News & Views
Faith in the Face of Evil
Core Christian belief states that God exists, that God is good and loving and that evil exists. However, the existence of a good and loving God and the existence of evil seem to be contradictory to many Christians and non-Christians. The issue of God and evil throughout history has been one of the biggest objections to the Christian faith.
Fourth century philosopher, Saint Augustine, questioned, “If there is a God, why is there so much evil?” This past century alone is rampant with great evils. The Holocaust, the killings in Rwanda and the terrorist attacks in New York City are only a few examples of the evil that human beings commit. We watch our family members suffer from cancer, our friends die in car accidents, our grandparents lose their minds to Alzheimer’s and our children die in the womb. And all the while we wonder…where is God in all of this?
Dr. Robert Myers, President of Academic Affairs at Oklahoma Wesleyan University, has witnessed a lot of evil and suffering throuoghout his time spent as a police officer and homicide detective. “I have probably seen more evil in this world than most people…people who have committed suicide and leave families, people who kill other people, people who abuse their kids, people who abuse other people’s kids, people who just look at life as if it’s nothing.” He explains, “I spent a lot of years looking at a lot of evil.”
One of the examples of evil that comes first to Dr. Myers’ mind is “the story of a woman who took her baby, set the baby on the stove, and set the baby on fire. It caught the whole apartment building on fire from the baby burning. The woman had no remorse. She just didn’t want to deal with the child anymore. You look at that…and then you begin to ask those questions. How can there be such evil? How can God allow such evil to exist?”
Dr. Mike Fullingim, professor of religion, tells a story of evil’s destroying power on faith, “I had a friend who went to India to be a missionary. He came up to my door when I was a pastor in Oklahoma City one day, heavily bearded and scraggly. I asked him what had happened to him. He explained that in India he had walked over dead body after dead body. People were in abject poverty, and no one cared. He could not understand how there could be a God when all of that stuff was happening. And so he gave up his faith in God.”
Yet evil does not always destroy faith. Sometimes it strengthens faith and demonstrates even more vividly the fellowship of sharing in Christ’s sufferings. C.S. Lewis explains, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
"They say that they will not give up their faith because they believe in Christ. They have no bitterness. They count it as joy to suffer with Christ."“Part of the reason that we go through the bad things is that God wants us to learn how to trust him.” Anna Welty, a junior at Oklahoma Wesleyan University, explains, “If anything, the bad things remind us of God’s presence even more.”
Richard Wurmbrand, Voice of the Martyrs founder, spent 14 years enduring Communist imprisonment and torture in Romania, yet he cried out to God, “I would love You in everlasting misfortune. I would love You even in consuming fire.”
Dr. Fullingim describes the evil that he witnessed in India this past summer. “It is evil almost unspeakable. Picture girls getting raped over and over again to make them give up their faith. Yet at the hands of their persecutors, they say that they will not give up their faith because they believe in Christ. They have no bitterness. They count it as joy to suffer with Christ. Their families want them to run away, but they will not.”
“We have a serious choice then.” Dr. Fullingim explains, “Can we believe in God regardless of whether he does everything that we want him to do…If I pray, Lord don’t let this person die and this person dies, what do I say? God can see the beginning from the end, so I can’t demand that God do certain things or I won’t believe in him.”
There are numerous examples in the Bible of God’s ability to use evil and suffering for his higher good. Joseph believed that God had a plan for his life. Years after Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery and imprisonment, these same brothers fell at Joseph’s feet and begged him, now the second in command of Egypt, for mercy. Joseph looked at the brothers who had hated him, and replied, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”
Another man in the Bible, Job, dared to ask God why. A blameless and upright man, one who feared God and shunned evil, he lost everything he held most dear, including his own health. He raged at God in Job chapter 30, saying “You turn on me ruthlessly; with the might of your hand you attack me. You snatch me up and drive me before the wind; you toss me about in the storm.” God answered him in Job 38. “Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?” A short while later, after Job had learned how to trust God in the midst of seemingly unbearable and unending hardship, God restored Job’s health, family and possessions.
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego stood before the king as they were about to be thrown into the fiery furnace in Daniel 3. “If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.” This is a deep-rooted faith, extending beyond surface convictions. This faith allowed them to both believe in God’s ability to save them from the blazing furnace and to trust in God’s higher purpose, even if it meant their deaths.
In Acts 14, Paul stood before the disciples bruised and beaten nearly unto death, yet Paul urges the disciples to remain true to the faith. “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God,” Paul encourages. He understood the high and sometimes painful calling that God places on His children’s lives, yet he also understood the glory, joy and power found in the knowledge of Christ. Paul exclaims, in Philippians 4, “Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!”
Christians do not worship a God who knows nothing of sorrow. They worship one who has carried the weight of all evil upon his shoulders. He knows how it feels to suffer and die, and he shares in our pain.
“Most of us think that God is not an angry God, but they are wrong. God is a God of anger and justice as well as a God of love and goodness,” Whitney Terry-Smith, a junior at Oklahoma Wesleyan University, explains. When God’s children do evil things that hurt themselves and others, the God of all that is pure and holy experiences anger and pain much greater than ours.
Whenever someone asks her why God does not use his power to stop humans from committing evil, Whitney Terry-Smith explains, “It wouldn’t be true love if it were forced upon you.” God greatly desires true love from his children. True love is the power to choose to love, but the price of true love is the power to hate instead.
“People have to get to a point where they understand that bad things will happen to you, and if they haven’t already, they will.” Dr. Myers explains, “You might have health issues, a family member die, financial issues, marriage issues. Something like that is going to happen in your life…but God has not abandoned you. God is greater than he that is in the world…He is greater than the evil.”
Anna Welty describes her mother’s philosophy. “Everything that happens goes through God’s hands, like a strainer, and we don’t know how many bad things God is also holding back from us.” As we look upon a world of suffering and pain and yet a world full of joy and goodness, how can we question the God who placed the stars in the sky and showed the waves where to halt upon the earth?
“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven,” explains Solomon, one of the wisest men to walk the earth. Yes, there is a time for questioning, but there is also a time for laying aside our questions and picking up the shield of faith. There is a time for trusting in a God who is infinitely wiser and more just than us. And maybe we will discover that we do not need answers to all of the questions as much as we need the power of Christ in us.