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Throughout my life I have often heard some form of this kind of thinking: “If God exists, why does He not stop evil in the world? If God was a forgiving and loving God, why does he allow babies to die in the streets? I don’t believe in a God that would allow such things to happen!”
When I hear these things, on the surface, I understand it to a degree…but once I ponder these thoughts, think them through, and really put God in proper perspective when it comes to us and our existence, the reality becomes quite different once examined. I mean, after all, we would love for there to be a god that put a stop to all hurt and evil. A god that did all that we wanted as if we made him and not the other way around. A “puppet” god that we could pull the strings to our liking and move him like a chess piece the way we see fit. Only then, would the world be a perfect place…when we used our “perfect” judgement, our “perfect” decision-making skills, and our “perfect” intelligence to make god give us our “perfect” world! I mean, c’mon, plainly, in our human existence we have proven ourselves to be perfect decision makers! Am I right? And, even though if you put 10 of us in a room and asked the question, “how would you make this world a perfect place?”, you’d get 10 vastly different answers…surely there must be only 1 cohesive answer as to what god we need to make our world perfect! I mean, obviously, this can’t be that hard!
Oh, but wait… is the perfect world defined by what I want or by what you want or by what my neighbor wants? Or better yet, what about the drug dealer, the murder, the rapist? What about the bully, the rich person, the poor person, the power hungry, or the control freak? What about the simpleton that wants for nothing with no drive to do anything, or simply the “good” person who doesn’t want to hurt anyone? Surely there must be someone among us that has the perfect decision-making record to get this honor? So how do we determine who gets to make this god? Do we get us all together and roll dice, highest number gets to make the god we “supposedly” all want? Man, my head is spinning!
Obviously, the above is pretty silly! Maybe, we really should be satisfied and happy to leave it to the God who truly is and find THAT God? Dare I say, what we “want” or “should be satisfied” with is absolutely irrelevant to the God that is! So how about we (man, I am talking to myself here as well) look at the God who is and not worry about the fictitious god none of us has the ability to create nor would we ever get it right anyway. In doing so, let’s analyze love and robots. I know, what a weird two things to put together right? Let me humbly try to explain.
Let’s start with love. Love cannot exist or abound without free will. If you take out free will, then you have robots devoid of love. To put that in perspective with an example: If I forced my children to love me, would it truly be love? Of course not! If I made something and electronically programmed (forced) it to love me, what would I have? Well, again, a robot, and certainly not love. Wouldn’t we be robots if God forced us to love Him? Surely, we would. To take it even a step further, if God forced our decision making on us to ensure no evil ever happened, this too would mean we are nothing more than robots, would it not?
But that is not the case. Instead, we have free will, and therefore, love does exist and does abound. We are definitely not robots! However, with free will, also comes the ability to make decisions that are evil and sadly, look around you, we do plenty of that. To go further, we have free will to love God by obeying Him or to reject Him. With free will comes either its rewards or its consequences based on the decisions we make in our existence. This is common sense I would think we all can agree on. Make a decision (free will) to put your hand on a burning stove, your hand gets burned (consequence). Make a decision (free will) to exercise and eat right and you will be healthy (rewards). You can look at every decision you and I make and we will typically find either a reward or consequence as a result of that decision.
The most important difference when it comes to our decision on God is this: we are playing with eternal rewards or eternal consequences. This is the most important free will decision you and I will ever make.
(On a side note: the word “eternal” here is not just an adjective to be descriptive. Ponder that and please consider letting that truly sink in. It means forever, without end! If you think I am wrong! Great! Now we are on to something! I encourage you to go genuinely seek truth for yourself and make a commitment to yourself to go wherever truth leads you! After all, that is the goal here)
With free will and love now established, we now must talk about the God who is and the God we still “want”. The God who is…is this: He is loving, forgiving, perfect, righteous, and just. Sadly, we want 2/5ths of this God. Typically, I find that we are all want the loving and forgiving God, but the God we don’t want to deal with is the perfect, righteous, and just God. The righteous God cannot allow sin in his presence. The perfect God means perfection is the standard that must exist with Him. And the just God means that He judges sin (also non-perfection) with justice. When this is put into proper perspective, who would want that God? It should come quite clear that the reason we don’t want that God is because then we are held accountable for what we do and think. We have to answer to the perfect Judge. Answering to the righteous, perfect, Judge who will administer justice means there are consequences we can’t get away from having to pay. With the perfect standard in place to dish out justice, we stand no chance to win acquittal…Unless…
The loving and forgiving God steps in…and He does just that! The loving and forgiving God steps in to satisfy his perfection, his righteousness, and his justice by offering the only perfect price to be paid to award us our acquittal from our sin. That is his son, Jesus Christ, coming off the throne of Heaven to come down to pay for us what we simply cannot pay on our own. With Jesus Christ, we can be reconciled to the God who is! Jesus’ sacrifice satisfies God’s perfection, righteousness, and justice all while also showing his love and forgiveness for us. You see Jesus, and Jesus alone, is the only one who can satisfy all we have to have to be able to live with the God who is….forever!
As simple as this sounds, I know it’s hard for all of us to get over ourselves. Our pride makes it very difficult to become vulnerable to admit to the above, but deep down, we know the above to be true…the question remains, what do we do with it?
I am glad we have the God who is, instead of the God we want because we would screw that one up too! If you don’t think so, look all around you. The pain, suffering, and hurt caused in this world is because of our decision making, and surely not God’s. We are best to leave the clean-up of the mess our free will has created to the God who is and He did just that when He sent his Son to die on the cross for you and me. You see, the evil in this world has truly already been defeated. The reason Christ has not returned is because God is patient, wanting all to come to Him…but He surely will not force you. But make no mistake, our sins have eternal consequences when measured up to the perfect, righteous, and just God who is.
So, does God let babies die in the streets? Nope, He does not. Humans do with our horrible decision- making skills. We have proven it time and time again down through the ages from generation to generation to generation. We can’t let ourselves off the hook as if this falls on God’s shoulders. What we can do though, is accept the perfect gift He gave us to save us from the mess we have made.
Have Character!
J. Noah Russell
