209 — Is God Culpable?
We’ve covered this very early on — and again midway — in this series, but it remains the most common question-type that shows up at tentpegsquestion@yahoo.com.
I liked your stuff in the God at War series. But, it did make me question some things. I guess to boil it down I would ask “If God has the power, and is the man at the switch, even if he doesnt know the fulture he still is watching events unfold and can intervene and stop the unjustified pain of others. If this is true, he is still an accessory to the crimes being commited or he is the worst father in the world…. right?” I would defend my family against any predator or attacker, but in this scenario God is the father who sits back and watches the attacker go at it. So, what do you think? How is God not responsible, at least in part, for the continued pain, sin, and suffering in the world? He is the man with the power, he is our father, but it seems he is OK with letting his children be abused. I would appreciate your thoughts on this, I respect your opinions and you have helped me through a lot of issues already by posting you sermons audio. Thanks and God bless you brother!
This kind questioner is referring to the service Rochester Church provides by posting my lessons online at www.rochestercoc.org for free. Hundreds more are available at a link on that site — and they are free as well. I did a seven and a half week series on Gregory Boyd’s work “God at War” concerning evil, God’s goodness, and the nonexistence of the future. Regular readers remember that we looked at this again not that long ago.
Can God stop evil from happening? Only by removing all evil — and that doesn’t happen in this life. In Jeremiah, for example, God repeatedly says that the things the Jews were doing were things He had never thought of nor had they entered His mind! God can and does react to evil, but to stop evil He would have to take away all of our free will. All of it. Like to look at pretty girls? Ever cross the line and lust? God would have to remove that forcibly from you for there are no sexual sins that don’t first start in the mind. Like to shop “just to look around”? God would have to stop that because it could lead to greed or envy. I could go on all day about this but the simple fact is that the only way to eliminate evil is to make a universe in which you do NOT want to live!
Or… to give you something so wonderful that you don’t want anything else. THAT is heaven.
Remember: the future doesn’t exist. Something happens, then it “is.” The “will be” portion of time and life is negotiable. I see things in this world that I fear might lead to heartache… but I do nothing because the future has not been determined (except for a few things God says He will do) and because other people must have their freedom. Am I being a bad father by not following around my married daughter or grown son and telling them what to buy, what to eat, who to talk to, what job to take, etc. ad infinitum? No. That would make me the worst nag in history. Sadly, that is what some people want God to become… they think. Should He ever do so, they’d hate Him and their life.
We don’t like the fact that God gave other people free will and we REALLY hate that God gives US free will but doesn’t remove the consequences of us misusing that freedom to sin. I submit that isn’t God’s fault, but ours.
September 24th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
You know Patrick, there are times when an answer to a question is, “I just don’t know” I have often wondered myself why God intervened quite often in situations, and even personal lives within the scriptures of the “Old Testament ” Old covenant, and why miracles ceased shortly after the “NEW”. It was said that he, GOD intervened in wars sinful actions, feeding his people, even childbirth, if anyone were to suggest that now they would be called a “nut case” What changed with God’s interactions with his people, could it be, they are not really “HIS” people ??
I don’t think it is safe to make that kind of judgment. If we did, we’d have to assume terrible things happened to Jesus and the apostles because they weren’t really HIS people. Yikes!
September 24th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
I completely agree with the free will aspect. Also there are times when what we think of as evil is actually benign. If an earthquake happens on Mars I don’t think anyone would call that an evil, so earthquakes are not in and of themselves a bad thing. Further God has made volcanoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, and earthquakes (to a lesser extent) predictable, so we can get out of the way, or build earthquake resistant buildings. If we take out benign events and acts of freewill we are left with very few “evils” that might be attributable to God.
The ones I struggle with are those like childhood leukemia. However, I have a hard time with those.
September 24th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Patrick That was great! it really reminded me of 1 John 1:5-7. If darkness is the absence (I believe that’s what the Greek “darkness” means) then to walk in Him and to know Him is to not know darkness. There is so much Light in Him, and He can fulfill every thing that we need! Your right that is heaven… But doesn’t He offer that to us know? If we would only turn and only focus on Him? Still workin’ on that.
Bobby
September 24th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Thanks Patrick, I was the one who submitted the question and you have given me things to think of. I guess, for me, its not so much that I want God to be the naggy father, but the Super Hero! Like when someone is about to rape someone, why doesn’t he swoop in and save the day, he didn’t take away free will, he just intervened at the right time to stop what the person was GOING to do. Does that make sense? But I do see what you are saying. I continue to wrestle with this issue and thank you for taking the time to answer my thoughts. God bless you brother and keep up the good work. You are a huge encouragement to me!
September 24th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Phillip Yancey asks a good question: “Why is it no one is concerned about the problem of pleasure? Only the problem of pain?” In other words, why did God create us to experience all sorts of pleasurable things, as well as to experience pain?
Personally, I think He gives us the capacity to experience good and evil in order to make informed choices between them. We would like for him to limit the scope of the things we experience to exclude major evil and its consequences – but then we would lose the balance we need to make balanced choices.
If God rescued us all the time from the consequences of sin in the world – even from natural disasters – we would lose our sense of sin having consequences.
As far as I can tell, there were no cataclysms in the garden east of Eden.
Not before the choice to eat the wrong fruit was made.
September 24th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
I agree with what you say. I think the key is Gen 3:22 “the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.” Combined with Psalm 8:5 “a little lower than the angels.” This is transferred to Christ Jesus in Hebrews 2:7-10. “His ways are beyond finding out.”
September 25th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
I may be out of synch here, but I’m thinking all things happen for a reason. I’m thinking that we choose our destination based on the path we choose to travel down. Some paths will bring good things, some will bring bad. If God intervened all the time, however, to keep bad things from happening – where would free will be?
I am with you in part, but I don’t believe everything happens for a reason. The Bible never indicates that. In fact, we see God being surprised at some things that happen (Jeremiah says that several times). I don’t think that God planned it all, but we can take what happened and use it to further God’s Kingdom. Or we can panic or fold. I don’t do panic or folding.
September 25th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
I agree whole heartedly with Keith’s comment that: “If God rescued us all the time … we would lose our sense of sin having consequences.” I would like to extend that thought a bit further: It seems to me that pain and tragedy form the matrix through which we attempt to comprehend the immensity of the Messiah’s sacrifice. We have a hard enough time wrapping our minds around Calvary as it is. Without the ability to use the personal experience of pain and sorrow as a reference point, would we take note of Jesus’ agony at all? How could be begin to understand He went through?
September 25th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Patrick; I am responding to your response to my comment. Tell me where I have misread the scripture that tells me that God the Father gave us over to his Son Jesus Christ, to judge and return to the Father on that final day. Do we really belong to GOD, until the Son returns us to him?? I believe Jesus has done all he was supposed to do, until that faithful day of judgment .
September 25th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
I don’t think it is an issue of free will at all. Jesus says to even think of a woman lustfully means that you have committed adultery in your heart. God knows what is in our heart. And even if we think it we are guilty cause he knows. So, with that, if a criminal is approaching a woman with the intent in his heart to rape her. He has chased her to a dead end and is about to pounce, then why can’t God swoop in and save the day? Does he have the power? Yes I would think. Would that interfere with free will? No, the guy has already committed the act in his heart, he is already guilty before he physically acts it out. So, Why doesn’t God save his children from horrendous atrocities and evils? Seems we are left to think, either he is not all powerful (as we understand it) or he is not all loving. In no way do I see this interrupting free will. It seems that this is a logical action a loving and powerful God would make, to save his child from evil, even if that evil is another one of his children. PLEASE RESPOND!
September 25th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Just another thought. We don’t think that Policemen and the like are God do we? No, of course not, but often they interrupt the crime that was going to take place in order to save a victim. They didn’t take away the mans free will by their intervention. If so, then they would be God. No, the man (or woman ;D)has already made their decision before they physically commit the crime. So when they are arrested, they are charged and sent to jail, whether they physically carried it out or not. (Just a thought to add against the defense of God on the basis of free will)
September 25th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Steve:
What, then, would you make of a man who’s internal sin (we’ll lust since that that’s the example you’ve already been working with) has painful consequences to an innocent party? I mean, there have been countless wives that have been caused immeasurable pain by their husbands’ lust for other women – even when the lust is not acted upon.
It would seem that the only way for God to “swoop in and save the day” in such a situation would be to remove the man’s lust. Just a thought.
September 25th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Good thought, but I guess I am more referencing the idea of a physical act of violence. God can’t stop what is in our hearts. We will think and feel what we want, that is free will. But when that comes to murder, or rape, or (you name it) I believe that a loving God would save the day. It is not sufficient to say that all sin is on equal par, I don’t think so, society doesn’t think so, and the Bible doesn’t think so. Is all sin a transgression of God’s very nature? Yes, but not all sin is the same. Some sins, inadvertently cause pain to others, that is they were never meant to cause anyone pain. Some are purposefully causing others, not just pain but horrific unimaginable pain. Stealing a pack of gum might get you the store security guard… But holding a person hostage in order to rape and kill, well that will bring the Calvary… Shouldn’t God be stepping up and being God? How do else would we know he was good if we don’t specifically see him doing good things? Like helping his kids out in a time of Horror just as any Dad would.
September 25th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
Steve,
I find it ironic that you said “holding a person hostage in order to rape and kill, well that will bring the Calvary.” I am sure you meant Cavalry (originally horsemen, now motorized war machines), but what sins do bring is Calvary (the place where Jesus died). I guess if I had to ask myself which was more important
1) My wife never having to risk being raped
2) My wife having the opportunity to go to heaven
I would choose 2 every time. When we ask “where was God when this happened,” the answer is “in the same place he was when he had to watch his son die.” I have sin in my life, and I thank God for the opportunity to repent. Why should some sins preclude that possibility?
September 25th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Yeah it was a typo, nothing ironic meant. But see it seems that you mean that Gods inaction is necessary for salvation, and you would choose risking your wife being raped other than Jesus not dying on the cross. They really aren’t the same thing. It seems that Jesus death was pre-ordained, are we to say to someone that has experienced a horrible tragedy that it was “Gods plan…”? No, of course not. I too thank God for the opportunity to repent of sin, but that is much different than allowing, (watching the horrid act and not intervening). If God knows all that is going on, and knows of the child being abused right now, and he doesn’t step in to save that child, well, he is at least partially responsible for the suffering that that child is enduring. There are many fancy spins we put on the argument and ways to divert from the issue, but the facts are the facts. The one who has the power to stop the action, doesn’t. It does not boil down to free will and does not have anything to do with future. (at least I don’t think) it is a simple case of inaction on the party that has the only ability to stop it. And to think that all sins are the same, of the same magnitude, cause the same damage and equal the same punishment, then I think we should reevaluate exactly how just of a God we think he is.
September 26th, 2009 at 10:28 pm
Steve, I think we need to keep God in perspective – He is Who He Is. If He deems it necessary to obliterate all but eight people in a catastrophic flood, He is God. If He desires to wash away Pharaoh and his armies in the crashing return of the Red Sea, He remains God. If He deems it expedient to wipe out 185,000 Assyrians in their sleep, He is still God. No one forces His hand on these matters; He chooses to do them. Is He responsible? Yes, for each one. Is He evil because He was responsible in an overt, active way? Is He evil because He permits harm and pain and death to happen in a passive, inactive way?
Maybe we just need to get away from the idea that we have the full picture of how everything works together in the universe, and that God doesn’t, and that everything that we see as bad must therefore be evil, even if God sees the good that He will cause to come from it.
Or do you consider it evil that God permitted His own Son to be arrested, tried, convicted, stripped, whipped, beaten, and crucified on a Passover weekend commemorating His deliverance of His people through the death of the enemy’s firstborn sons?
I think it was C.S. Lewis who said that one of our problems is that we think pain is always bad for us and that the existence of our pain indicates a lack of goodness in God. God gives men free will even when they use that freedom to inflict terror, pain, and genocide. However… this life is not the only life and the death of an innocent person is not the end of the story. Justice will never be found on earth (though we should work for it). God will sort it out for, as you noted, Keith, He is God.
September 28th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
So, blind allegiance is the answer to a question where there seems to be no way out to give God a moral out? And if we are to give God the out by saying, “We can not understand his ways,” “and we don’t know what his plan is” then we are denying reality. How? Well if we give God the out on this issue by saying “Yes, someone did get raped but look at the good that came from it!” Then the man who perpetrated the act should be given credit as well. I mean if it wasn’t for him raping the woman then all of this good wouldn’t have come right? It simply doesn’t work. And I don’t think that God requires, or has ever required blind allegiance to him, especially in the face of questions confronting his character.
Steve, I don’t think any of us is advocating blind allegiance. I think we are talking in shorthand since we’ve had these discussions here a few times before and since I have seven and a half hours of this up on the website. It is hard to condense that to a couple paragraphs.
September 29th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Hey, no offense intended. I have listened to the 7 1/2 hrs of audio, but feel the question is still unanswered, at least on a few ends. That is all. I am not meaning to drag this out I am just behind you guys in thinking about this subject i guess. If you guys have figured it out then email me please because I have not found a good answer for this issue.