Is it just me, or has this been a rough decade? We’ve seen serious hurricane seasons return with a vengeance, giving us the likes of Katrina, Rita, Gustav, and Ike; we’ve seen the representatives of a virulent, malignant strain of Islam take terrorism to a whole new level, beginning with the 9/11 attack on America; along with that, we’ve seen the government of Iran actually get worse, which would have seemed hard to believe before we were introduced to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the return of expansionist Russia; and now we’re seeing a storm of a different kind tear through our financial institutions, leaving us holding our collective breath to see which will stand and which will fall.And though it’s now receded into memory, we also saw the worst natural disaster in human history, the Asian tsunami of December 26th, 2004, which killed some 273,000 people. It seems strange to think that such a gargantuan event should be out of sight, out of mind, given the instantaneous response it provoked at the time; from children setting up tsunami-relief lemonade stands to Jay Leno selling a white Harley covered with celebrity signatures on eBay—a Houston company bought it for $810,000 to sit in the atrium of their headquarters—to offers of foreign aid from the U.S. government to large grants from Presbyterian Disaster Assistance and agencies of other denominations, people all across America snapped into action to offer assistance, and in that we only mimicked what the rest of the world was already doing. To be sure, there were also many who took advantage of the situation to line their own pockets, but on the whole, the collective response was one of which the human race could be proud.Of course, there was another response as well, from professional opinion-givers—pundits, authors, writers, Ph.D.s, preachers, and others of that sort—seeking to turn the situation to their rhetorical advantage; and in the West, at least, most such commentary revolved around religion. As Presbyterian pastor and writer Jim Berkley, who happens to be a friend of mine, noted with some exasperation, it seemed that the secular press had all of a sudden discovered the problem of evil—and assumed that the discovery was equally sudden for the church. The novelist and critic James Wood, writing in the Manchester Guardian that following January, wrote, “If there is a God with whom we can communicate, who (sometimes) hears our prayers, why does He not hear our suffering? Or why does He hear our suffering and do nothing about it? Theology has no answer, and never has had.” A few days before, Guardian columnist Martin Kettle had written a column titled “God and the Tsunami” which was, essentially, an 860-word elaboration of that same assumption, concluding with the question, “Are we too cowed now to even ask if the God can exist that can do such things?”It’s worth pointing out that there’s one important difference between Wood’s column and Kettle’s: Kettle seemed to think that atheist science provides a perfectly acceptable answer for the tsunami, while Wood understood that it doesn’t. As he noted, such an approach “can tell us how the world works, but cannot answer the eternal metaphysical wail: why do we suffer so?” Both, however, assumed that the tsunami justified them in their atheism, for surely Christianity can offer no worthwhile explanation.Unfortunately, as little as I like to admit it, the views on the tsunami offered by many Christians in the weeks after this disaster didn’t do much to challenge Kettle and Wood in their assumption. Why is it that every time something big and nasty happens, someone will inevitably jump up and pronounce it to be God’s judgment on the victims? It’s utterly beyond me. In Scripture, every time God is going to judge someone, he sends prophets before it happens, both to give them a chance to repent and to ensure that they recognize his judgment when it comes. I don’t recall there being any prophets predicting judgment on Asia, nor do I understand why some people are so quick to anoint themselves prophets of judgment after the fact; and if God hasn’t given you the gift of prophecy, that’s really not something you should be pronouncing on.Of course, that sort of “God is judging Asia” talk was far from the only reaction out there. Others, for example, seized on the relief efforts of Christian churches and organizations, and on the opportunity tsunami relief seemed to provide for missionaries and the indigenous church in countries such as Indonesia, Thailand and India, to proclaim that God allowed the tsunami in order to create these opportunities, as if the chance for people to give money justified even one death, let alone 273,000; and even if this does boost evangelistic efforts in Asia, couldn’t that have been accomplished without the loss of life? There is no doubt truth here, that God will bring good out of this calamity, but when it’s offered as an explanation, as a justification, for such pain and suffering . . . well, that strikes me as blasphemous and obscene.The issue here is one that the great journalist and wit H. L. Mencken identified when he wrote, “For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, easy to understand, and wrong”; and unfortunately, those are the sort of solutions, the sort of answers, to which we tend to gravitate. For Christians, it seems to boil down to, “God is good, therefore this must really be good in some way.” Obviously, atheists don’t have that particular issue, but even the Guardian’s tag team that I mentioned earlier show signs of this. For Martin Kettle, an atheist of a scientific bent, the tsunami allowed the easy dismissal of Christian claims and a relatively easy affirmation of an atheist scientific view, for science can explain it and religion can’t. James Wood, being a literary type, was able to see that the explanation science offers isn’t adequate to our needs, so he said, “This sort of event proves that we need literature to express our feelings”—as if that was any more adequate.The difficulty we have finding a satisfactory explanation for such an event as the tsunami, or the abuse of a child, or 9/11, or any of the other myriad ways in which human and natural evil devastate lives, should lead us to ask whether an explanation is really what we want. After all, let’s suppose that someone came along and offered an explanation of evil which really was sufficient, which really did explain everything in a satisfactory way, with no holes in it. What would be the cost of such an explanation? What would that mean? It would mean that evil is explainable, that it’s understandable; and for that to be the case, it would have to be part of the natural order, part of the necessary structure of the world as God made it. Put another way, for us to be able to offer an answer for why evil happens, evil would have to make sense, which would mean it would have to be in some way necessary to the proper order of things; which would mean that this world was flawed from the beginning, and that God deliberately created it flawed. It would mean that we would never be able to get away from evil, that evil cannot be defeated; it would mean that the people who say that good cannot exist without evil would be right, and thus that evil, too, is eternal. That, it seems to me, would be far too high a price to pay for any mere explanation.When once we see this, we realize that we could either have a world in which we can find a rational answer to the problem of evil, or we could have a world in which the final defeat and total destruction of evil is a possibility; and it is the consistent testimony of Scripture that the latter is the world we have. Scripture doesn’t offer any sort of philosophical explanation for evil, because it offers no compromise with evil at all, only unrelenting denunciation of evil in all its forms. Those who seek to explain why God would allow the tsunami should remember the words of Jesus in Luke 13 about another natural disaster, the collapse of a tower in Jerusalem, which killed 18 people; not only did he refuse to offer an explanation, he challenged the popular idea that their deaths were God’s judgment on them. Trying to make sense of evil is our project, not God’s, and thus it’s ultimately futile. Evil doesn’t make sense, it can’t be rationally explained, because it doesn’t belong to the world God made; it’s fundamentally alien to the way things are supposed to be, and so it’s fundamentally inexplicable.Does this mean that our faith has no answer to offer us for the problem of evil? Does this mean that God has no answer? No! Indeed, he offers us the only real answer possible: he offers us himself. Thus it is that when Habakkuk offers his complaint at the evil God allows, what is God’s response? “There is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and it does not lie. If it seems slow in coming, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay. . . . The righteous live by their faith.” The apostle Paul then picks this up in Romans 1, applying it to the gospel of Jesus Christ: it is through Jesus, by faith in Jesus, that the righteous live by faith. It is through faith in a God who doesn’t try to fob us off with explanations, as if such thin soup would really make our lives any easier or any better, but instead comes down to endure evil with us, and ultimately to defeat it by his death and resurrection.Thus, when James Wood asks, “Why does [God] not hear our suffering? Or why does He hear our suffering and do nothing about it?” he’s wrong in his question, and completely wrong to say, “Theology has no answer, and never has had,” because that’s exactly what Easter is about. God has heard our suffering—he has heard every cry of anguish, felt every blow and every betrayal, and caught every tear in the palm of his hand—and in Jesus Christ, he has done everything about it. In Jesus, he came down to share our suffering with us, drinking that cup to the very dregs. He took the weight of all our sin on his shoulders—the entirety of human evil and human suffering, of all the brokenness and wrongness of the world—and he carried it to the cross, its cruel thorns digging into his forehead, its sharp splinters shredding his back; and there, for the guilt of all the crimes he never committed, he died.This is God’s answer to evil. He doesn’t explain it, for to explain it would be to dignify it, to give a reason for it, and ultimately to excuse it, when evil is utterly inexcusable; instead, he says, “I have overcome it.” In the resurrection of Jesus, life has defeated death, and love has broken the power of sin, once and for all. Yes, there are still times when the pain of this world drives us to cry out with the Psalmist, “How long, O Lord?”; there are times when we wonder why God is waiting so long to raise the curtain. But we know that at the cross, he turned evil against itself, and on that first Easter, he broke it; and when the time is right, he will complete the victory he won that day. Evil will be banished, and all things will be made new; God will live among us, and he will wipe away every tear from our eyes, for death itself shall die, and grief and sorrow and pain will be no more. This is the promise, and the one who makes it is the beginning and the end, and all that he says is trustworthy and true.
