Since God is good, why does evil exist?
Couldn't He have created a world where there was no possibility of pain and suffering? Stay with us. R.C.
Sproul will address those questions next on Renewing Your Mind. Welcome to the Thursday edition of our program. I'm Lee Webb, and we're studying the providence of God this week. Providence seems like an outdated term these days.
It was used frequently a couple of centuries ago, but it is a present reality, a biblical reality. And it's what Paul acknowledged in one of the most quoted verses in Scripture, Romans 8.28, where he says that we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good for those who are called according to His purpose. Let's learn more about God's providence.
On February the 12th, 1938, two men had a private meeting in a mountain retreat house. And in the course of their conversation, one of the men said to the other one, I have a historic mission to fulfill, and that mission shall be fulfilled because providence has destined it to be so. So as these men were having this discussion, the man who made the statement about a historic mission used the term providence and a form of the word destiny.
These two go together. This man had an understanding that the goal and the purpose of his whole life was under the shaping influence of divine providence. He went on to say to the other gentlemen in the course of the conversation, anyone who is not with me shall be crushed. I'm sure that you've guessed by now that the man who made this claim to a providential destiny was Adolf Hitler. It's also interesting to me as we read the history of that period that when Joseph Stalin was elevated to the role of premier of the Soviet Union, that the bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church rejoiced in this stroke of providential success, as they were convinced that God had raised Stalin up to be a divine instrument for the leadership of the people of Russia.
And yet when people gather to discuss the question of diabolical evils that have been perpetrated on the human race, the two names I think we hear more frequently than any others associated with human wickedness are Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Any time we're studying the question of providence and the question of divine government and we hear that the Scriptures teach us that God raises up nations and brings nations down, we have to face the question, how is divine providence related to evil governments, evil individuals, and indeed the whole question about evil? In our last session, I quoted from the Westminster Confession of Faith from the third chapter where it says that God from all eternity doth freely and immutably ordain whatsoever comes to pass. What does that mean then that God ordained Hitler or that God ordained Stalin? Is evil something that is ordained by the providence of God? In the second century, a European liberal theologian by the name of Strauss made this statement that the existence of evil and the difficulty that attends explaining evil in the light of a concept of an ultimate God who is supposed to be good is the Achilles' heel of Christianity. If God ordains everything that comes to pass, it would seem a necessary inference from that that He must ordain evil, and that if God ordains evil, this would seem to indicate that He is evil. Again, we remember the philosopher John Stuart Mill, when he raised his objections to Christianity, he said that there's an internal, irreconcilable, illogical thesis about Christianity, a dilemma that cannot be resolved. He said, if God has the power to free the world of evil and doesn't do it, then God is not benevolent. That is, God is not good.
If He is good and does not free the world of evil, that can only mean that God is not omnipotent, and Mill was saying there's no way that He could conceive of a God who was both all-powerful and all-righteous in the light of the undeniable reality of evil. We've said since the beginning of our discussion of providence that the crisis of our entire understanding of providence in our day focuses on questions about causality, and that question is nowhere more acute than when we talk about the question of the cause of evil. I remember teaching 17th century modern philosophy, and of course the big name of 17th century philosophy is the French mathematician and scholar René Descartes. You've all heard of Descartes? You know, I think, therefore I am. Well, he argued for the existence of God on the basis of saying that this universe requires a sufficient cause, a cause that is able to perform the task to give the result that we now observe. And so he argued from cause to effect, reasoning backwards from the universe back to God. Well, one of the principles that Descartes used in that argument for the existence of God was this principle. He said there can be nothing in the effect that isn't first in the cause.
Or to state it another way, there cannot be more in the effect than that which inheres in the cause. Now that principle, which has been espoused not only by Descartes but by thinkers for millennia, I think is a valid principle, and it's critical to other arguments for the existence of God. One argument, for example, that we use to prove the existence of God is the argument from human personality.
We can prove that there has to be a first cause and that that first cause has to be self-existent and eternal and so on. And after we do that, people will often say, well, alright, there has to be something out there that is the self-existent, eternal power source of all that is in the universe. We agree with that, but how do we know that God is personal and not just some kind of impersonal force? And one of the considerations that you look at in discussions of that is always say, well, are we persons? Is there such a thing as personality that involves volition, intelligence, affection? And if people will agree that human beings are personal, that they have intelligence, and that they have intentionality and volition, choosing, and that sort of thing, then of course the philosopher would say, well, you can't have intentionality accidentally. You can't have an impersonal source for personality.
There has to be personality and intentionality in the cause if you're going to have intentionality and personality in the effect. That's the way that Descartes reasoned to argue that God was personal. But do you see, if you're thinking with me now and thinking ahead, do you see how that particular argument, as valid as it may be, can backfire on the Christian? The critics of Christianity saw it.
They said, well, wait a minute. If there can't be anything more in the effect that's not already inherent in the cause, what does that say about the character of God? That He must be evil, because if God is all good and we have an effect here that's evil, there can't be more in the effect than is inherent in the cause. So if evil exists here, it must have existed back there, and the conclusion we come to irresistibly is that God Himself is evil. Now here's a case, I think, where we have to understand, ladies and gentlemen, that more is less.
Now what do I mean by that? I don't mean to speak nonsense or to talk in contradictions, but when we say that there's something more in the creature than resides in the Creator, all we mean by that is there is obviously something that is found among human beings that is not found in God, and that's something that is found in human beings that we don't find in the closest scrutiny of the deity is sin. That is, there is something in us that's not in God, and that's something we call evil. But that doesn't mean that the creature has something greater than the Creator.
Rather, the creature has something far less than the Creator. And to focus on that, I want to take a couple of minutes to recapitulate our definitions historically of evil, to ask the question, what is evil? Because when we're talking about evil here, we're not talking about natural evil or metaphysical evil, we're talking about moral evil. And the thing that human beings have in common with the deity, at one point at least, is this, that we are moral creatures. We are moral beings. We are capable of actions that may be deemed right or wrong. I realize we're living in a time where there are a host of people who are denying that proposition, who are saying, really, ultimately there is no such thing as good or evil. Only actions, preferences, everything is relative, and there's no such thing ultimately as good or evil. But good or evil are simply societal conventions that we have received through various traditions. I thought about that last week when I went through the experience of having my golf clubs stolen.
And the golf course called the police, and the police came, and I had to file a report and give all the information to the police officer who was there. And in the midst of that discussion, I said to him, candidly, I've never quite been able to understand the mentality of people who steal. We always have a reason for our sins or an excuse that we tell ourselves because nobody wants to look at the mirror and say, you're a no good rotten person.
We minimize to our best ability the evilness of our own evil. But I said to this policeman, how does a thief look at himself in the mirror? How can he go home that night and see anything in the mirror but a person who's unspeakably selfish? I said, it astonishes me. The policeman didn't have to be encouraged to agree because his vocation was to deal with this kind of problem every day. And then he said, you know, he said the worst thing that I find with people who have been victims of violence or theft is the personal sense of invasion of privacy and violation that one feels when they have been robbed by another human being.
Now I say all that to say this. We really don't need a complex philosophical argument to prove the evilness of stealing. It's self-evident, isn't it? People know that to steal somebody else's property is wrong. And we may say that there's no such thing as evil and argue about it philosophically, but the argument ends when somebody helps themselves to our wallet. Then we say, that's not right. That's not good. That's bad. But again, I'm not going to waste time arguing about the reality of it.
We all know that evil is real. It's destructive. It violates persons. We've all committed it. We've all been victims of it. But what is it?
What is it? Again, the Westminster Catechism answers this question, what is sin? Listen carefully. Sin is any want of conformity to or transgression of the law of God. And a want of conformity to or transgression of the law of God. The Confession defines evil here in two ways. One is negative.
One is positive. There are sins of omission, sins of commission. But it's the first part of the definition I want to zero in on. Sin is any want of conformity. What does it mean, want of conformity? The word want here is not used as a synonym for desire, is it? What is a synonym of? For lack of.
Okay? That sin is a lack of conformity to the standard that God establishes for righteousness. In philosophical terms, the ancient philosophers, medieval theologians, in trying to define evil, defined it with the use of these terms that evil was defined in terms of provatio and negatio. That is, evil is defined in terms of the negation of the good, negative terms, or a privation of goodness, a lack of goodness, something that falls short of the plenitude of righteousness is evil. Now what the philosophers were getting at was that the only way you can describe and define evil is in negative terms. That by its very nature, evil is parasitic.
It's a parasite. It depends upon its host for its very existence. And at the point of creation, ladies and gentlemen, we have an eternal God who is altogether good and who is a moral agent creating other moral agents that are good. But the great difference, the grand difference between creator and creature, get this point, is this, that God is eternally, immutably good where the creature was made mutably good. That is, He was made with the possibility of changing in His performance of conformity to the law of God. Now, does God do evil?
Absolute priority of biblical teaching is by no means. There's no shadow of turning in God, and God in His providence is utterly incapable of performing evil. Yet we've been saying all along that God ordains everything that comes to pass, and some of the things that come to pass are in fact evil. So let me ask the question another way.
Put your thinking hats on. Does God ordain evil? Ladies and gentlemen, there is only one biblical answer to that question, and the answer is absolutely yes. Because if God did not ordain evil, there would be no evil because God is sovereign. But we trip and stumble over the word ordain. We think that ordain, that divine ordination means that God either does the evil or He imposes upon a righteous creature and forces innocent people to do sinful deeds.
No, no, no, no, no. What He has ordained is He has ordained to create creatures with the capacity for evil. He doesn't force them to exercise that capacity, but He knows that they are going to exercise that capacity, and at that point the deity has a choice. He can destroy the creation and say, I'm not going to allow the first sin to take place. The moment that serpent came into Adam and Eve and began to suggest disobedience, God could have snuffed out the serpent or snuffed out Adam and Eve.
There would be no sin. God, for reasons known to God, made the decision to let it happen. Now, we ask the question, why? And I have to say at this point, I'm glad that our time is running out because I have no idea why God allows evil to besmirch His universe.
I know that He has. I know that it's there. I'm not going to deny its potency or its reality. It is there, and I know that God is sovereign over it, but here's one more point that I want you to take home. When God ordains anything come to pass, His purpose in doing so is altogether an absolutely good. Now, be careful.
As R.C. Sproul is saying now that evil really is an illusion. Then in the final analysis, evil really is good.
No, no, no. I'm saying it must be good that evil exists or it couldn't exist because God only will sovereignly, providentially ordain what is good. And in terms of God's eternal purpose, God has esteemed it good that evil should be allowed to happen in this world.
That does not mean that therefore the sins that I do in so far contributing to the providential plan and government of world history are in fact virtues. Like Pharaoh in the Old Testament and as a vessel of destiny as Judas was subjected to the divine providence in God's plan for the redeeming of the world through the treachery of Judas. Now, Judas couldn't possibly have delivered Christ to Pilate were it not for the providential decree of God. We know that, that this was the fore-determined counsel of God, and yet God did not put evil in the heart of Judas. God did not coerce Judas to do his diabolical sin, and Judas cannot stand up on the last day and say, look what I did. If it hadn't been for me, you wouldn't be able to celebrate Good Friday or Easter because there'd be no cross, there'd be no atonement, there'd be no salvation because I'm the one that made it all possible.
I don't know. From Judas' perspective, what he did in his intent and design was utterly evil. But when God ordains all things that come to pass, He ordains not only the ends, but also the means to those ends, and that He works through all things to bring about His righteous purpose. One of the great comforting verses of Scripture is, all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purpose.
Only a sovereign providence could make a promise like that, ladies and gentlemen. That statement does not mean that all things are good, but all things work together for good. And the only way they can work together for good, even the theft of my golf clubs is working for my good because over and above all evil, all acts of human wickedness, stands a sovereign providence who has appointed a destiny of the universe and of you as an individual, and that destiny is perfectly consistent with His own righteousness. We read in Proverbs that the lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord. Even though the things that happen in life seem to be random and by chance, God is in control and in charge. There's comfort in that knowledge. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind.
I'm Lee Webb. Thank you for being with us today. The message we just heard is from the series The Providence of God. In six lessons, R.C.
Sproul looks at how God can guide all events without destroying human freedom. We'd be glad to send you the three-CD set for your donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries. You can make your request online at renewingyourmind.org, or you can call us at 800-435-4343. And we'd like to include another resource at no charge. Our monthly devotional magazine, Table Talk, deals with different theological topics, and next month's issue is on God's providence. And if you've never contacted us before, we'd like to send you the February issue of Table Talk.
Just mention it when you contact us at 800-435-4343. Well, tomorrow we'll continue this series on God's providence, and we'll look at the subject of free will. The question of how my free decisions correspond to God's sovereign providence is one of the most excruciatingly difficult questions that we ever have to struggle with in theology, isn't it? Indeed it is, and R.C. will help us understand human freedom in his message tomorrow. We hope you'll join us Friday for Renewing Your Mind. .
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