📖 Apologetics — Unit 4: The Problem of Evil and Suffering

Text: Isaiah 53:4

The Hardest Question

We come now to the heaviest objection any believer will ever face, and I will not pretend it is light. If God is all-powerful, He could stop evil. If God is all-good, He would want to. Yet evil remains — the cruelty of men, the dying of children, the earthquake that swallows a village in the night. The skeptic lays it down like a trump card: either your God cannot stop suffering, and He is not almighty, or He will not, and He is not good. Do not wave this away. Do not answer a grieving mother with a syllogism. The honest apologist feels the weight of this question, because it is the question of every man who has ever stood beside a grave. We will not pretend to solve the whole mystery in one unit. But we will show that the Christian faith, of all the faiths on earth, has the deepest answer — and that the answer is not finally an argument but a Person.

The Boomerang

Begin with something the skeptic rarely notices. When he calls the cancer and the cruelty evil, he has reached, without meaning to, for a standard of good — and where did that standard come from? You cannot call a line crooked unless you have some idea of a straight line. You cannot rage against injustice unless somewhere within you there lives a sense of true justice that the world has violated. Some atheist philosophers have tried to defend objective morality without appealing to God, arguing that moral facts are simply brute features of reality, the way mathematical facts are. That is a real position, not a fantasy, and the honest apologist should not pretend otherwise. But the Christian can still press a fair question: on a purely naturalistic picture, where the universe is ultimately just matter in motion, it is not obvious why moral obligation should exist at all, or why anyone would be bound by it rather than merely preferring it. Theism offers a more natural grounding — a good and personal God whose character is the standard, and whose authority explains why the standard binds us. The very force of the atheist's objection depends on treating some moral law as real, the law we discussed in Unit 2, and the apologist can press him to say where, on his own worldview, that law's reality and authority actually come from. So the problem of evil, pressed hard enough, does not abolish God; it opens the deeper question of what could ground the standard being used to judge Him.

Evil Is Not a Thing

Now let us be precise about what evil is, for here many stumble. Evil is not a substance God created, as though He stocked the world with a dark material called wickedness. Evil is a privation — the twisting, the spoiling, the absence of a good that ought to be there. Darkness is not a thing; it is the absence of light. Cold is not a thing; it is the absence of heat. Rust is not a thing God made; it is the corruption of good iron. In the same way, cruelty is love gone wrong, lust is desire gone wrong, pride is a good self-regard swollen into a tumor. God made a world and called it good, and every evil in it is that good bent, broken, or robbed. This matters, because it means God is not the author of evil. He is the author of a good that creatures have spoiled.

The Price of Love

But why would God permit the spoiling at all? Here is the costliest truth in the unit. God could have made a race of puppets who never sinned, who moved only as He pulled the strings, who never once chose against Him. But a puppet cannot love. Love that is forced is not love at all. The husband who programs his wife to say "I love you" has gained a recording, not a bride; the words are worthless precisely because she could not have said otherwise. If God wanted creatures who could truly love Him — and He did — then He had to make them free, and freedom that cannot choose against the good is not freedom; it is a leash. (This is what philosophers call libertarian freedom, and most versions of this free-will defense rely on it; other serious Christian thinkers, particularly in the Reformed tradition, have proposed different accounts of freedom and responded to the problem of evil in other ways. But the reasoning here is the one this unit follows, and it is the reasoning most believers reach for instinctively.) So God took the great risk of liberty. He opened the door to love, and through the same open door walked sin. The possibility of the cruelest evil and the possibility of the truest love came into the world hand in hand, for they are the same possibility: the freedom of a creature who can say yes only because he could have said no.

The Shadows in the Painting

And yet, having said that, I must be honest with you, for the illustration goes only so far.

But What of the Innocent?

Free will explains the evil that men choose. But what of the suffering no one chose — the child with cancer, the village under the wave, the baby who never drew a guilty breath? Here I will not hand you a tidy answer, and you must beware of anyone who does. We live in a world that is not only free but fallen, where the whole creation groans, and some of its groaning we cannot trace to any cause we can name. There are sufferings before which the wisest believer can only fall silent. I would rather leave you with an honest ache than a dishonest answer. Job demanded that God explain Himself, and God never did explain; instead, God gave Job something better than an explanation. He gave Job Himself. And that points us to the one answer that goes all the way down.

When No Rescue Comes

Habakkuk gives the problem of suffering a pastoral form. The prophet prayed while violence and injustice continued around him and asked the question believers still ask: how long can we call for help when God seems silent? An older sermon by Dr. Cook uses the picture of survivors on a raft who were unexpectedly given food and rescued. We rejoice when the “seagull comes” — when the sick recover, the marriage is restored, the prodigal returns, or the crisis breaks. But faith is tested most severely when no rescue appears. Habakkuk's answer is not that suffering is unreal or that faithful people will always receive the outcome they request. God tells the prophet that He is at work in ways Habakkuk cannot yet understand, and the prophet learns to live by faith before he can see the whole explanation.

This keeps Christian apologetics from giving glib answers to pain. The cross has already settled the question of whether God loves us, and the resurrection has displayed His power. What remains unanswered in a particular tragedy may still remain unanswered for a time. Biblical faith can therefore say both, “I do not understand,” and, “Yet I will trust Him.” That is not the absence of reason; it is trust resting on what God has already revealed when circumstances provide no immediate explanation.

The Crucified God

Here is what no other religion on earth can say. Our God did not stay above the suffering, safe and serene on a far throne, watching our tears through glass. He came down into it. He took on flesh that could be torn. He stood at the tomb of His friend and, though He knew He would raise him in moments, He wept. And at the last He stretched out His hands and let the nails go through them, and cried out in a darkness that swallowed the noon sun, "My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?" — so that no sufferer could ever again say that God does not understand. As a man He was hungry, but as God He fed the thousands. As a man He grew weary, but as God He stilled the storm. As a man He bled and died, but as God He carried in His own body the griefs and sorrows of the world, as Isaiah foretold. The cross does not explain every pain. But it tells the sufferer the one thing he most needs to know: that he does not suffer alone, that God Himself has been here, in the dark, with the nails, and that the scars are still in His hands.

Meant for Evil, Meant for Good

One thing more. The God who entered our suffering is also able to weave it, without ever being its author, into a good we could not have imagined. Joseph, sold by his brothers into slavery and left to rot in a foreign prison, came at last to the men who had wronged him and said, "You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good" (Genesis 50:20). Notice he did not say the evil was good — it was real evil, and his brothers truly meant it. But God, the master weaver, took the dark thread the brothers spun in malice and worked it into a tapestry that saved a nation. This is the promise Paul makes to every believer: "All things work together for good to those who love God" (Romans 8:28). Not that all things are good, but that all things are woven for good by hands wise enough and strong enough to redeem even the worst.

What We Carry to the Suffering

So we hold the mystery humbly, but we hold the cross firmly. When we go to a man in his sorrow, we do not bring him a clever theory of evil; we bring him a wounded Savior who has been where he is. We move, as the skeptic never expects us to, from defense to invitation: the very evil he hurls at God is the proof that he longs for a justice this world cannot give — and that longing, like every other, has its answer in the God who bore our griefs. Do not be afraid of this question. Feel its weight, refuse the tidy lie, and then point, as you always must, to the hands with the scars in them.

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