually reflects God’s own character. In fact, to obey the law is to imitate God, to be like him, to image him (Ex. 20:11; Lev. 11:44-45; Matt. 5:45; 1 Peter 1:15-16). There is in biblical ethics also an imitation of Christ, centered on the atonement (John 13:34-35; Eph. 4:32; 5:1; Phil. 2:3ff.; 1 John 3:16; 4:8-10).
  • An Ad Hominem Defense: When an unbeliever questions the consistency of God’s sovereignty with his goodness in the face of evil, the apologist sometimes replies that the unbeliever has no right even to raise the question, for he cannot, on his basis, even distinguish good from evil. If the believer faces the problem of how there can be evil in a theistic world, the unbeliever faces the problem of how there can be either good or evil in a nontheistic world.
• Next Lesson: What does Scripture say about the problem of evil, besides what we have covered above?

1. Drawn from Frame & Torres, Apologetics  Chapter 7, “Apologetics as Defense: The Problem of Evil, Part 1 – Questions, General Principles and Blind Alleys” (P&R Publishing, 2015),