Thinking Christian about God and Evil

Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer. You know, this week I've had the opportunity to talk with Jeff King and also Teresa Seidbotham. And in both of those conversations, we've really been discussing God and evil to some degree. In Teresa's conversation, we talked a little bit about spiritual abuse and the sort of other sexual and physical abuses that can happen in the church and her work and her law firm's work in really helping churches try to avoid some of those abuses. With Jeff, we talked a lot about the lessons that we can learn from persecution and really the lessons that we can learn from suffering in the Christian life. And so if you haven't checked out either of those episodes or both of those episodes, I'd encourage you to go back and listen to those. Again, Teresa Seidbotham is a lawyer from Teleos Law, and she does a fantastic job working through some of the administrative and more mundane aspects of caring for those that are in a particular congregation and just talks through some of the policy frameworks, some of the signs and symptoms of a church that may have a culture problem, and also just provides a lot of resources that churches could use to sure up and make sure that they are doing everything that they proactively can to avoid spiritual abuse, physical abuse, or sexual abuse within the church. Jeff, it works a lot with persecuted Christians. He's actually heard their stories, seen their conditions, and he wrote a book called The Whisper. And he really does speak in depth about the lessons that he's learned from these persecuted Christians. And he encourages us not to look at them as if they are somehow holier than us because they're experiencing this suffering, but to look at them as a picture of how to handle the suffering that we're all experiencing. And so I just love Jeff's approach. If you haven't listened to that podcast, I'd encourage you to go back and take a listen. Check out Jeff's book. But today, I thought it would be appropriate to end the week with a discussion of God and evil. Now, the discussion of God and evil is sort of one of those philosophical debates that's been around for a really long time, and it's often brought up in discussions about how we can actually think that belief in God is reasonable. And so the general accusation usually is framed in terms of, if God is both sovereign and good, meaning that he has total control and could stop evil, and he's good, so it would seem like he would want to stop evil. If evil exists, then God isn't both sovereign and good. It's sort of a logical trap that people tend to try to put God into. And then so I think that there's a lot there that we could discuss, but what I'm going to offer today is just a few comments on, number one, what evil actually is and how I think about evil, how I think that maybe the Bible frames evil to some degree. And then also, I want to talk a little bit about what sort of conversation we should be having when we or could be having when we're talking about this relationship between God and evil. What are the other players on the board? What are the other factors that we need to consider? How might we think about this as Christians? And so as we think about God and evil, it's not going to be a perfect theodicy or a solution to God and evil, but hopefully it'll give you some food for thought and be fairly biblically rooted. So there's that. Okay, so let's turn into, number one, what exactly is evil? How do we understand it? Well, we can think of evil in terms of just evil individual acts, something that one person and or group does to another person and or group that is not in keeping with the dignity of humanity. This is something like what we might turn to the Ten Commandments and say, they're either murdered, killed, their property is taken or stolen. They're stripped of their liberty due to a false witness. Those are the kinds of moral acts that I have in mind when I'm thinking about a moral act of evil. It's something that is the opposite of loving your neighbor as yourself. This is something where you're loving yourself more than your neighbor and you're forcing them to experience a downside that you are bringing about specifically. And so there's a number of different ways that we could consider that, but we've seen a lot of these over the years in human history. You know, we've seen the Holocaust, for instance. We see terrorist acts in various places. These are acts of moral evil, and they're often what we think about when we think about evil and when we think about evil people. When we think about evil people, what we generally think about is the evil acts that they have done in a consistent patterned way that allows us to characterize them as evil. Right. And so most of us would probably think of ourselves as relatively good compared to some of the evil people that we might bring to mind. If we think about someone who has just had a pattern of bad behavior their whole life. So morally evil or evil acts. I think there's a separate notion of evil that we could talk about in terms of suffering. And, you know, I'm 46 now. I've been lifting weights since I was 14. I actually had a herniated disc in my back in 2012 and wasn't due to weight training. I was just carrying something really heavy and stepped in a hole. And so that whole twist loaded twist and pivot messed up my back. And so sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I'm suffering. I'm not suffering like a persecuted Christian might be, but it takes me a while to stand up straight. And so, you know, there's a degree of pain involved in that that is just unavoidable. And so we could we could class that pain as a sort of suffering. It's a consequence of living in a broken and fallen world. These are things like sickness, like aches and pains in our body, like more of the ambiguous limitations that we run into as human beings where we're not able to pursue the sort of prosperity and abundant life that we might want to pursue. And so it is, I think, I think of suffering really more in terms of the fruits of our human limitation. These are things that just biologically and physically and socially that we are going to run into walls with and that there's not much we can do other than, you know, make a trade off. If we don't want to feel this pain, we can feel a different pain. But ultimately, it's just a limitation that we have as humans that is going to result in some level of suffering, some form of suffering. So we've got those two. Now, oftentimes I would say evil is also, you know, if we want a really working description of evil, I would tend to describe evil as disorder. What we see in Genesis 1, and this is really, you know, sort of getting into the biblical account of what we have, in Genesis 1, God is going to create different things. He's going to create by distinguishing items from one another, right? Light from darkness, land from water, you know, those kinds of separations, right? And then he's going to proclaim them. He's going to look at them and he's going to make a judgment about them. And each time he makes a judgment about what he's created, he says he looked at it and saw that it was good or tov. Tov in Hebrew is usually translated good. It can also be used to translate beautiful. We see that translation in Genesis 6, for instance, where the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful and they took whichever ones of them they chose. That beautiful there is actually tov. And so let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free Retirement Defense Guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. God sees that it is tov, that it is good, that it is the way I would interpret that is it is in line with what he intended to create. It is designed in the manner that God wanted it to be designed in. In other words, as God spoke the world into existence, he's creating it such that it aligns with and conforms to what he wanted and conforms to his will and it has a specific order about it. And that order ultimately results in Sabbath. And so as we get into the full creation, God steps back and looks at it and he says it is very good or tov meod. Tov meod is sort of an adverbial qualifier or probably not an adverb. I'm...

Missing it on my grammar. It's modifying tov, and it's giving it sort of this enhancement in very much the same way we might when we say it's very good in English. It's not just good. It's very good. I think the force of it is that this is an abundant goodness, an exceedingly good thing, a goodness that is sort of overflowing. It matches so perfectly the pattern that God wanted to create that it could not be any better. I think that's sort of the sense. And so what we have in the Genesis 1 1 through 2 3 account of creation is that God has created an order. He's not only created the heavens and the earth, he has created an order. This thing is now set. It's designed to do what God wants it to do. Part of that is, you know, the call or the destiny, the command, some people would call it, that is given to humanity to be fruitful, to multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it. And so everything that is created is well-suited for that purpose, for humankind to be able to be fruitful, to multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it. Now, it does other things. It's not just about humanity, but humanity seems to be the centerpiece of creation. We are made in the image of God. And so what I think is going on there is what we're seeing is that we are to reflect God's glory within this new creation as we multiply and fill the earth so that ultimately the whole earth will be filled with God's glory. Okay, so the point there is that in the creation story, what we have is the creation of a specific order. When we move into Genesis 3, what we see is a disordering of that order because the serpent convinces the woman that God is not sovereign, that, in other words, there's a way that God is actually a little bit of afraid of the humans that he's created because he knows that they could become like him and so he's prohibited them from eating from this specific tree and the specific fruit so that they won't become like him. In other words, his sovereignty is not ultimate. There's a way for his creatures to get up to his level and it's through this fruit that he's prohibited. And so God is not particularly sovereign. The serpent also questions God's wisdom. And so, you know, in prohibiting the tree, God is giving a specific, not just a prohibition. He's giving the human beings a way of living and setting forth obedience as that way of living. In other words, if you live according to the law that I have given you, things will go well with you. That is a statement of wisdom. It's a way of being in the world that is intended to orient us to the world. When the serpent comes along, he says, no, no, no, no. You won't die when you eat this fruit. Instead, you'll become wise. You'll become like God, being able to determine good and evil. And so he questions God's wisdom. And then finally, he questions God's goodness because ultimately what he's telling the woman is that God has not prohibited this tree and its fruit because it's bad for you. He's prohibited it because it's good for you. In other words, he's constructed this paradise in an attempt to make you forget that it's a prison. And so in Genesis 3, what we see then is Eve being convinced, right, that God is not as sovereign as she thought he was, not as wise as he thought he was, and not as good or benevolent as she thought he was, and that she has the opportunity then to usurp some of the authority to transcend her current limitation and to usurp some of that authority that God has for himself. The Adam comes right along with her, right, does all this, and there is now a disordering because human beings tried to usurp some of God's authority, some of God's rightful authority, and take more than they had been given. They're trying to transcend their limitations by disobeying God. And so that creates this sense of disorder and we see that in the way that it affects the rest of creation. And so now, all of a sudden, evil or disorder, as I'm using it here, sort of seeps into the whole of the created realm. And we see this in the back half of Genesis 3, really, Genesis 8 through, I believe, 27, is 24, maybe, 27 or 24, one of the two, all the consequences of the sin. And then we see it also through, you know, the rest of human history until we're going to get to Revelation 21 where we have a creation of new heavens and new earth. There is a reordering. And so we can understand evil in all of those senses. Now, the benefit of seeing those things, the idea of disorder, right, is that disorder brings with it the possibility of suffering. Disorder results really from this disobedience and it brings with it that possibility of suffering. And so if disorder brings with it the possibility of suffering, then what we have, what we normally would say in a non-philosophical sort of biblical, theological sort of statement is that it is actually human action that drives suffering. Now, that doesn't solve the question of God and evil because, of course, the serpent is already there. And so what's happening with the serpent? There's a few different ways to think about this, but here's what I would say. From a philosophical perspective, what I would tend to think, and again, this isn't sort of ironclad, shut the book, the case is closed kind of argument. But what I would say is that if God wants autonomous beings, in other words, he wants agents who actually have a free choice to do as they please, not just sort of automatons that automatically are set to default to love God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength. He's looking for his creation and his creatures to freely choose him, like to love him because they want to love him. And so I think that in that inherent act, if that's what God wants to create, then the possibility of evil is a real possibility. If you're going to create agents that are capable of choosing to follow, that ultimately means that they're capable of choosing not to follow. And so what I would argue is that it's not a limitation on God. It's not that God doesn't want, it's not that God is creating pain and creating evil, creating suffering, right? But he is creating a world where pain and suffering are definitely a possibility. And that pain and suffering is brought about by the fact that he wants these agents who he's creating, and I'm using agents to just refer to individuals and groups with choice, right? And so he is creating these agents who can choose to follow him or choose not to follow him. But if that's what he's creating, then that possibility for evil already exists. And so a lot of times what I find is when people are asking the question of God and evil, they're usually limiting it to those two characters, God and evil, if we can call evil a character, but those two factors, right? And so the statement really is, if God is sovereign and good, how can there be evil in the world? Well, it's because God and evil aren't the only two things that are around. If it were just God, there probably wouldn't be evil. And so, now we still have to reckon with the serpent, and I would argue that we know very little about what's going on in the angelic realm. You know, we have accounts of sort of the fall of Satan, but overall, there's really just not much there. And I think we give a very similar answer to what we have, what I've given for the human couple, that if angels are able to choose, if they're not just sort of mindless drones moving about, but are actual autonomous beings that have a brain in their skull and can choose to be loyal or disloyal to God, then we have a very similar situation to what's going on with the human couple in the garden. And so you can have... Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free Retirement Defense Guide, or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. These are hubris or pride of Satan.

a problem and resulting in the fall of some of the angels. Overall, I think that's probably the best explanation we can get, is that, you know, ultimately this does come back down to God is not creating evil. He is creating beings who have the choice to be loyal to him or not to be loyal to him. And I think that plays itself out within a covenantal framework. You know, as we look at some of these things in the old covenant, we see that there is the option or the potential for blessings or cursings. And so if you want the blessings, you need to obey. Obedience becomes the strategy by which you live your life, and that strategy will lead to blessing. The opposite end of that is disobedience. You can choose to disobey, and that's going to end not so well. You're going to experience a lot less than blessing. You're going to experience some curses, and you're going to have more suffering. Now, as we look at something like the book of Job, we realize that there is such a thing as the righteous sufferer. And so we have to account for this idea that we still live in a broken world. We still live in a fallen space, and that suffering is going to be our lot until all creation is restored. And so I think that's probably the best that I could do on, you know, God and evil. Now, what I will say is I go into more depth in this in the article on Christianity.com, so I'd just encourage you to click over there and read it. But I think the other aspect of this is that what do we really need to sort of end on here, right? How do we land the plane on this discussion of God and evil? Number one, Christians should avoid committing evil, obviously. We're not going to escape evil, but I think, you know, as I mentioned in my new book, Serpents and Doves, or Christian's Politics and the Art of Bearing Witness, when you look at that passage on serpents and doves, and it's talking about, you know, sort of be as wise as serpents and innocent as doves, what I think that is talking about is we are to be wise as serpents in the sense that we understand how to navigate the world and its systems without becoming dependent on them, and we are to be innocent in the sense that even as we navigate those world systems, that we are not participating in those world systems and thus participating in the sort of disorder or evil that is characteristic of those who reject Christ. And so you have this sort of wise innocence that we are supposed to develop. The wisdom keeps us from just getting trampled over by the world and, you know, and missing out on, you know, how the world is really moving against God. And the innocence keeps us from picking up some of the tactics and weapons of the world in order to navigate the world systems. And so that's number one. We're not to participate in evil. We are to be people who are really bought into the strategy of obedience. We want to recognize that our problem is not a problem that we can solve through human tactics. It's a problem that we can solve by being obedient, by following the law of faith, the law of Christ, as we see it in the New Testament, and by really conforming to the image of Christ and doing the things that he did by imitating him and the patterns of his life. And so that's number one. We shouldn't participate in evil. Number two, when suffering comes, we see this multiple times in the New Testament, is that we, as Jeff King said in his interview, you know, suffering is a gift. Persecution is a gift. It's not one you'd ever want to give, and it's not one you'd ever want to get, but it turns out to be a gift. And what he meant by that is this. You know, suffering does things to us that can strengthen us in our faith, that can build our character. And I think just intuitively, one of the things I've talked about in one of my previous books, Thinking Christian, I talk about the church being anti-fragile. It's something that Nassim Taleb has done. He actually wrote a book called Anti-Fragile, Things That Gain from Disorder. And it's really fascinating because, and I'll use the analogy of musculature, right, when you're lifting weights, you're actually ripping your muscles, breaking those muscles down, tearing your muscles. And they are built to come back stronger. And so they benefit from that disorder. You get stronger. You get bigger as you lift weights. As long as you don't rip a tendon or a ligament or something, you're gonna get stronger. You're gonna get bigger lifting weights. And that comes through a breaking down, a tearing of that musculature. You have to harm it in some way. And so suffering is very similar to that, I think, in the Christian life. And as we experience this suffering and as we recognize that it is breaking us down in certain ways, and I think it's trying to break down our dependence on ourselves. It's trying to break us of our self-dependency, and it's reminding us that, look, we have severe limitations. These things that we are suffering are the fruit of our severe limitations. We need to look to the Lord as opposed to just continually trying to work ourselves out of our human predicament. God is the solution. He has given us the solution in Jesus Christ. That's where we need to focus. And I think the last thing that I would just say to kind of close this up is, you know, there's a lot of talk, and we're coming up on Easter, and there are some people who talk about the substitutionary atonement and, you know, the Father's sacrifice of his son as sort of some sort of divine child abuse. I think that, you know, when we think about God and evil, the other thing we have to keep in mind is that God is not going to commit an act of evil. God is always going to be acting in concert with his character, commensurate with his character. He's not going to do anything that is outside the bounds of his character. And so when we look at the suffering and crucifixion of Jesus Christ, I think what we really have to keep in mind is Philippians 2. Philippians 2, what we see is the decision that Christ makes before he ever even becomes human. And what he realizes is that the equality with God is not something to be grasped, or it's not something to be used for his own advantage. That keeping it to himself, keeping that equality, keeping that power, is not what it means to be God. It is not what it means to be love. It is not what it means to be good. And so he humiliates himself, as the text talks about, taking on the form of a servant and coming down and being obedient even unto death. And so, again, I think that we have to make sure that as we think about evil, we think about God and evil, that we're having a full understanding, especially as we roll into Easter, that Jesus' suffering is not an evil act. It's an act that was done for us. Now, was there evil involved? Certainly. The people who put Jesus up to crucifixion, the people who, you know, made him suffer on the way to the cross, were committing acts of evil. But God sending his son was not an act of evil. It was an act of love. And those are things that we're just going to have to wrestle with and hold in tension and recognize that God often uses evil for good. And we just have to sort of live with that tension. So hopefully this has been helpful to you. Like I said, I have the article up on Christianity.com. You can, if you type in Christianity.com in your browser window and James Spencer, you'll get there as well. I've written a number of articles for Christianity.com, so you can check those out. Or you can just click on the link in the show description and read it for yourself if you'd like. But hopefully this was helpful. And again, you know, after those two interviews this week where we talked a little bit about spiritual abuse, about persecution, about physical and sexual abuse in the church, it just seemed appropriate to have a brief conversation about God and evil to close out the week. And next week we'll get going into some conversations about the resurrection and really gearing up for the Easter holiday. So have a great weekend, everybody. Enjoy the time that you have with your family, with your friends, whatever it is that you're doing. And I'll see you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Hi, I'm Rachel Adams, host of the Love Offering podcast, where we explore how to live out the greatest commandment to love God, love others, and even love ourselves. Each week, my guests and I share stories of how God's love transforms us and overflows into the lives of those around us. Whether through small acts of kindness or powerful moments of faith, we're learning how to make love our greatest offering. Tune in to the Love Offering podcast available on lifeaudio.com and all podcast platforms.