If God Exists, Why Is There Evil?

If God Exists, Why Is There Evil?

Evil surrounds us and sooner or later always kills us. Earthquakes, fires, cancers, strokes, dementias, rapes, tortures, murder, and countless other tragedies happen all over the earth every single day. The monotony and inescapable effects of evil weigh heavily on all of us, causing people to ask this crucial question: If God exists, why is there evil?

There are four big-picture points we need to keep in mind if we are going to understand why God allows evil.

First, we need to understand the origin of natural evil.

Second, we need to comprehend the origin and extent of human evil.

Third, we need to grasp the nature and value of free will.

Fourth, we need to be aware of how God will resolve evil in eternity.

Of course, all of these issues merit greater explanation, and it needs to be explain with very insightful thoughts.[1]

The Origin of Natural Evil

To understand the origin of natural evil, we must take the book of Genesis seriously. In Genesis 1, we are told that God created the first man and the first woman and placed them in a garden. Genesis 2:16-17 says that “the LORD God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die’” (NIV). Here, Adam and Eve, our first and original parents, were given the option to obey or disobey God, and the penalty for disobedience was clear: death. Adam and Eve rebelled against God and ate from that tree anyway, and we’ve been attending funerals ever since. In response to their rebellion, the Lord did the following:

First, to the woman God said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you” (Genesis 3:16). So there were two consequences: The first was that childbearing would be very painful (that probably includes everything related to childbearing, such as female reproductive problems). The second was that the husband would now rule the woman. A husband ruling over his wife was not a part of God’s original plan, and the world has since witnessed many men treating women harshly and unjustly.

Second, in verse 17, the Lord told the man, “Cursed is the ground because of you.” Romans 8:20-21 explains that creation was “subjected to futility” and is now in “bondage to corruption.” Thus, natural evil entered the world because God cursed the earth in response to Adam’s sin. In fact, what harmful mold, decay, disease, and so on and on, cannot have ensued from God looking at planet Earth and saying, “I curse you”? There is something desperately wrong with our world, and that is because God cursed it.

Third, in Genesis 3:22-24, the Lord banished the man and his wife from the Garden of Eden, thus removing them from the rejuvenating power of the tree of life, and so all humans began to die. Taken together, these things are the origin of natural evil, which was the result of Adam and Eve’s free choice to sin. All natural evil, therefore, is in one way or another related to sin.[2]

Sometimes people object that God should have created someone else who would not have sinned. That is exactly what God did: Jesus was born in the likeness of human flesh yet kept all of God’s commands perfectly, including death on the cross. And by trusting in Jesus’s giving His life for us, we can be saved from our sinful condition. First Corinthians 15:22,45 says that “for as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive…‘The first man Adam became a living being’; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.” And what kind of life does Jesus give? Eternal life!

The Origin and Extent of Human Evil

Adam and Eve used their free will to disobey God, thus plunging us into a world of sorrow, sickness, and death. But that is not all that resulted: They also lost their proper relationship with God and their natures were corrupted. We read in Genesis 3:8 that after they sinned, they “hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God.” And then in that fallen state, they had children. Thus Adam and Eve, our first and original parents, passed on to us their corrupted natures. In other words, we are the sexual reproductions of Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve could not reproduce beings greater than themselves. They could only give birth to fallen humans estranged from God.

Hence Jesus said in John 3:6, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” Therefore, all of us are born, in a very real sense, Adams and Eves. We inherited their natures. In fact, we received our souls from Adam and Eve. Further, we received our consciousness from Adam and Eve. Consequently, until a human is born again, he or she is Adamic flesh that needs to be born from above (John 3:3,7; 1 Peter 1:23). This is called the doctrine of original sin, and it explains why people do so many evil things. There is something terribly wrong with humankind that is best explained by the fact that our natures were corrupted by the sin of Adam and Eve—the original sin. The human propensity for evil could be illustrated in many ways, but I will use only one example—genocide. Every genocide researcher I have ever read (and I have read a lot of them)—and even every genocide survivor I have ever read—agrees that it is the average member of a population that commits genocide.

In Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, genocide researcher Christopher Browning concluded, “I could have been the killer or the evader—both were humans.”[3] Similarly, sociologist Harald Welzer wrote,

"We are left then with the most discomforting of all realities— ordinary, “normal” people committing acts of extraordinary evil. This reality is difficult to admit, to understand, to absorb…As we look at the perpetrators of genocide and mass killing, we need no longer ask who these people are. We know who they are. They are you and I."[4] Hannah Arendt concluded of Auschwitz administrator Adolf Eichmann that the trouble with him was that “so many were like him, neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”[5]

Even Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel concluded, “Deep down…man is not only executioner, not only victim, not only spectator; he is all three at once.”[6]

Like it or not, we were all born Auschwitz-enabled. As Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga put it, “The doctrine of original sin has been verified in the wars, cruelty, and general hatefulness that have characterized human history from its very inception to the present.”[7] Even atheist Michael Ruse agrees: “I think Christianity is spot on about original sin—how could one think otherwise, when the world’s most civilized and advanced people (the people of Beethoven, Goethe, Kant) embraced that slime-ball Hitler and participated in the Holocaust?”[8]

With these truths in view, perhaps Scripture makes more sense when it says in Romans 3, “There is no one who does good, not even one. Their throats are open graves…Their mouths are full of cursing…Their feet are swift to shed blood.” Indeed, nothing illustrates humanity’s “feet” being “swift to shed blood” like genocide. This is all a horrifying revelation, and indeed, without Christ, I do not know how one could find an affirmative meaning in life. Once we truly understand the depths of human evil, then the question changes from “Why does God allow evil?” to “Why does God allow humans?” Or, “Why does God allow humans with free will?”

Free Will and Its Value

Free will is the ability to do other than what you do. For example, people can choose between the mundane (such as whether they are going to have Neapolitan ice cream or chocolate) or the morally significant (such as whether or not they are going to remain an alcoholic). If you are going to let your daughter exercise her free will, you cannot give her permission to go out with the boy down the street and then chain her to a heavy kitchen appliance. Similarly, for God to give Adam and Eve free will required that God give them the ability to rebel against Him. This is as logical as it gets.

Some have argued, however, that if this evil is the price of free will, then God should not have given us free will in the first place. But would you want to be around only things without free will—call them robots or androids or whatever—things that are no more than lifelike, life-size Chatty Cathy dolls that are programmed to say “I love you”? The Lord desires relationship with real beings who can make real decisions and have real desires—and so do we! But that means, for all their flaws, that we must endure the good and the bad from real humans.

In this tragedy of human death and sin, God is doing something wonderful. Both our present knowledge of the horrors of human sinfulness and our further education at the judgment will prepare us to inherit God’s kingdom, where we will regard sin as beneath us. This knowledge prepares us for when God sets us free in His kingdom to do what we want to do. We will not want to sin because we have already learned the knowledge of good and evil here and we will be further informed on the horror of sin at the judgment. Also, in heaven, there will be no world or devil to tempt us. Our lustful, Adamic flesh will be transformed, hell will be an eternal reminder to free beings of the horror of rebellion, and we will live by sight. Again, however, the key point is that we are learning here on earth the horror of rebellion against God.

How God Will Resolve Evil in Eternity

Eternity relates to our suffering here because eternity will dwarf our suffering to insignificance. Our sufferings here will be diminished by the eternal glory that awaits us for three reasons.

First, we Christians will get it all, as in we will get everything. Consider 1 Corinthians 3:21-23: “So then, no more boasting about human leaders! All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, and you are of Christ, and Christ is of God” (NIV). “All things” are ours! Similarly, Jesus said in Luke 12:32: “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” He’s going to “give” us the kingdom—not just let us visit it.

Second, not only do we get it all, we get it all forever. Remember, God’s promise to the Christian is “eternal life.” In fact, the most famous verse in the Bible, John 3:16, ends with “should not perish but have eternal life.”(See also Matthew 25:46; John 3:36; 5:24; 6:40; Acts 13:48; Romans 2:7; 6:23; 1 John 5:13.)

Third, forever we will enjoy the Creator of the universe—the King of kings and Lord of lords—and forever we will enjoy other Christians. The Lord is supremely accomplished, supremely beautiful, supremely knowledgeable (in fact, by definition He is omniscient), and supremely powerful (by definition He is omnipotent). And we are told, “God is love” (1 John 4:8). It is not that love is a character quality that God possesses, but that love is God’s very nature. Contrary to the popular image of heaven being about sitting on a cloud, sporting flightless wings, and forever strumming a harp, the afterlife is most often compared to a banquet (Isaiah 25:6; Mark 14:25; Revelation 19:9), and we are going to feast like that with each other forever!

Consider 2 Corinthians 4:16-18: “We do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” When Paul wrote “beyond all comparison,” he was not speaking metaphorically. Even a full human lifetime of suffering here is dwarfed to insignificance by eternity. The Lord is giving all things to those who trust Him, and He is giving them all things forever and ever!

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[1] Clay Jones, Why Does God Allow Evil? Compelling Answers for Life’s Toughest Questions (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2017).

[2] Some might wonder about John 9:1 and the man born blind, of whom Jesus said, “‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned…but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him’” (NIV). But would the man have been born blind if Adam and Eve had never sinned?

[3] Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), xx.

[4] Harald Welzer, “On Killing and Morality: How Normal People Become Mass Murderers,” Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: Perpetrators in Comparative Perspective, eds. Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann (New York: Macmillan, 2008), 148-149.

[5] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1994, reprint 1963), 277.

[6] Elie Wiesel, The Town Beyond the Wall, trans. Stephen Barker (New York, NY: Avon, 1970), 174.

[7] Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford, UK: Oxford University, 2000), 207.

[8] Michael Ruse, “Darwinism and Christianity Redux: A Response to My Critics,” Philosophia Christi 4 (2002), 192.