Easter and the Problem of Evil

This weekend Christians of various stripes are celebrating the suffering, death, and resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. The history of the Church bears out that Christians place more stock in the celebration of the death of Christ than His birth. There would be something morbid about this if we were merely celebrating the crucifixion of a great religious teacher that took place over two thousand years ago. As celebrations go, usually we are more concerned with the birth of a great person than with his death. But Christ is not an ordinary person. Don't get me wrong; He was fully human. He had a true body and a reasonable soul, but His humanity was personally united to the divine nature of the Son of God. Two natures came together in an intimate union that neither added to nor took away from either nature in order to form one person, Jesus Christ. We celebrate this incarnation during the Advent Season. But Christ came to fulfill a greater purpose. He came, as the angel promised, to "save His people from their sins" (Mt. 1:21). In other words, Christ death was an accomplishment; it was suffering and death like no other. And His suffering and death did not spell the end of  His life, but the realization of all true life.

Many atheists and agnostics cite the so-called problem of evil as the ultimate defeater of Christian belief. If there is an all-powerful God who is also all-good, whence the existence of evil (or some similar argument)? Since it is claimed that this is an inexplicable conundrum, the conclusion must be that God doesn't exist. How I just presented the problem of evil is a simplification, of course, of what can be a complex debate. Christians have presented various arguments against the problem of evil. An argument that seeks to justify the goodness and providence of God in the face of evil is termed a "theodicy."

Various approaches have been taken to theodicy both in philosophy and theology. I don't have the time to go into all the different approaches in this post, nor is it my intention to do so. There are several things I want to briefly highlight about the discussion of the problem of evil from the Christian perspective. First, we need to be honest with ourselves that we are dealing with a profound mystery. There are things we are never going to solve, nor are we going to be able to do full justice to the goodness and providence of God in this life. We are limited in our capacity to know and understand the Almighty and His works and ways. What we do know is true and sufficient for our salvation. But how are we going to comprehensively express in human terms the facts of God's goodness and power and the existence of  evil? Search your Scriptures, this very topic was an enigma to even the greatest of saints.

Second, though this is a difficult topic to wrap our minds around, we must realize that it in no way represents a defeater of Christian belief. Sound minds have tackled this issue, and, though they admit to coming up to walls through which they know they will never be able to break, they have at least shown the possibility that the goodness and power of God and the presence of evil are not incompatible with each other. For the atheist and agnostic readers, I would like to refer you to the fascinating way Alvin Plantinga deals with this in his Warranted Christian Belief and God, Freedom, and Evil. I hope to, in the near future, deal more in depth with his argument, but for now hopefully it will suffice for you to pick up these books and read them. 

Third, the problem of evil presents its own problem for the atheist. The notion of evil admits the existence of moral standards. I am happy to admit that atheists are, more often than not, moral people. They have a sense of right and wrong, of justice and mercy. The problem for the atheist is where did these ideas come from? Are moral standards merely social conventions? Are they a product of evolution? If so, are they subject to change over time, and if they are what is the standard for knowing when a moral standard must change or drop out of use? Furthermore, by what standard do we judge whether common practices we do now are better (or worse) than the common practices from earlier times? What standard do we use to judge whether what one culture does in one part of the earth is worse or better than what another culture does on another part of the earth? Why, for example, should we think that stoning of women is wrong, when a practice like this can keep a society functioning and presents no real burden on that society's survival? Is there an ideal moral attainment that we should all strive for, and if so, how do you know? Conversely, if not, how do you prove it is not so? This is a real problem for the atheists and agnostics who cite the problem of evil as the ultimate defeater for Christian belief.

I pass on from these considerations in order to get to the point I really wanted to talk about. It is my hope to deal with the above considerations in a fuller way, but in this post, I wanted point out the connection between Easter and the Christian's assurance in the face of evil. The problem of evil is not a problem for believers. This is not to say that believers have struggled over this issue, even to the point of nearly losing their faith.  

The Old Testament is full of the raw emotion that believers have felt as they              struggled through various trials and sufferings that they fell into. The Psalms are full of cries of "how long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?" Psalm 73 is one of the most pointed psalms regarding the believers struggle with the problem of evil. The author's struggle was, in fact, over the issue of why good things happened to the wicked while those who performed righteous deeds did so in vain. This caused his foot to "nearly slip". What was his solution? It wasn't well conceived reasons or  clever arguments. He "went into the sanctuary of God". The worship of God, and all that it pointed to, reminded him of the covenant faithfulness of God. From that point the problem of evil was no longer a source of despair. 

Job is the prime example of a good man who suffers for seemingly no good reason.  The interesting thing about Job is that he is never given an answer to why bad things happen to good people. What we do see throughout the book of Job is a man who clings to his faith despite his sufferings, despite his losses, despite his wife telling him to curse God, and despite the poor comfort he receives from his friends. In the middle of the book we read his heart wrenching cry of faith and hope amidst confusion, "For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God" (Job 19:25-26). These are just two examples of believers clinging to faith in the face of suffering. I could mention more. I could mention Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, or Paul, who suffered greatly as he brought the gospel to the Gentiles. I could also mention Christians outside of Scripture, who maintained a strong faith in Christ in the face of severe affliction. 

Christians do not let the problem of evil defeat them. Why? The answer has everything to do with the suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ. As I mentioned above, His suffering and death were like no other. The Scriptures teach that the Messiah, whom we know to be Jesus Christ, was to be a suffering servant. Isaiah 53 says that the Christ, "was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed." Again, we must say that His piercing, His crushing, His wounds were nothing ordinary. As the Son of God, the Word made flesh, He was the ultimate good man, and the ultimate bad thing happened to Him. The death of the righteous Son of God by wicked hands was the ultimate crime. But Christ's sufferings were mind-blowingly greater than anything anyone has experienced before or since. There have been those who cried to God, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" But Christ experienced the actuality of this statement. God the Father actually forsook the Son. The reason was Christ, who knew no sin, became sin for us (2 Cor. 5:21). Christ took upon Himself the sins of His people, and thus suffered on the cross the Hell they deserved. Martin Luther, it is said, meditated on this passage for hours without budging from His seat. At last he threw up his hands and said, "God forsaken by God, who can understand that?" But our lack of understanding does not negate the actuality of the event. 

Christ's suffering and death was not the end of His life; rather, as I said before, it was the realization of all true life. Christ did not stay in the grave; on the third day as the Scriptures foretold, Christ rose from the dead. He defeated death and hell, just as He said He would. And we today receive the testimony of those who saw those events with their own eyes. Many of these eyewitnesses sealed their testimony with their own blood. As the Apostle Paul declares, this same Jesus was "declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead" (Rom. 1:4). 

This is the internal logic of the Christian faith. We have a Savior who defeated death. In Christ we can proclaim, "If God is for us, who can be against us?" (Rom. 8:31) And we can say, "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, For your sake we are being killed all the day long we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered. No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom. 8:35-39). Death has no sting, the grave has no victory, and the problem of evil certainly has no teeth.