Where is God? Why Doesn't He Do Something about Suffering? Part 3

Anger at God is Understandble and Right

So we see from my last blog, it is understandable and right to be angry with God in the face of suffering - especially when God doesn't seem to do anything. Now we take our next step in piecing the jigsaw of 'Why God allows Evil and Suffering'

A Mixture of Good and Evil

That our world is a mixture of good and evil is obvious. But putting it like that robs the truth of its reality. We do need to face reality if we are going to get real answers that matter. So I am saying, if we want to understand why God doesn't do away with suffering and evil, it is not enough just to acknowledge the world is a mixture of good and evil. We need to understand a little of what good and evil is. As we understand these things, we will begin to understand why God allows suffering.

Good and Evil are Not Equal Opposites

I am talking for now, about the evil that people do. We will see how this relates to natural disasters like Tsunamis and disease in a later blog, but we need to begin with people. 

We can imagine that good and evil are kind of equals at opposite ends of a spectrum. But that is not true. Think about it. 'Good' is what we all should be all the time. It is never right to be bad or evil. It is always wrong. If you agree with that, then you will see the first really important point: we can never, ever make up for, or cancel out the bad or evil we have done. Here's why.

The Nasty Friend

Imagine you are talking with a friend, happily chatting away, having a laugh, enjoying the conversation, then unexpectedly he gives you a piece of chocolate. "That's kind of him" you think to yourself, when suddenly he punches you right in your face really hard. The punch only lasted a moment, you are dazed, hurting, freaked out, confused and in a state of shock. All the while he carries on speaking to you politely as if nothing happened.

You say, "What the heck's wrong with you, you total freak!"

He says, "look, so I punched you, it only lasted one tiny moment - I've chatted kindly with you for about 3 hrs and I gave you that piece of chocolate which I didn't have to give you. Surely 3 hrs of being good and a piece of chocolate makes up for one tiny moment of bad".

You reply, "What? No! You should never ever be bad, you should just be good, there is no rightful place for that badness, even if it was just a tiny moment". 

You can see the point. 100 moments of goodness do not make up for 1 moment of evil. Now I know it is not just about 'moments' of evil, but also there is a qualitative element. In other words, it is about the degree evil and the degree of good to make up for it. That unexpected punch may only have lasted a moment, but the pain lasted ages - it was a particularly bad thing to do even if it only took a moment. You could say, it is the size of the evil, not the length of time it took. 

However, suppose, after the punch the friend gave you £1,000,000. Would that make up for it? You might think it was financially worth it but still, it doesn't cancel out the evil. Imagine hanging out with this guy, every now, and then at some point each day he suddenly smacks you straight in the face and puts another £1,000,000 in your account. A freindship like that, even if financially worthwhile has got something profoundly wrong - it is perverse!

The good does not make up for the bad, it just adds to the perversion of the bad. Those violent moments should never, ever have happened, and the idea they can be justified or cancelled out by good deeds is perverse. Those evil moments invaded and stole what should have been good moments. All the other good moments should be good anyway, that extra piece of chocolate in the story above, was an extra kindness, but that doesn't somehow give credit to act badly! In the same way, an extra kindness after a bad deed does not 'repay' for the bad. 

Good and evil are not opposite equals. Why?

Doing and being good, and doing and being evil, are ways of using time right? We do good and evil in time. The problem is, we did nothing to get time, it is freely given by God, so that we can do the highest good possible with it. We have no time of our own, we cannot add a moment to our lives. It is all given to us by God to use for the highest possible good. Doing the highest possible good with the time we are given is what it means to glorify God.

So when we take that God-given time, and act selfishly with it doing evil, we are abusing that God-given time because God didn't give it to us to use like that. And we can never make up for it because, whatever other time we have is also given by God to us to do the highest possible good with. So, whatever good we do with that time is just the good we should have done anyway - it can never be more than our highest good, so it can never produce the 'extra' needed to make up for time wasted, abused and misused.

Story

Mum sends Johnny to the shop with £10. She says, "Buy 10 bars of chocolate for £1 each and bring them to me". 

He takes the money, but on the way a mate stops and says, "Hey, you wanna buy this packet of crisps from me for £1?" 

Johnny cannot resist, he buys the crisps and eats them. Johnny then buys 9 bars of chocolate because that's all he can afford. He returns and says, "Sorry mum, I lost /spent £1 so could only get 9 bars. But I will make it up to you, I will pay it back!"

Next day she says the same, "Go to the shop with this £10 and buy another 10 bars and bring them back".

Everyday she does this, every day Johnny brings back the 10 bars. But does that make up for the £1 He stole? No it doesn't. That is still owing. The problem is, all the money given him is for a purpose. He has no money of his own at all, so he can never make up the £1 he owes because every pound he gets comes from her anyway. 

What if she gave Johnny an extra pound?

Even if she gave him an extra pound and said, "This is yours to do whatever you please, as long as you do good with it (because it is always wrong to do bad with it), and then he said, 

"here is the pound I owe you mum, now we're square". 

That doesn't help and here's why. That pound was an 'extra' pound, so an 'extra' good should be added to Johnny's record. Repaying the money he owed, is just doing the good he should have done in the first place. But what about the 'extra good' that should have been done with the 'extra pound'? It has not been done because he used it to pay what he owed. That 'extra good' is missing! So you see, we can never make up for the time spent doing bad.

All our time comes from God and is for us to do good with. Every time we use our time for anything other than the good God intended it for, is like stealing from God. The Bible calls this sin. The attitude  that says, 'I will do whatever I want with My time' is a sinful attitude that is in rebellion against the God who has given each of us all of our time for the highest possible good. He has never given us permission to do evil.

You might say, "That's not fair, having to use all our time to do 'His will'". But His will is the highest possible good. And it includes things like, rest, enjoyment, play, good work etc, so what's our complaint? 

Now if God is to remove suffering from the world, He would need to remove all the causes of suffering, and the causes are evil, and evil is that which is less than the highest possible good. The problem is, it is we humans who do evil and cause suffering. So if God is to remove the cause of suffering, guess what? You got it! It would mean removing you and me!

We will see in a later blog, how it is because we ignore God and do our own thing in life that the world is the mess that it is. 

Once we understand this principle, we can move on to see the implications of it. When we have done that, we will begin to see why God allows suffering and what he has done about it (past), what He does about it (present) and what he is going to do about it (future).