God and Evil

That’s a rather big question!

The good news is, the answer isn’t dependent on what I think – or even what we, the collective body of Christ, think. I sleep much better, knowing I don’t have to have the answers to questions like these.

If I did have to make an attempt at an answer, I’d suggest it’s quite possible God did have a reason for that bridge to collapse and/or that he regretted it terribly and had no desire for it, yet allowed it to happen. I want to think God doesn’t punish innocent people. Then, I have to remember just how many of us are truly innocent.

The collapse of a bridge is neither good nor evil in and of itself. It is. Yes, people died. That is sad for us earth-bound. But great for those Christians who are now with their Lord in eternity.

Could God have prevented it? Sure. Did he have to? No. Does not preventing a tragedy take away from God’s glory or make him a bad guy? No. The reason that things like this happen is because of the tragedy of sin and its contaminating effect. The world is broken, and continues to spiral to further brokenness because of sin. Decay, breakage, mistakes, miscaculations, all the natural things that brought about the collapse of that bridge will not happen when all things are made new. They were never God’s plan or design, but began when Adam sinned.

The question as to whether God willed the bridge collapse or whether he simply wasn’t “surprised”, is kind of silly IMHO. God does not experience time like us. We live in creation. He made creation. He is separate from creation. He knows the end from the beginning, because he made it all. Did he will the collapse of the bridge? I don’t think of it as such but I wouldn’t put it like a lack of surprise. He made the stuff of which the bridge was made. He made the man who designed it and the men who ran the equipment that built it. He knew what stresses would collapse the bridge. He knew the moment it would collapse. Did he will it? Again I think it is the wrong question.

I think every Christian should read Christopher Wright’s “The God I Don’t Understand”. Very helpful, readable, and doesn’t skirt any issues like the one raised above.

In short, my view is that you will have a very hard time making sense of large sections of the Bible if you espouse a view like Kinnon’s.

Perhaps this quote could contribute (but maybe not) from one of my former seminary profs:

“Surely there’s a different between God’s determining of the future and his knowing it isn’t there? No. There is not. Biblically there is no difference. In fact, merely knowing the future at least from a theological point of view is irrelevant. When scripture affirms that God knows what the future will be it means nothing less than He has decided, ordered, and ordained the future. God’s knowledge of the future, means that the future is sure. If that weren’t the case, that he knows the future in the sense that it’s sure, no one would care if God knew the future or not. Does that make sense? I know I am kind of arguing with the Arminian tradition here but that tradition will affirm just at strongly as I will that God knows the future. Ok, why do you care if it’s not that he secures the future, that he promises the future? It really doesn’t matter if God knows it or not. So I agree with Pinnock that God’s knowing the future makes the future absolutely certain.”

-Dr. Michael Williams, Professor, Covenant Theological Seminary
From his lecture #16 of the class, God and His Word

From God’s point of view I don’t see a huge distinction between foreknowledge and causation. But people WAY smarter than me have debated this one for centuries and here we are still…

I usually skip J.P.’s weekly encyclical(s), but I’ve seen enough to discover the modus operandi:

1) Select a topic for which there are no easy answers. The longer theologians and church historians have wrestled with it, the better.

2) Give an easy answer.

Bill,

I affirm what you wrote about those texts I cited, I just don’t think you take them far enough. I completely affirm human responsibility and divine sovereignty (one of the many tensions in the Bible that are simply asserted without explanation: Trinity, hypostatic union, authorship of the Bible, etc).

With Job, yes, Satan has to ask permission, but notice that he doesn’t give credit to Satan, but rather to God. He claims that God is ulitmate the one who did it to him.

Job 1:21-22 – 21 And he said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

22 In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong.

With Joseph, he claims the same thing, that God had intention in what happened to him. In speaking to his brothers he says… – Gen 50: 20 As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people [2] should be kept alive, as they are today.

“God meant it for good” – Human authors and divine Author of calamity.

The cross is the ultimate example – Acts 4:27-28 – 27 for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, 28 to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.

Isaiah spoke about this as well in terms of the divine will in the calamity that fell upon the Son of God . Isaiah 53:10 – 10 Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him;
he has put him to grief

Zach,
Let me simply ask the question, then. Is it your opinion that God’s sovereignty is such that He planned the I35 Bridge collapse for some purpose we cannot understand?

God has foreordained everything to happen. The Scriptures are blatant about this side of the truth revealed about God’s sovereignty. Just because you can’t logically conceive of this as compatible with suffering in this present fallen world doesn’t mean you have to denigrate God’s pre-determination of all things.

Well Trish, I guess that just settles it then. My bad.

Zach, thanks for the clarity. What I would say is that you come to that conclusion “Biblically” based on the lens through which you view scripture – informed by Calvin and Augustine before him. I would find myself more in the Arminius, Wesleyan camp – with a growing Kuyperian bent, oddly enough. Many who use your particular lens would see me as a heretic. I see you and those who use your particular lens as my brothers and sisters in Christ – just as broken and in need of a Saviour as I am.

Dan,
(Warning, longwinded response as I move into storytelling mode.)

Yesterday I watched my eldest (who you know reasonably well) leave the dock at the cottage to get to work on time. He was late. (What a shock.) He’d forgotten to put the drain plug back in the aluminum boat when he lowered the boat into the water – and by the time he did this, he had water sloshing at his feet.

In his haste to get going, he didn’t give the 15hp Yamaha any time to warm up. Oh. And he was dealing with rather high winds, rain and strong waves that wanted to push the boat north. As he pulled off the lift, the engine stalled. He restarted it. It stalled again. He restarted it. It stalled again. In frustration, he pulled on the starter cord so hard, I thought it would come free from the motor. I called out to him to take it easy.

He finally got the boat underway but appeared not to notice the motor was in it’s low water position – causing the front end to rise precipitously. I called out to him again. He yelled back, “I know” and dropped the motor into position rather than lowering it.

I watched him pull away and then began to walk back up to the cottage. (We are on an island, as you know.) I heard an awful bang and raced back to the lake to see what had happened. My son, now about 500 yards away, had appeared to have turned sharply left but was now correcting it and heading off again. I watched him ’til I could no longer see him – praying for him all the while.

Later that day, he told me what had happened. A technique to drain an aluminum boat is to pull the drain plug while the boat is under full power. (This is not one I would practise, but it is one that his mother and younger brother have used – both much better boat pilots than me. That is they used this technique up until yesterday.) In reaching to pull the plug, the wet throttle arm (set at full power) slipped out of his hand, the boat immediately spun left, slammed into a wave (the noise I heard) and almost launched my son out of the boat. The starter clip was not attached by cable to my son, so the boat would have continued to spin if my son was no longer in it. There was a very real possibility that he would have been gravely injured, if not killed by the racing motor.

The sequence of events began with being late and could have ended with my oldest’s death. He has been taught his entire life the need to allow for time, especially when circumstances (the weather in this case) intervene. He has been taught to allow the engine to warm up. He has been taught to be hyper vigilant on a boat in inclement weather. We now have a new rule in place (idiots that we are – it should have already been there) that the engine starter clip cable must be attached to you, especially in inclement weather – and you must be wearing a life jacket when there is any chop on the Lake. My eldest is extremely bright and very capable. The morning started badly and could have ended in tragedy – even with all the teaching, rules and “wisdom” in place.

All this to ask; if my son had been killed or severely injured who should I blame – my son, me for not intervening and taking over the boating to get him to the mainland, or was it all God’s fault? Would this sequence of events have been part of God’s plan in your estimation.

That would be the position of my Grandfather, who blamed God for the death of my mother’s youngest full brother, Tom, who died of exposure in the Straits of Belle Isle in 1962. My Uncle Tom attempted to head home to Goose Bay, Labrador from an afternoon fishing trip (for pleasure, Tom was the Esso Agent for Labrador) in high seas. Growing up on the tip of Northern Newfoundland, Tom had no fear of the water.

This was the final straw for my Grandfather’s faith – having lost his first wife (who was pregnant) when my mother was ten, his oldest son when my mother was 15 and then his youngest son from his first wife. God chose not to intervene – though my Grandfather believed he could. Therefore He was not good. My grandfather walked away from his faith – though never denying God’s existence.

From my perspective, Tom’s own actions led to the tragedy. A healthy fear of the power of the seas might have saved him. Could God have intervened? Of course. But God in His goodness and wisdom gave us dominion over the earth, we turned away from him in the Fall, and we’ve been reaping the consequences of our fallenness ever since.

Sorry for the longwinded response that led to the question (four paragraphs north of this one).

Hi there.

Some thoughts: If God must ordain in order to foreknow, then his foreknowledge is no different than ours, except in scale. If I design a game and rig it so that I will always win, how much foreknowledge does it take for me to predict the winner? And if I rig it such that the other players cannot help but make fatal moves, can I escape responsibility for those errors? This idea of God not being responsible for sin even though he rigged people to be helpless but to commit it, is like saying “People don’t kill people, guns do”. The one pulling the trigger is the killer, and the One making people unable to resist pulling the trigger is the cause of sin.

If all must be caused by God, then life is a cosmic puppet show. But puppets don’t love, free agents do. Changing the programming of some of the puppets to “freely” love is no better, and such “love” would be quite insulting to God. Telling the puppets to choose, to love, to strive for holiness, is all a sadistic deception if the God giving the exhortations decreed from eternity past that such things are beyond their capacity. And dismissing all this with “it’s a mystery”, one I’ve heard often by predestinarians, would never be accepted from their opponents.

If scripture tells us anything about God, it is that God loves and wants our love in return. This is a fundamental and indisputable fact of scripture. So when we think of the implications of that fact, we have to decide whether what may appear to be a violation of the free will to accept or reject God simply cannot be, or God would not be Love at all.

A shameless plug for some of my very biased ramblings:
theory vs. reality
cosmic q and a

Bill,

Just to let you know; I love and value you. I simply want us to wrestle with the whole of the biblical text. I think you think God is in control and has delegated, or allowed, in the umbrella of His sovereignty, a certain level of human freedom from His control- a bit like a parent giving the reins to their growing children. I think that somewhere in the mystery of divine providence God has given us significant freedom – and yet retains sovereign control over the world. The exhortations of scripture, as Jason points out, do imply great freedom for us and responsibility to use it to love God. Yet those exhortations are interwoven with texts that teach us that ‘it is God who is at work within you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure (Phil 2:13).’

We all agree, I think, that the biblical mystery of how God’s freedom and ours work together, lies somewhere between the unfair characterizations of ‘fatalism’ (the caricature of Calvinism by it’s opponents) and ‘God-not-being-sovereign-at-all’ (the caricature of non- Calvinism by Calvinists). I am not a fatalist, but a Calvinist. You are not a person who denies the sovereignty of God, but a Wesleyan leaning Anglican. We are probably closer than we think, but we have real differences. Let’s ignore Piper if we can – that is just ad hominem arguing anyways – and see if we can wrestle with the biblical record.

Christianity cannot answer the question of why a good God allows / causes very bad things to happen to good people. You have to turn to other religions like Buddhism to get solid answers.

Which is a little strange, when you think about it. You’d think that if God wants Christians to act a certain way, it would be important for us to know why and for what we’re being punished or rewarded.

Jjoe, in the mean time please consider this:
critique of “when bad things happen to good people”

If God foreordained everything, including the Fall, then there is no choice in the world except His. Indeed, in this view, man made in the image of God does not exist because the “image of God” presupposes language, love — which has to involve choice not force – and creativity at the very least.
Why do we hang our very lives and God’s character on interpreting a few passages against the overall message of the Bible? God made a real world with all that we see and a world of creatures (angels, seraphim etc.) that is unseen , committed himself to it, made man in his image and gave man, male and female dominion over this real world. He made a real world where man has/had the choice to love Him or not. He did not make us puppets and thus, gave us the choice to love Him or not. He could have forced us to love Him, forced our obedience but that was not his delight or his plan, if you will. Into this real world comes something new — not surprising to God but not caused by Him — man chooses to rebel and hands over his dominion to another prior rebel who becomes known as the prince of this world.
God in His foreknowledge conceived a wonderful plan that would allow for redemption that does not contradict the choices of man. He makes a way of redeeming man and the whole of creation that does not do violence to the principles that created the world and man in the first place. God bears the brokeness of reality himself in the body of His Son. Amazing! Nothing like it in any other religion or philosophy. To pin the real choices of man and the prince of this world on God is to deny the significance of what He created in the first place and to render redemption an act of absurdity.

Darryl, I understand that one wants to hold on to a sovereign God. That is not in doubt in Scripture. Yet what is the nature and characteristic of that soveriegnty? That is the question. For John Piper it is a controlling manipulation (from lat: manus = hand) of God’s fingers holding or not holding that bridge. In Scripture it is a moral sovereignty all the way and a limited material sovereignty after creation. He mandated humans to have babies; God does not make them. God can and does do miracles, but expects much of what is needed for life to come through the agency of people’s work. He pleads with people to obey, seek justice, to believe, but he cannot make them do that. Jesus could not convert Jerusalem, in his home town he could not do all kinds of miracles. God could not bring back the bride of Israel that had gone off to other gods.

The wonder of Scripture is that it reveals a definite God, not an all encompassing infinity. His power is true to his character. He is moral and not also immoral. Having once created human beings free he cannot take away that freedom (but deals with it in other ways!). God is innocent of what people do and what a fallen world of people’s choices and their logical consequences places into the lives of people. We live on a stage with several actors, not just God.

May I suggest you read my recent book “The Innocence of God” for a more detailed study of God’s relation to a broken world. I suggest that Scripture declares God is innocent of the accusation that he could have prevented what sinful people have done; and innocent of the tragedies of life, which too many, including John Piper, want to remove by somehow seeing God’s purposes behind every mischief nasty people do to each other.

That version of Christianity is in fact fatalistic like Islam. It matches what all religions finally do and why Christianity and Judaism are not religions: They all tell the faithful to lie low, accept and shut up. All of which violates what Jesus (the express image of the father) exhibited in his ministry when he opposed false teaching, an invitation to Herod’s palace, much sickness and death. He saw no hand of God in any of these.

Greetings.

Can I ask a question, please?

“The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Just because those words are recorded in the Bible as being spoken by Job, does that make what Job said true? Or, are we merely religiously quoting those words uttered by Job, (in his ignorance of the nature of God,) as being the truth? In which case, are we not just as ignorant of the nature of God as he was?

Just asking,… but looking forward to some input from those MUCH wiser than I.

The question isn’t whether Job sinned or not. The question is whether his statement accurately portrays the character of God. If God is visiting upon His people all these judgements and diseases and disasters, either as punishment or as a “teaching tool,” what is Satan doing? Where is HE in all this? Being “allowed by God to test us?” Doesn’t the fallen nature of Mankind or the impact that sin had on the world have any bearing?

I just don’t accept the argument that God causes all those children in Sick Kids Hospital to suffer the illnesses that they have to endure, or the loss of several loved ones, as in the case of Bill Kinnon’s grandfather. Geez, even my Father wasn’t THAT abusive!

Only an Ignorant person would say that Job was ignorant in his belief of God. God creates good and evil.