Many have ventured to ask why God allows evil and suffering. I’m sure the discussion of this question could range through several chapters in a book on the topic, but my concern at the moment is simply the hypocrisy that it represents for most who ask it. Here’s what I mean:
When bad things happen, many people’s default expectations are revealed: they tend to expect that God should prevent evil from harming anyone. So when bad things happen, it naturally raises the question of why God is not performing as expected. While some may dare to shake a fist at God, others hesitate to charge him openly with wrongdoing, yet their question remains unanswered and they can find no reason that God does not meet their expectations in protecting the world from evil. Thus does this persistent question amount to a soft challenge to his sovereignty. He could do it, they reason, therefore he should do it. So why doesn‘t he do it?
The “should” is where their disapproval of his actions is revealed.
What I’d like to point out here, however, is that the same question can be asked of humans:
They could do an awful lot to stop evil. Therefore, they should do an awful lot. So why don’t they?
In our culture, we stand by and watch as all manner of evil is carried out around us. We could “nip it in the bud”, but we generally do not. We could get involved, but we generally do not. We may even criticize, whether silently or aloud, but we do not insist that it be stopped. Consider just a few examples of evil that could be stopped if only the will existed to do so:
- War
- Fractional Reserve Banking
- Misinformation/Disinformation in the media
- Established corruption in government
- Misinformation/Disinformation in the public schools
- The “two-party system” stranglehold on Congress
- Excess of powers in government
- Refusal of government to enforce all laws and to provide true justice
- Undisclosed toxins/irritants in our food supply
- Legislative and/or Executive protection of a favored few to the disadvantage of everyone else.
These are some of the “big picture” problems we have, and every one of them could be fixed if man cared to do so. But we don’t. And lest anyone argue that “we” can’t fix problems on such a grand scale, let us consider how many mundane problems we leave unfixed at home:
- The neighbor is harsh with his kids.
- The mayor is stealing from the city.
- The pastor is in an adulterous relationship.
- The teacher at school is incompetent.
- The town council wants to spend a million dollars on some frivolous expense while serious matters remain unattended to.
You see these things every day. But do you get involved in putting a stop to them? Statistically speaking, the chances are very good that you don’t do a thing about it.
Now, if someone wants to attempt to deny his responsibility for thwarting the evils in our national society and even in his own local society, there are always the evils that occur in one’s own heart:
- You fuss when the other party violates the Constitution, but you ignore it when your own party does the same thing.
- You fuss when the other church violates the scriptures, but you give your own church a pass when it does the same thing.
- You complain about bad personality traits in others but ignore your own and have absolutely no plan of self correction or self improvement.
- You vote for candidates who promise you benefits from the public treasury when those benefits are not coming from tax dollars that you contributed, but from others.
- You take a job or a contract or a grant from a government that is not constitutionally allowed to be spending money on that job or contract or grant.
- You see problems in your own children’s development, but you don’t find solutions for them. You allow them to grow up malformed in character.
It is no wonder that evil thrives on the national and local scene when so little is done by the average citizen to rid his own heart of it. Even so, however, when some concentrated act of evil presents itself, such as a school shooting, people start asking, “where was God?”, as if the primary failure in the story was not a failure of mankind, but one of God.
It is the consummate act of blame shifting from an amazingly-irresponsible society. You condemn the poor parenting that must have raised a mass murderer, and yet you allow your own children to be holy terrors in the home and even in public. Some of you even condemn the government for not disallowing guns (which strategy, you reason, might have averted the latest disaster), yet you do not condemn the government for its daily violations of the rule of law, nor even for its incessant wars in which millions of innocents are killed as “collateral damage”. If you’re really so concerned about the protection of human life, why aren’t you trying to put an end to war?
Just as many people tend to blame our societal woes on “the other party” or on “the government”, it should come as no surprise to us when they want to blame them on God. Indeed, a great many even blame their own church’s problems on God, more or less. That is, they don’t strive to fix those problems themselves. Rather they are “waiting on the Lord”, they say. They assure themselves that “Jesus will fix it”. And having “prayed about it”, they consider themselves absolved from any further responsibility in the matter.
So God becomes the “fall guy” for the messes that mankind makes.
Has it ever occurred to you that if God disallowed evil, men would curse him for it? Yet they continue to challenge him for not stopping the evils committed against them by others. Do you see how biased that is? You want God to put the smackdown on some gunman on his way to a school, but you don’t want God to put the smackdown on you when you plan out evil schemes in your own heart.
Well, that sounds an awful lot like the way you want government to work for you—to protect your own misdeeds while punishing others for theirs. And this is how you want the media to work for you; you choose the publications and productions that will tell the dirt on the other party while being more or less silent on the indiscretions of your own party.
And indeed, that’s the way you want your own thinking to work, too—protecting yourself from blame while blaming others at will.
This is the nature of those who question God’s inactivity with regard to the evil schemes of men. They want him to do for them what they are too lazy to do for themselves. And they are unwilling to initiate any reform movement, for their own personal corruption would also be endangered.
Our fundamental problem is the corruption of our thinking. The great irony is this: The very thing we are the most free to do excellently and honestly and justly, we refuse to do.
Perhaps we can devise a way to blame God for this, too.
But I digress.
The next time you are tempted to ask “why does God allow evil?”, be sure that you also ask, “what evils an I allowing?”
