John Wenham once wrote that ‘Evil constitutes the biggest single argument against the existence of an almighty, loving God.’ The problem is not only the existence of evil but the origin of evil. How is it that God who is perfectly good made a world which He declared to be very good (Gen.1:31), and yet it fell away to the point where it could be said that it was cursed (Gen.3)? Where did the evil come from?
There is a strange ambiguity at work here. Even in the unfallen state, God states that ‘it is not good that the man should be alone’ (Gen.2:18). Furthermore, Eve saw that the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was good when in fact it was not (Gen.3:6). The world is created good, but with the possibility of evil. It was good but not in the sense that the new heaven and new earth will be good for there will be no possibility of falling away from that which Christ has won (Rev.21-22). Some indication of an answer is found in that there was a fall amongst the angels before human beings descended into sin. The serpent is said to be crafty (Gen.3:1; Rev.12:9), and his angels are reserved for judgment because of their sins (2 Pet.2:4; Jude 6).
Yet this only takes the problem further back, and we still have a good God who created all things good yet with the possibility of evil. G. K. Chesterton said that this was because of free will. Life is, says Chesterton, ‘a play He had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers who had since made a great mess of it.’ This raises the question of why God should be so attached to free will in the original creation when it will be abolished in the new heaven and new earth.
Bertrand Russell thought that he had the conclusive argument against the Christian faith when he wrote: ‘I would invite any Christian to accompany me to the children’s ward of a hospital, to watch the suffering that is there being endured, and then to persist in the assertion that those children are so morally abandoned as to deserve what they are suffering.’ One is heartened by the thought that Russell visited dying children, but this hardly justifies his misrepresentation of the Christian message. Like Job of old, Jesus repudiates the view that the greatest sufferers must be the greatest sinners (Luke 13:1-5). Still, almost anything would have been more comforting than Russell’s own words: ‘When I die, I rot.’ One suspects that a dying child might find more solace in the declaration of Christ risen than of Russell rotting.
God is so holy that He is of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong (Hab.1:13). We cannot blame God for our sins for He tempts no one. In a sense, we cannot even blame to the devil for ‘each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death’ (James 1:13-15). Yet God is not remote from evil, and it is insufficient to say that He simply permits it. He declares: ‘I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the Lord, who does all these things’ (Isa.45:7). Jeremiah asked: ‘Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that good and bad come?’ (Lam.3:38) And Amos: ‘Does disaster come to a city, unless the Lord has done it?’ (Amos 3:6)
It was Augustine who said that evil is the absence of good, and in that same vein, C. S. Lewis called it a parasite. God made the devil but not as the devil. God is not the author of evil but He made the author of evil. Why did He not ‘lock in’ goodness, so that there was no Fall, with all its attendant misery? Ultimately, He does not tell us. We do know two things. The first is that salvation is all of the triune God so it shall be to the praise of His glorious grace (Eph.1:6, 12, 14). The existence of evil makes God’s grace all the more glorious and gracious. Secondly, we are enriched when we receive something of which we have been deprived. For example, if we have been unwell and we recover, we have a renewed appreciation of health and well-being; and if we have been very hungry, the next meal is especially enjoyable. It may be that our experiences here of sin make us all the more grateful, even in eternity, of the righteousness of Christ.
– Peter Barnes