Read the rest for his explanations.
- God is all-powerful, fully in control.
- Suffering in this world is normal; Americans, like everyone else, have no promise of ease or immunity.
- God knows what it’s like to suffer.
- God has brought much good out of these terrible events, and will continue to.
- We should remind ourselves daily that this world, as it now is, is not our home.
The late atheist pundit Christopher Hitchens was fond of likening the universe to a cosmic North Korea ruled over by a dictatorial deity. But as sure as Hitchens suffered his share of problems, right up to the problem of his own withering health, did he not also experience a life of many enjoyments? Did he not secure an outlet as a writer and a platform for fame? Did he not fill rooms with people who enjoyed his sardonic wit and lined up for his autograph? Did he not rub elbows with important cultural and political voices during a very long public career? Did he not spend many a fine meal regaling the table with his sharply sarcastic critiques of so many things in the news? Why would the all-powerful ‘Kim Jong Ill in the sky’ be so good to him as to allow all of that? Why would that cruel cosmic meanie give so many pleasures to a man who railed against him ceaselessly?Read the rest.
If the world is ruled over by a figure of omnipotent viciousness and cold cruelty, we should expect a thousand times more hardship in life than we experience. Likewise if the story of human history is nothing more than the story of a race of creatures on a distant galactic outpost where, by a crazy long-shot, a zillion factors lined up to make their existence possible, then all of our eloquent lyricizing and philosophizing about good and evil amount to nothing more than sounds going out into the atmosphere and never beyond it. As Doug Wilson put it, “the material universe doesn’t care about any of this foolishness, not even a little bit … it’s all just part of a gaudy and very temporary show. Sometimes the Northern lights put on a show in the sky. Sometimes people put on a show on the ground. Then the sun goes out and it turns out nobody cares” (Letter from a Christian Citizen). Yes the problem of good and the problem of evil both force our attention and require us to consider more seriously the kind of reality in which we live.
No response is neat and tidy so as to satisfy us completely, but, like Wilson and unlike Hitchens (the two men, incidentally, are featured in a series called Collision that highlights their uniquely antagonistic friendship through several public debate appearances), I would maintain that the Christian understanding of things makes more sense of good and evil than the alternatives.
I began writing this morning hoping to find something profound to say, something that might clarify this crime in my mind. But there is no making sense of it, for evil doesn't play by our rules and doesn't give us a satisfying explanation for its ways and deeds. If there is a glimmer of hope it must be this: the promise—the sure and steady promise—that even the most evil events do not escape the eye of the God who is good. If he sees the fall of the sparrow, how much more does he see and care about the death of a man made in his image. And if he assures us that there were redeeming purposes in a murder even more ghastly—the crucifixion of his own Son—we can believe there must be greater purposes in this murder as well.Read the rest.
...the Bible points us to the radical affirmation of God’s sovereignty as the ground of our salvation and the assurance of our own good. We cannot explain why God has allowed sin, but we understand that God’s glory is more perfectly demonstrated through the victory of Christ over sin. We cannot understand why God would allow sickness and suffering, but we must affirm that even these realities are rooted in sin and its cosmic effects.Read the rest.
How does God exercise His rule? Does He order all events by decree, or does He allow some evil acts by His mere permission? This much we know–we cannot speak of God’s decree in a way that would imply Him to be the author of evil, and we cannot fall back to speak of His mere permission, as if this allows a denial of His sovereignty and active will.
A venerable confession of faith states it rightly: “God from eternity, decrees or permits all things that come to pass, and perpetually upholds, directs, and governs all creatures and all events; yet so as not in any way to be the author or approver of sin nor to destroy the free will and responsibility of intelligent creatures.”
God is God, and God is good. As Paul affirms for the church, God’s sovereignty is the ground of our hope, the assurance of God’s justice as the last word, and God’s loving rule in the very events of our lives: “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, who are the called according to His purpose.” [Romans 8:28]
We dare not speak on God’s behalf to explain why He allowed these particular acts of evil to happen at this time to these persons and in this manner. Yet, at the same time, we dare not be silent when we should testify to the God of righteousness and love and justice who rules over all in omnipotence. Humility requires that we affirm all that the Bible teaches, and go no further. There is much we do not understand. As Charles Spurgeon explained, when we cannot trace God’s hand, we must simply trust His heart.
And so, we weep with those who weep, and we reach out with acts of care and compassion. We pray for those who are grieving and have experienced such loss. We cry for the children lost in this storm, even as we are so thankful for brave people who did their best to save lives as the winds raged. And, we pray we we know to pray: Even so, Lord come quickly.
(1) It will not accomplish anything good to deny what Scripture so clearly asserts, that God is absolutely sovereign over all of nature.Read the rest.
(2) God is sovereign, not Satan.
(3) Great natural disasters such as this tell us nothing about the comparative sinfulness of those who are its victims.
(4) Events such as this should remind us that no place on earth is safe and that we will all one day die (unless Jesus returns first).
(5) We should not look upon such events and conclude that the Second Coming of Christ and the end of history are at hand, but neither should we conclude that the Second Coming of Christ and the end of history are not at hand.
(6) We must learn to weep with those who weep.
(7) Pray that God will use such an event to open the hearts and eyes of a city and a state immersed in unbelief and idolatry (and I have in mind not merely Oklahoma, but also America as a whole), to see the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and turn in faith to him, lest something infinitely worse than a tornado befall them: Eternal condemnation. Eternal suffering.
What does an evil person look like? In the wake of the Boston Marathon Bombings, a not unexpected thing happened in the social media sleuthing for the perpetrators. As readers of popular sites like Reddit pored over photos of the marathon public, they began to highlight suspicious looking figures, and by “suspicious,” many meant bag-lugging figures of “Middle Eastern” countenance, or some other vague non-white descriptor. Some of course in both the mainstream and the alternative media insisted (hoped?) the bomber(s) would be white homegrown terrorists. But in both cases everyone sort of assumed they knew what evil looked like in this instance.Read the rest for some good implications for our lives.
Then something strange happened. The photos of the (alleged) bombers were released by the FBI. Turns out the perpetrators looked a little like everybody’s diverging presumptions assumed they would. Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev weren’t homegrown, perhaps, but they were sort of home-raised. They were Muslims, yes, but not Middle Eastern. From Russia’s Caucasus region, these fellows are literally from the place from which we get the word “Caucasian.”
One of the remarkable things about the American spirit is that even after two world wars, Vietnam, the 1970s, global terrorism, and three Transformers movies, optimism and progressive ideologies still shape our basic outlook on human nature. Faith in the fundamental goodness of humanity is still our basic credo—with enough time, money, energy, and education, the future is bright. For this reason we are, for the most part, utterly incapable of coping with the reality of human evil. Unless we're stuck in some dark, hipster cynicism about life, most Americans upon reading this will scramble to find an explanation—and by "explanation," I mean a way of explaining it away.Read the rest.
When faced with evidence to the contrary, we try to tell ourselves: "But, people are basically good. It's just those German Nazis and their particularly evil ways. That culture at that time and that place was just particularly messed up. It was the work of some particularly wicked people and some people just got carried along through fear."
Except that based on this new research, it wasn't just the soldiers following orders, or the masterminds, but the everyday people: husbands and wives; hardworking fathers and mothers providing for their kids; good neighbors; decent, regular folk.
And honestly, shouldn't our own recent history have disabused us of this naïve faith?
As this year ends, the question I am asking is: Where was God when so many good things happened this past year?Read the rest.
How can God be a God of justice, yet allow so much good to happen to people who dishonor him by disbelieving in him, or giving lip service to his existence, or paying no more attention to him than the carpet in their den, or rejecting the kingship of his Son, or scorning his word, or preferring a hundred pleasures before him?
How can God be righteous and do so much good to us who are so unrighteous?
You have to show people that it takes faith to doubt Christianity. C. S. Lewis argued with God before his conversion that the universe seems so cruel and unjust. But then he asked himself, "But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? . . . Atheism turns out to be too simple" (Mere Christianity, Book 2, Part 1). In the natural world the strong eat the weak, and there's nothing wrong with violence. Where do you get the standard that says the human world shouldn't work that way, that says the natural world is wrong? You can only judge suffering as wrong if you're using a standard higher than this world, a supernatural standard. If there's no God, you have no reason to be upset at the suffering in this world. It takes faith to get mad at this world.Read the rest.
Our ancestors lived in a world like this. At any moment they might succumb to a disease no one yet understood. Or become collateral damage in a war they didn't start. Or suffer starvation when the skies withheld their rain. The patriarchs of the Old Testament lived in such a world. So did the apostles of the New Testament. So did Jesus.Read the rest.
Not even the Son of God escaped gruesome, torturous death. He lived in a world where religious leaders conspired with political tyrants to kill so-called enemies who made the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers clean, the deaf hear, the dead rise, and the poor rejoice over good news (Matt. 11:5). He was not safe and secure in this world. In fact, he said, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head (Matt. 8:20).
And yet this man, not even welcome in his hometown (Luke 4:24), could point to those same birds of the air and see reason to trust in our heavenly Father, who feeds them, "who neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn" (Luke 12:24). So when his season of sorrow approached, when one of his closest friends handed him over to evil men, he could say to his heavenly Father, "Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done" (Luke 22:42).
Jesus knew exactly who to blame for his impending execution. He stared into the faces of the chief priests and scribes who sought his death. He answered to Pilate, who signed his death sentence. And yet, when he looked out on these murderers from the excruciating elevation of the cross, he prayed, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34).
No cry of why will satisfy our search for a reasonable explanation to the horrors of this age. But the God-man who cried, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" comforts us in our grief (Matt. 27:46). Even more, his unjust death and ultimate triumph in resurrection is the very means by which we can begin even now to enjoy never-ending peace with the "Father of mercies and God of all comfort" (2 Cor. 1:3).
Jesus had no illusions about why the nations rage. They rage in their sin, against their God, going so far as to put God in human flesh to death. But such evil plots in vain, because the ascended Jesus promises to return in justice. He will hold his and the Aurora movie theater's murderers to account. And he will usher in the safety and security of the new heavens and new earth for all who believe in him.
"He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away" (Rev. 21:4).
In April 1945, as British and American soldiers liberated Nazi concentration camps, civilized people around the world gasped in horror at the images coming out of Germany. Newsreel footage showed catatonic, living skeletons, many of them all-but-dead in various stages of disease, dehydration, and starvation. Bergen-Belsen alone, liberated on April 15, held 60,000 living men, women, and children, with another 20,000 lying dead in the open, unburied.
By the end of April, Adolph Hitler had added his own corpse to the death toll, and the war in Europe was over. Good people everywhere were grateful and relieved, but in the aftermath, deeply troubling yet inescapable questions arose. How did this happen?—in Germany, no less, the land of Martin Luther, the Catholic monk who had given birth to the Protestant Reformation?
Nearly a century later, it’s easy to view the whole of Nazi Germany telescopically through the lens of Schindler’s List or the U.S. Holocaust Museum: The Nazis were bad; it must not happen again; now let’s move on. But human history is not so simple. The same Adolph Hitler, who in the 1940s was recognized as a murderous despot, rose to power in the 1930s with widespread approval. The more apropos question might be, How did that happen?Read the rest.
It dawned on me after the movie was over, however, that although the dullness of “Margin Call” was an artistic failure, it may have been thematically appropriate. In its very triteness, the film suggests how the Great Recession is yet another example of what Hannah Arendt termed the “banality of evil.”
Arendt’s 1963 thesis held that many of the atrocities committed throughout history, particularly those of the Holocaust, have not been the deeds of a single sociopath. Rather, catastrophic evil requires an acceptance by ordinary people in order to have full impact. Evil, then, isn’t always the work of a dramatic villain. It’s often unremarkable, relying on those who look the other way or fail to acknowledge their complicity in the awfulness at hand.
We’re starting to see this now in the wake of 2008. It wasn’t only the investment firms who knowingly sold worthless financial packages; it wasn’t only the banks who signed off on risky home loans; it wasn’t only the federal government’s failure to regulate Wall Street. It was also you and I coveting a lifestyle that perhaps we couldn’t – or shouldn’t – afford. Homes, yes, but also cars, clothes and whatever else it is that we put on those ubiquitous credit cards.Read the rest.
Maybe it is just me, but Christopher Hitchens is at his very best when he is making sense. This is something he does, with his usual vim, in a recent article for Slate entitled “Simply Evil.” In it, he makes short work of the kind of anti-Americanism that tried to turn 9/11 into something complex enough for an obfuscating intellectual to puzzle over. He nails those who tried to blame the attacks on “the Bush administration or the Jews.” And for those who held up a simplistic tit-for-tat blowback explanation, Hitchens dutifully pulls their shirts over their heads and rolls down their socks.Read the rest.
And at the same time, Hitchens defends himself ably against charges that he must have turned into a rah-rah Americano by pointing out that he was a named plaintiff in a lawsuit brought by the ACLU against the National Security Agency concerning warrantless wiretaps. He also arranged to have himself waterboarded in order to argue persuasively to his readers that such practices did indeed constitute torture. He wrote critically and honestly on the subjects of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and he has formally registered his contempt for the security theater fraud perpetrated, at an airport near you, by uniformed members of the TSA.
All this is Hitchens doing what Hitchens does best, and he does it for most of his article. And then, fulfilling the promise of the title (“Simply Evil”), he veers into incoherence at the very end when he only had about two column inches to go. It was like watching a bicycling Tour de Something rider, 50 yards ahead of the nearest competitor, anticipate the finish line by raising both hands above his head, at which point he triumphantly bites it.
R.C. Sproul
:One of the things that I am grateful for as a consequence of the tragedy that befell the United States on 9/11 is something we began to hear on television. Suddenly it was politically acceptable for the media to speak of real, objective evil. Indeed, when I watched the buildings implode, I knew we had marked a turning point of moral relativism in American history. The events of 9/11 were a mortal blow to relativism, because the response of Americans and the response of people the world over, after looking at this heinous attack on human life, was the very “unrelativistic” declaration that “This is evil.”
Recently I saw that same affirmation made by a national news service, where a headline bulletin on the screen proclaimed, “The end of moral relativism.” One cannot have such a shocking encounter with pure evil and walk away, saying, “Well, it’s a relative thing.”Read the rest
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If Casey is not guilty of murder, then may God sustain her — for whatever else she might have done, she does not deserve, on top of the grief of Caylee’s loss (however deeply buried that grief might have been), to be universally scorned as the murderer of her own daughter.Read the rest. Timothy has a great blog that warrants your attention.
If she is guilty of murder, then may God have mercy on her soul. And I mean that literally. Jonah did not want the people of Ninevah to repent and be saved (Jonah 4), and he was rebuked for it. I am a Christian, and as such I should always hope for repentance, for mercy, for redemption and reconciliation with God. God does not will that any should perish — not even a mother who murders her own daughter. God can save Caylee. God has saved Caylee, and she is peacefully and joyfully present with him. Yet God wishes to save Casey too. God will see that the righteous are rewarded, but in the end the only one righteous is Christ. God would see that the wicked are saved (and by the wicked I mean all of us), and God went to extraordinary lengths to make redemption possible for those who would receive it.
Some have walked further down the road to perdition; they’ll have further to walk back along the path (sanctification) after their repentance. But repentance is not walking down the path. Repentance is simply turning around. Whether we’ve taken ten steps down the road, or ten thousand, it’s the turning around (justification) that saves us. In absolute terms, Casey’s sins may be worse than my own. But she doesn’t need to live down her sins — to be sanctified — in order to be saved. She just has to take refuge in the grace of God in Christ. And in some ways, those who’ve walked further down the path have it easier; they won’t be tempted to believe they can walk back on their own. The grace of God does not have to overcome our sinfulness. It has to overcome our pride.
So this may sound like a pious exaggeration, but theologically I sincerely believe it’s true: if the grace of God were not this radical, then neither Casey Anthony nor I would have any hope. That is, I’d better hope that the grace of God is powerful enough to reach a mother who murders her child, lest it be too weak to reach me. May God have mercy on us all.
