Inspiration

This is a question that I hear quite often. Why me? I presume people ask the question because something bad has happened to them or something wrong has happened to them. Some people even venture to blame God for their misfortune. It is easy to blame God. Some do it out of disgust while others do it out of shame. Many even claim to be Christian and yet they don’t understand why these things happen to them.

Let me offer my suggestion regarding three teachings in the Bible that just don’t seem to fit together.

• God is good. This simply means that God is absolutely pure. Not only is God pure but He also hates evil. He has to deal with everything that is in rebellion to Him.
• God is great. God is all-powerful and He can conquer anything that challenges Him.
• Evil is real. There are things out in the world that are in rebellion to God and that are at this very moment challenging Him.

So, here is the problem, God would know about evil. If God is really good, then why doesn’t He condemn it and do something about it? Also, if God is truly great—in other words, if He is all-powerful—then why wouldn’t He actually do what His goodness demands and destroy evil?

Do you see the problem? As Christians we believe God is good and He is great, and yet evil still exists and on a magnificent scale. How do we understand this?

Here are some examples of solutions by people who deny the existence of God.

• Deny God’s existence—and, with it, the reality of evil.

This sounds simple enough, wouldn’t you think? If God is good and great, the He would certainly destroy evil. And since evil is not destroyed, there must be no God.

Here is the problem with that thinking—a lot of people seem to miss the fact that if you throw out the idea of God, you have also thrown out the meaning of evil. You see, in an atheistic universe there is no actual good or evil, and therefore no absolute standard by which to judge anything as being ultimately right or wrong. So, all we are left with is are preferences. I have mine and you have yours. Robbery and murder are not my forte, but they might be somebody else’s. Who are we to say what others do is wrong? On the same token, who are they to judge what we are doing?

Now, we can do and make up rules and laws to try to help us get along with one another. But if these rules and laws are not grounded in any objective reality or standards beyond mere human opinion, then what makes them right versus wrong? They are just human preferences.

We should not forget that Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein, for example, had their preferences, which they imposed on their nations. Now, we can say we don’t like it and we can fight to try to stop it, but we’re left with the unanswerable question, “why accept our values over theirs?”

We know—unmistakably and undeniably—that evil is real and that some things, whether legalized and legitimized by society or not, are simply wrong. So, if evil is real, if it truly goes against a set of universal moral standards, it is a powerful indicator that there must be a transcendent moral lawgiver.

• Deify evil.

This comes primarily through Eastern thought, especially Hinduism and Buddhism, and through the New Age teachings in the West. Everything is part of God, these religions tell us—so the thing we call evil is actually, as we saw in the Eastern-influenced story of Star Wars, just the “dark side of the force.”

But if everything is part of god—not a personal God as the Bible teaches, but an all-encompassing impersonal god as is taught in these pantheistic worldviews—then evil and suffering are part of that god too. So, the problem then is that we are supposed to join with the very thing that contains evil within itself!

• Diminish God’s power. Deny God’s greatness.

This viewpoint says that God does exist but is limited. He is good and He sees the evil, but He lacks the power to do much about it. This simply comes from various strains of liberal Christian theology.

We see this idea that God is not all-powerful at a popular level in the best-selling book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, by Rabbi Harold Kushner.

There are major problems with this teaching. First, it denies what the Bible tells us—in both the Old Testament (including the Jewish Torah) and the New Testament—about a God who is unlimited in His power; who is unchanging; and who has Satan, the ultimate embodiment of evil, under His feet, ready to crush him at any moment.

How can we know that ultimately there will be any victory over evil? If God is limited, how do we know anything solid about the future? This is simply a weak and unbiblical attempt to explain evil.

• Diminish God’s goodness.

This only suggests that God knows about evil and has the power to vanquish it, but apparently doesn’t care enough to deal with it. He lacks the goodness to take action, letting evil just go on.

A lot of people in the midst of pain and suffering are, consciously or unconsciously, tempted to flirt with this idea. They have privately shaken their fists at God and said to themselves, “He must not be good; He must not care; He must not be loving—why else would I be going through this?

You see, during those difficult times, it is easy to overlook all the ways God has been good to us. It is common in the middle of a drought, for example, to forget that rain is the norm.

So, yes, bad things do happen, but a lot of good things do, too. Perhaps this is one of the reasons the Bible stresses the importance of gratitude—so we will remember God’s many acts of goodness in our lives.

There are many recorded revelations all through the Bible that assure us God is good. And the historical record of God’s patient dealings with His people certainly bears out those claims.

There is nothing we can say to make people suddenly okay with the evil around them or the suffering in their lives. Because—to be honest—we are not okay with it, either! Christianity offers the most satisfying answer to this problem.

M. Scott Peck begins his inspiring book The Road Less Traveled with this profound statement: “Life is difficult!”

Many people today have a different perspective on this. It is easy for us to sit back and want to believe that life should be easy. Instead, the road most travelled is full of complaining about life’s difficulties.

I find that life with Jesus Christ makes life so much easier. However, when one decides to follow Jesus, life is very costly. I believe it is pretty clear in the Sermon on the Mount that living with Jesus actually means walking a road less traveled. Matthew 7:13-14 (NASB) very well describes it. “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.”

Jesus also makes it very clear that He promises abundant life to those who will follow Him, while at the same time following Him is difficult and very costly. So if we elect to follow Him, we will travel the road less traveled.

It is one thing to be following Jesus for quite some time and then all of the sudden, He drops this question from Matthew 16:15 on us: “…But who do you say that I am?” If you are like me, you want to quickly say, as the disciples said, “You are the Messiah–the Son of the living God.” What we do not expect Him to say is that He must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law; and that He must be killed and after three days rise again!

In fact, the Apostle Peter could not handle those words and so he said in Matthew 16:22, “…God forbid it, LORD! This shall never happen to you.” Suffering and death just did not fit Peter’s concept of the Messiah. Does it fit in ours?

So what is this cost to follow Jesus? He put it very simple in Mark 8:34-35, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it.” Denying oneself is probably one of the most misunderstood and misapplied commands of our Lord. The word “deny” means “to resist,” “to reject,” or “to refuse.” In essence, it means to say “no.”

To deny oneself simply means to deny your self-lordship. In other words, it is saying “no” to the god who is me! I won’t bow down to my inward self anymore and I say “yes” to Jesus Christ as my Lord.

“Take up your cross.” Many folks just refer to an illness or a disability as their “cross” to bear. Jesus means much more than that. Jesus carried His cross through the streets to His own crucifixion. When a man carried his own cross through the streets, for all practical purposes he was a dead man. A man on his way to crucifixion was compelled to abandon all earthly hopes and ambitions. Jesus was telling us to think of ourselves as already dead, to bury all our earthly hopes and dreams, to bury the plans and agendas we made for ourselves.

Lose your life for My sake. Here is the mystery of the road less traveled. We finally find ourselves when we lose ourselves for Jesus’ sake. But what does that mean? By investing all that we are and have for Him and His gospel. By saying to Him, “Here is my home, my checkbook, my talents and gifts, my brain, my heart, my hands, my feet, my mouth. Lord, all this is Yours. Use it to glorify Yourself and further Your purpose on earth.

The road to Easter goes through Good Friday. The road to new life goes through the death of the old. The road to resurrection goes through crucifixion. Jesus calls us to walk that road, the road He walked.