Teacher to Teacher - December 2008 - (Page 3)

own good purposes. The most obvious example of that, of course, is the crucifixion—a heinous crime perpetrated by evil men driven by evil supernatural forces (Luke 22:3, 22; Acts 2:23; 4:27−28)8 but one that resulted in the provision of salvation to all who wished to come.9 opportunity to present God’s grace— and often that means supporting the assertion that God is good even though sometimes it does not look like it. The Biblical Data One should begin, of course, with what the Bible says. Many Christians are disappointed that the Bible not does have a more clearly organized—according to Western standards—discussion of the subject; some are surprised that the writers of the Bible do not really seem to care much about it. While it is true that theodicy is not a driving theme of Scripture—though the goodness and righteousness of God are often stated and even more often demonstrated—there are a number of passages where the Scripture devotes some space to the fact of evil and the apparent unfairness of it all. The first passage that occurs to anyone familiar with the Bible is the book of Job. Here are the musings of a man facing disaster through no fault of his own. Three other men in the Bible— Joseph, Daniel, and Habakkuk—also help us to learn from “unjust” treatment. Then there are passages that raise the question directly: Psalms 1, 37, 73; Ecclesiastes; and Jeremiah 12. In Romans 9, in the context of election, Paul obliquely raises the question as well. Together these passages direct our thoughts along several specific lines: • God is sovereign (Job 38:1ff; Romans 9:19ff); He can do as He pleases and owes no one an explanation. • As fallen creatures, we deserve evil, not good (Jeremiah 12; Romans 3); so in one sense evil is not really a “problem”; it is what we should expect.10 • We are limited in our knowledge as well as in our ability to understand what we do know (Job 38:1ff). Thus, we should expect to be puzzled by many things in God’s will.11 • God, who is good by nature, works out His providential plans for good, even though the path to that good 10 An attempt to deal with the problem of evil is called a “theodicy,” or an attempt to justify God’s ways to men, as Milton put it. But most Christians have an inherent sense that we, as stewards of the grace of God, should be ready to defend His honor in the face of misunderstanding or even outright hostility. (The Bible confirms this sense in 1 Peter 3:15.) As evangelists, we should be ready to use a bridge collapse or a flood as an 8 Of course, that raises the question of why an omniscient God would create people who would turn out to be deserving of such evil. And as I often tell my students, this is the God we should expect. Finite minds studying the infinite God should expect to run out of intellectual horsepower at some point. If we could understand God completely, we would have to suspect that He was the creation of a finite mind. 11 It is intriguing to me that this point seems to be such a dominant one for the biblical author Luke. Another oft-cited example is the actions of Joseph’s brothers (Genesis 50:20). 9 continued on page 6 Teacher to Teacher | December 2008 page 3

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Teacher to Teacher - December 2008

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