Making Sense in a Senseless World

LIFE LESSONS

Making Sense in a Senseless World

Wallace Alcorn

How can a loving God permit all this evil in the world?

I find this to be a reasonable question often, though not always, asked earnestly in an effort to make sense of a senseless world. The less one knows God, the more senseless his actions themselves appear and the more difficult it is to understand anything.

An answer can be put simply, almost as self-evident, even though this isn’t a simple matter. The reason the loving God tolerates (not “permits”) evil is precisely because he is the loving God who loves the world he created. What pleased God most of all he created was man (Adam), whom he created in his own image. What is distinctive of humans is choice, volition. God created humans with the choice to remain as he purposed and designed to be humanness. But from the very nature of choice, the ability to choose for necessarily includes the ability and opportunity to choose against.

This is to say that God could not (from the nature of things) be pleased to be obeyed and worshipped by the one creature for whom he created the ability to obey and worship without also creating the ability to rebel and scorn. It is not so much that it is a sin to reject God as it is that sin is the rejection of God.

All this evil in the world that God tolerates, he does so in order to receive the love and fellowship of those who choose rightly. The astounding thing about God’s love is that he loves the world so much that he is willing to endure the millions who will choose against him for the enjoyment of the few who choose for him.

The world God had created to the point of creation of man was wonderful and beautiful and right—while it remained the world God created. Mineral, vegetation and animal functioned as he purposed and designed them. It worked perfectly, but this was because it was a mechanical necessity of functioning according to the Creator’s design and for his purpose alone. Creation had no choice but to be what it was created to be or not be at all. (Neither can birds swim as fish do nor can fish fly as do birds. If either should try, it would die.)

God appraised what he had created and became satisfied it was “good.” As pleased as God was, he was not yet fully pleased. He wished to crown his created pyramid with a grand apex after

his own image. To achieve this, he designed one final being with choice or will or volition. This being he named Adam (man). When he looked again at what he had created, he saw that it was “very good.” With this, God rested from his creative activity.

While man was living as God purposed and designed humans to live, God was fully pleased with him, and he was fully pleased with himself. In order for man to exercise freedom fully, God provided an opportunity to use free will negatively. If man would choose against God, he designated that one tree in the garden to symbolize that choice, there then being no natural way to do so.

The proposition Satan made to Adam and Eve is that if they would as much as take fruit from this designated tree, they would know by experience the difference between good (what God has created, which they already knew) and evil (the corruption of what God had created, which they would thereby come to know).

Satan suggested they should be dissatisfied with being only human despite their being fully human. Man was already, by his unique nature, the highest of all creatures and the creature in all creation most pleasing to the Creator and of all most like him. The only way he could become higher was to become God himself, and this is precisely what Satan suggested.

What Satan did not mention and what Adam did not consider was that to become God, he would no longer be human. When Adam chose to try for divinity to replace humanity, he failed to achieve what he craved and lost what he had. Claiming to be The Wise, he became the fool.

Some years ago, two fire fighters sat on the bumper of their fire engine trying to recover from what they had seen and gone through for several hours. In addition to arson, a family beat and killed each other. One commented, “How can a loving God put up with such evil in the world?” His partner asked the better question: “How can God put up with people who do such evil?”

The answer, of course: He loves us no matter what we do to ourselves.