Who is Evil?

Read Job 21:1-34

“What kind of God would allow such suffering?” “No God that I believe in would allow so many people to die.” “I just cannot accept that God is real when so many good people suffer so continuously.”

These are the sentiments of people we know and love. They are neither unique nor evil questions. They have been asked by everyone who has partaken of the breath of life. Everyone wants to know why there is so much violence and hatred and killing going on in the world. I would like to know. I would like it to stop. But I am a realist and I do not look at the world through rainbow colored lenses. I see a world that is fallen and beset by the consequences of that fallenness. I see a world corrupted by the very sin in which we delight. Rarely do we consider consequences while we are sinning.

As a Christian I have asked some of the same questions that Job asks here in chapter 21: “Why do the wicked live on, growing old and increasing in power?” I have asked it this way: “Why does Hugh Hefner continue to exist?” Why is it that when I look around I see people like Osama Bin Laden defying God at every turn and still living? Why has he escaped justice for so long? Job said, “Yet they say to God, ‘Leave us alone! We have no desire to know your ways. Who is the Almighty that we should serve him? What would we gain by praying to him?”

The famous question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” is, frankly, a poor question because it is not original and it is not worded properly. What, pray-tell, is a good people? What, pray-tell, are bad things? The New Testament writer the apostle Paul said that we should rejoice in sufferings because they build character, and perseverance, and hope. Really? That is what he said? And I stick with this religion? A better question to ask then might be, “To what end will these bad things take these good people?” (I wrote a couple of days ago that a better question would be this: Why do good things happen to bad people?)

But some people do believe that Christians have to defend God in this respect. They feel that so long as people continue to suffer and continue to die then our faith is suspect and our God is either a) not real, b) uncaring, or c) downright mean and vindictive. I suppose that is how Job’s friends viewed God: vindictive. These are not the only options that I believe are available and I do not feel as though I need to defend God on any one particular issue. God did not fire the gas chambers in Germany, shoot the rifles in Cambodia, fly the jets into the Twin Towers, or fill Siberia with humans. Man did, if I recall correctly.

And anyhow, do we really think God is above and beyond all of this suffering? We should not because God knows how bad it hurts to be a human. I agree with David Atkinson who wrote, “It is communion with him which gives us the grace to live with questions and uncertainties.” Yes, because he died for us, we can endure pain for him. Faith is the willingness to trust God not the not the need to have every question answered.

Prayer Thoughts on Job 21:1-34

In this crazy mixed up world people are always accusing God of some malevolent act of violence against man. Pray that when such people do pop up you will be prepared not so much to defend God, but to tell people about Jesus’ suffering for their sins. If God hurts us, imagine how we have hurt him because of our sin and violence towards one another.