February 27, 2010

If God is Good, Why Much Evil in the World? - Part IV

If you were God, choosing a redemptive plan would cause you a number of problems, not the least of being that a free will means that whatever plan you would choose would be unacceptable to some or even most. It is not even clear that any plan would be able to retrieve more than a small percentage of those who were lost. Short of a general amnesty which would lead to unrestricted evil in the present world ( for there would be no fear of ultimate consequences), there would have to be conditions on that redemption. What conditions would you set?

One thing is certain. Any conditions you would choose would be considered unfair to many, if not most. You could not possibly choose a redemptive plan based on the opinions of others, for free will means a mind that is free to reason, rightly or wrongly, meaning that there would be many different and conflicting ideas that would be floated about.

But more to the point, one cannot go about, willy-nilly, creating a universe, without a plan to begin with. We find in the Bible that God has made His redemptive plan based on two major principles - righteousness and love. (It should be said here that any plan that includes these will be heavily criticized by those who would prefer another definition of either or are just disinterested in putting in the effort to obtain them).

While many criticize the biblical presentation of righteousness in this point or that, the real problem that people have with God's definition of righteousness is we would rather have one that excludes the things that we would prefer to do and would declare it as harmless or even virtuous.

Secondly, many dislike, if not despise, the biblical teaching that once man has gotten into his moral morass, he cannot extricate himself. We would like to believe that if we turn over a new leaf, that that which was done in the past has no further claim on us.

While this is not true, the thought that presses this argument has some merit. The past has to be taken off the table if a new life is to be begun. But how do you un-murder someone, stop the ill done by gossip or perjury? You cannot give someone back their life, no matter how much you wish to. After you have robbed a person's home, how do you give them back the security that they felt before, when within its walls? Giving the money back certainly does not help, even if you give back double what you stole.

All that the Bible calls sin can be analyzed in a similar way. But not all the sins are committed against one another, some of them are directed toward God. But the ones that are directed against one another are also indirectly done toward God because He has told us not to do them.

Time and numbers create a world full of evil. As a people age, they learn more and more ways to do evil to one another. Have you ever noticed how quickly put-downs go into general use? Words like "nerd" and "geek" took only a few years to go into general usage. Or that old put-downs often go on forever? If they are short and, perhaps, descriptive, they may go on for centuries or even millenia. And the ways to physically hurt, torture or kill another have certainly not declined with time - nor stayed the same, for that matter.

Putting the blame on God for giving us the free will that allows us to do good, but which also is the source of our personal evils, is denying human culpability and responsibility. We may well wonder why men, women and children all try to get out of their responsibility for what they have done. We want to escape the consequences that come with our transgressions
against one another and God. We may deny it up and down, but we are sinners who need redemption.

Redeeming ourselves is not possible because the very same mindset that has made us who we are becomes the judge of the degree of responsibility that we have, and as I have said, we downplay our own culpability. We blame God and others for the conditions that surround us and claim personal responsibility only for that guilt we are aware of at the moment, while continuing to bury from our consciousness the rest.

We need a redeemer, a savior, a deliverer, a transformer, and of those who have walked this earth through time, only Jesus Christ is able to do that.

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