With All That Evil, Why Trust God?

Can so many tragedies mingled with evildoings really be part of His great plan?

Khen Lim




Image source: ibelieve.com

When we look around our world at the wonderful works of nature, it’s not difficult to believe in a Creator. For all the scientific logic everyone claims will dispel the idea of God, even the most outstanding scientists in the world through time have come to acknowledge that there indeed is a Divine Source who is responsible for the whole universe and all things living.

There is an actual order in the lifecycle of every living creature in all of the ages as much as there is an intricate, if not complex, design in how the solar system is in place. In the biology of the living being, there is an abundance of evidence in the logic and structure of the molecular and atomic makeups in all of us. Nothing is ever in place by accident or coincidence. All are meticulously planned. All are designed by the most impeccable and Greatest Architect of Life and all of this leads us to proof of a master plan.

But then came the confusion, anarchy, mayhem and chaos. Pre-existing orders are stirred. All our theories of providence and what we believe is the natural order of common logic fly out of the window. A deadly disease can basically destroy an entire village community and work itself to the next, obliterating everything in its wake. An earthquake wipes out an unsuspecting string of towns and cities along the fault line. Rising waters can swell and break the banks of the biggest rivers and wipe out the livelihoods of tens of thousands of inhabitants in nearby townships.

A random act of violence takes place in the unlikeliest time and place and kills dozens of innocent people. A bright and beautiful child, the apple of the eye of everyone in the family, can suddenly fall ill, goes into a comatose and never recovers, dying of a fatal disease that no one saw coming.

Even a horrid bad hair day will get all of us wondering if there is a God, is He watching? Does He even care? Was He even there? Can so many tragedies mingled with evildoings really be part of His grand plan?

The honest truth is there are no easy answers to be found that can properly explain the problem of evil around our world but in the Book of Genesis, God does reveal a few clues. In God’s great plans, He created humans in His image and in His pleasure, He accorded us dominion over the earth. He trusted us enough to give us free will to make our own decisions and to choose to or not to love Him back. But of course, free will is a two-edged sword because the flipside of this freedom is the option to sin in which we began by questioning God’s wisdom and ended up not doing things His way.

By opting to find our own way, we open the floodgates to a mind-boggling array of harmful and deadly outcomes. The trouble is when all of this happens, we blame God and question His whereabouts but we don’t stop and come to terms with the fact that although free will is His gift, it is we who decided what to do with it. It was our option to take, not His.

Some then question if God should have made us incapable of sinning. We could then be perfect and stay unblemished throughout our useful lives. We could be pleasing to God at all times and not have to bear His wrath. We could be really productive and yield great glory to Him, worshipping and praising Him endlessly and crafting everything that reflects the Christ in us. What could actually be better than this? We won’t know what sin is and there will not be any need for hell because no one would be there to keep the devil company. What a perfect life this would be for all of us!

It’s tantalising to think this way but this is flawed thinking at best. To remove the opportunity to sin is really to eliminate choice altogether. That means no free will anymore. The concept of choice is that we get to select one option or the other and from this, we have the right to come to a fitful conclusion after consideration. We resolve our own matters because God gave us the means to. We judge our steps and movements and make a decision to turn this way or the other because He made it possible for us to be able to do all that.

If free will were to be eliminated from our makeup, we would become automatons, incapable of self-thought, reflection, emotions, and analysis and decision-making. We would simply be God’s order takers where we have no rights of our own. We would be like organic plants, biologically existing but mindlessly so. We will have no requirement for our intellectual prowess and everything must be done for us since we are not able to think for ourselves in terms of what we need to live and survive.

As it is then, would God actually find us useful? Would He have a use for minions hardwired for thoughtless and meaningless relationships? Why would He even bother to have us programmed? For His pleasure? To do His bidding? To keep Him company in case He’s lonely?

God has no used for machines, droids and cyborgs but He created humans in the precise way He wanted with a powerful creative desire as well as the freedom to choose and the moral responsibility that obviously came from Him. And with that free will, His desire is that we will hope to tap into the boundless opportunities to strike a relationship with Him. Indeed He has built into each of us a genuine ability that if we find it in us, will help us to experience His Fatherhood unlike anything else in our lives.

Even with all this hope pinned unto and desire for us humans, God experienced unimaginable disappointment shortly after He created us, for our original ancestors chose to sin instead. And with sin, we learned to be selfish, disobedient, rebellious, destructive and evil. While we relish in the free will God gave us, we use it to insult, abuse and hurt Him. And all this while, as sin stings us back with repercussions we obviously didn’t think of, we seize every opportunity to heap the blame for our hardships back on Him, not willing to accept that from the very beginning, it was we who preferred to choose sin.

We never, for any single moment, sat down to consider the consequences that come with every act of sinfulness. We never thought about sin’s backlash that comes in the form of broken lives, broken relationships in a forlorn broken world. Even though there are occasions when man admits to creating his own predicaments and causing self-inflicted wounds, how about we own up to the rest? Isn’t the evil we see in the world today the direct result of our own actions? For all the horrible things now forced down our throats by our political leaders and governments, who do we really blame? Who do we say was the root cause of all this?

The world we know today is shaped by human debauchery. We like to blame God and say He’s the source of all the senseless evil but He is not, though every so often, He allows us to encounter these sinful effects so that we know we are in a world tempered by imperfection and the creaking burden of sin and that we genuinely need Him. These encounters also remind us we’re not there yet; we’re nowhere near home still.

Of course, try as we might, we will never fully understand God’s ways. Neither will we come to grips with the types of stories that our lives tell from one corner of the world to the next. And yet in all the hopeless gloom and foreboding darkness, there is one thing we are all certain of and that is, we can trust in His love and goodness. We may never be able to tell if someone is actually a male or a female these days or whether or not we can trust our political leaders with their promises but we have complete faith in that every one of our stories of brokenness contains the potential for redemption.

Only in God, therefore, we place our trust.