Futile Questions

Sometimes I wonder if we don’t, in our excessive questioning, make things more difficult than they really are and have to be.

Why we ask, does evil exist on this earth? How can a good, all-powerful God allow evil? Either He cannot rid the world of evil (He is not all-powerful) or He chooses to allow evil (in which case He is not all good). It must be that simple.

But what about man’s free will one may ask. Isn’t that the cause of evil on earth? But like Descartes we think: how can man have any will of His at all if God is all powerful? If we control anything, if we decided what to drink, what to wear, or whether or not to be evil or good, something exists outside of God’s sovereignty, which prevents God from being all-powerful, and God thereby ceases to be God.

And by no means can man determine his salvation! That is the heresy of Pelagius! No, as Calvin says man has no choice in the matter. God chooses who to save and who to damn regardless of what we do or how to respond, how else could grace be free? If man played any part of his salvation, then Christ’s sacrifice would cease to be enough, depriving God of His grace.

But isn’t that unjust? To punish and hold man responsible for his actions when all we do is predetermined by God and man has no choice in the matter? As Descartes believed, who are we to question God, what do we know of justice? God makes justice. God could make evil good and good evil, God is all powerful and God determines all.

What about this: is God bound by his own laws? Can God break the laws of nature that He put in place? If He can He can do miracles, but why would a good God break the law? If He can’t He is not all-powerful?

These are the controversies in which ‘clever’ people become embodied. Yet does it all have to be this complicated? It seems there are very easy answers to all these questions.

God is all-powerful, but He allows evil to exist because the benefits of evil (the benefits of choice: love, honor, duty, etc) outweigh the negatives. He in His eternal wisdom can see this, while we may not be able to see this at all times. Just because He allows evil does not mean He couldn’t rid it if He wanted to; God is still all-powerful. And just because He allows evil does not mean that God enjoys it; God is still all good.

Man has a will and that is why man can be held responsible for his actions. Even we in our wickedness know that it is unjust to punish a man for something he had no control over. God cannot be unjust for justice is a part of God, it is found in God alone. God is the source of all justice, yet He punishes man, in this we may know that man has a free will. This does not take from the power of God. Man need not have a free will, he could have been like a beast, but God chose not to exercise His power in this area so as to allow man to have a free will.

Regarding salvation, how can man’s will and God’s grace co-exist? Easy, God makes his grace available to all and it is left up to every individual man to decide whether or not he will chose to enter that grace.

Regarding miracles, why can’t God intervene in His creation in such a way so as not to break any laws? Maybe, just maybe, we haven’t discovered all the laws of nature so that when there is a miracle it only appears as if a law of nature has been broken when all the while God is obeying an even greater and deeper law of which we do not have knowledge.

I think these conversations are interesting, but they are not the insurmountable paradoxes that people make them out to be. Too often we make God incomprehensible when He is readily knowable. And too often we make God evil out of our ignorance (like Descartes and Calvin did) when it clearly can be shown He is good. Yes there are tensions in the Bible, but many times when we dig deep into these tensions we find truth.

And when we can’t fully grasp the truth (like say, the complete workings of the trinity), we must embrace the mystery of God. God is knowable, but He who thinks He knows all of God knows not God. There is a part of God that is higher, mysterious, and unknowable. When we come upon that part of God we must embrace the mystery and vulgarize the Almighty God in such a way so as to make Him readily understandable.