When the Problem of Evil Gets Personal
“How can a good God who loves me allow me to feel so depressed and despairing? Why would He allow me to experience such terrible pain and suffering?
The Lay of the Land
Last month we started by getting to the root of the question by challenging the faulty assumption that God’s love exempts me from pain and suffering. We asserted that the Cross is the premium and undeniable proof that God loves us and that He is working to eliminate pain and suffering in the age to come. This month we are going to clarify the logic of the question above and then introduce two lines of reasoning that highlight the flaw in that reasoning while proposing a better way forward.
When “Why” Leads to Discovery
Knowing why God allows suffering and pain won’t make you feel any better. It’s been said before that Job still had to face empty seats at the family dinner table even though he discovered (to some degree) that God had been doing a great work in his life even through his difficulty and grief. Asking why won’t lead us to an emotionally satisfying place, but it can lead us to a fruitful discovery nonetheless. Asking why leads us to some discovery about ourselves and our God that can lead us into a deeper relationship with and love for a God infinitely bigger, wiser, and more majestic than we can imagine.
Combating Lies with the Truth
Asking why can lead us to truths than help to confront the lies that our hearts are prone to believe. Knowing those truths can keep us from spiraling down into the pit of despair and depression and help us to worship God even in the midst of difficulty.
For starters, let’s reframe our hard question as a personalized version of the problem of evil. We might rephrase the thinking of the question like this:
If God is completely good, then He would prevent evil and pain if He could.
Since God is all-powerful, He can prevent evil.
Therefore, since God can prevent evil but isn’t doing so in my life, His goodness (or love) is in question. (Many use this line of reasoning not merely to doubt God’s goodness but to argue against His very existence.)
A Way Forward
To combat this faulty line of reasoning, we can muster two types of arguments. First, we can offer theodicies which are theological justifications for why God would permit rather than prevent evils or sufferings. Second, we can offer the argument of inscrutability which reasons that perhaps there are good reasons for God permitting evil and suffering even if we don’t know what they are. In fact, this latter argumentation is particularly poignant when we consider that God is infinite and we are finite. How confident are we that we absolutely know that God doesn’t have a good reason to permit evil and suffering? Perhaps we need to humble ourselves and trust that what we do know about God for certain (i.e. that He is good, loving, and compassionate) is not jeopardized by what we do not know for certain (the possible reasons for why He would act the way He acts and permit the things He permits). The Bible offers us a viewpoint about evil and suffering that combines both approaches.
In the months to come, we are going to examine three theodicies (though there are more we could detail) as well as the argument of inscrutability.
We will examine the following theodicies:
Pain is a megaphone in that it leads us back to our need for God.
Suffering is soul-building experience used by God as a dynamic means of cultivating our character to be like Christ and showcasing the trueness of our faith.
Suffering is revelatory in that it reveals things about God and His character that we wouldn’t know or experience otherwise.
After we examine these three theodicies, we will turn our attention to thinking about how the stories of Joseph and Job show us that God has very good and wise reasons for allowing pain and suffering, even to those He loves. Just because we don’t always know what those reasons are doesn’t mean that they aren’t there.