While some Christians just want to remain oblivious to what is happening around them, the real-deal believer MUST be very concerned about this world and what is happening in it. It is hard to be salt and light, as Jesus commanded us to be, if we just keep our heads in the sand.
The biblical Christian will take a keen interest in both the state of the world and the state of the church. Sure, that can cause us deep grief and concern, but we must share in God’s heart here. He cares greatly about these things, and so should we.
With all this in mind, let me say that I woke up this morning, asking in prayer: ‘What’s next? It just seems to be one terrible thing after another.’ From terrorist attacks to wars and rumours of wars, from cancer claiming the lives of loved ones to the abuse of children, it seems that the various demonic assaults we see all around us are never ending.
Every night I pray for all sorts of people, including various leaders, politicians and church folk. And I also pray each night that Christ will return quickly. The ultimate answer to evil is two-fold: The first coming of Christ when his death and resurrection dealt with the sin and death problem, and his second coming, when he puts all enemies under his feet, and sin and suffering will be no more.
This is what we call theodicy: justifying the ways of God in the light of evil and suffering. Since I have just been reading the new book by Ross Douthat Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (Zondervan, 2025), I was going to quote from it here.
I still will, but in the middle of penning this piece I got a call from an old pastor friend, who shared some kind words with me about celebrating Christmas without my wife again this year. We chatted about things like antisemitism and the Bondi terror attack – topics I have been writing a lot about of late.
He also discussed one of his favourite theologians, P. T. Forsyth (1848-1921). As he was sharing from some of these books, I went to my relevant bookcase and pulled them out. After he hung up, I further perused the volumes. Thanks Trevor for the timely – providential – call, and reminding me to revisit Forsyth.
So let me offer a short part of what Douthat had said and then turn to Forsyth. One chapter in Believe deals with three stumbling blocks to belief. One has to do with why God allows wicked things to happen. Of course theists have been discussing this for two thousand years now – three thousand, if we go back to one of the first theodicies: the book of Job.
So what Douthat says is not new, and it likely will not please angry atheists and others, but it is well worth sharing nonetheless. He says this in part:
But to claim that the argument is easily settled against divinity, that it’s such a slam dunk as to justify outright atheism and not just argument and doubt, is a pretty peculiar presumption.
To begin with, like the more confidently atheistic versions of the scientific project, the moral case against Almighty God assumes a version of the very premise it ostensibly denies – that human beings are so distinctively fashioned among all the creatures of the world that we are equipped to stand outside material creation and comprehend it so completely as to make a certain moral assessment of how good and evil are balanced or imbalanced in the cosmos. Indeed, it assumes that we can identify good and evil as meaningful categories at all, as opposed to just flags of convenience for things we have to instinctively favor and dislike.
Because only such a presumption makes it possible to place any trust at all in humanity’s ability to offer a serious objection to how an omnipotent God might have ordered His creation. If God existed and human beings were as certain materialists think we are – jumped-up apes laboring under an illusion of self-consciousness, our sense of free choice and intellectual “judgement” entirely ordered by our hormones and neurons – by what possible standard would we pass moral judgement on anything or anyone, much less the universe’s Architect? None, of course. To make that moral judgement, to condemn God’s moral failures, is to already assert something about human beings’ stature and capacity that only a religious conception of the human person can seriously allow.
Then, too, some of the intensity of that moral judgement on God’s failings seems very specifically to a residually Christian culture, which even in its secularized form retains a sense that the truest morality has been fully revealed in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, his teaching and His example and His death. The doctrine of the incarnation is an arguable answer to the problem of evil – here is God Himself, answering our laments by coming down to share in our sufferings and die in torture alongside us. But it’s also an arguable intensification of the dilemma, since it makes God’s goodness seem especially intimate and loving and embodied, complete with healings for the sick and special friendship for children and the suffering poor. If this is how intimately God loves us, why is there any evil in the first place? If this is what God does when he comes to earth, why in God’s name can’t He do it all the time?
But this is a problem that’s specific and meaningful inside Christianity, something to wrestle with once you’ve already generally accepted the incarnation and the rest of Christian faith. Step back from the intimacy of the Gospels to monotheism’s basic conceptual framework, in which an omniscient God creates, sustains, and deals out justice to beings – us – whose own existence is both impossibly contingent and yet also potentially eternal, and it becomes a bit harder to assert that you know better than this God about how even the worst hardships of a timebound human existence will look in the light of eternity. (pp. 154-156)
Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religiousby Douthat, Ross (Author)
As to the important Scottish theologian P. T. Forsyth, let me briefly mention two books that my friend and I were just discussing. One line from The Work of Christ (1910) that Trevor reminded me of is worth offering here: “Theology simply means thinking in centuries. Religion tells on the present, but theology tells on the religion of the future and the race.” (p. 144)
Yes, as I have often said, Christians tend to forget that we need to keep the big picture and the long term in mind. We lose necessary perspective when we focus on our own immediate little world, our own problems, and our own particular time frame.
When I cry out to God nightly about all the horrible things happening, I have to remind myself that every age has had its fair share of horrific evil, demonic destruction, and sinful selfishness. There have always been very dark periods in human history. Yet God has always been there, and he is not aloof nor unaware of what is going on.
Yes, I hope and pray that he comes soon – REAL soon. But if he does not, he has good reason for doing so. So I must continue to trust and persevere. Thankfully one day Christ will indeed return, righting every wrong, fully punishing evil, and bringing final, comprehensive judgment.
And that leads to another book by Forsyth: The Justification of God (1917). Recall my definition above of theodicy: it is about justifying God’s ways in face of the problem of evil. His book is all about this matter, especially pertinent since it was written while WWI was raging. Thus some of the chapter titles include:
-“The Failure of the Church as an International Authority”
-“Teleology Acute in Theology”
-“Philosophical Theodicy”
-“History and Judgment”
-“The Conquest of Time by Eternity”
I close with just two (out of so many) important quotes:
No reason of man can justify God for His treatment of His Son; but whatever does justify it justifies God’s whole providence with the universe, and solves its problem. He so spared not His Son as with Him to give us all things. The true theology of the Cross and its atonement is the solution of the world. There is no other. It is that or none. And that theology is that the Cross is not simply the nadir of Incarnation, but that it is God’s self-offering (under the worst conditions that love could feel for evil man) to His own holy name. The just God is the chief sufferer, and sole Doer. The holy love there is in action everywhere. The most universal thing in the universal Christ is His cross. Everywhere, according to God’s ubiquity, imminence, or what you will, His holy love is invincibly at issue with death, sin, and sorrow. Everywhere is redemption. And that is the only theodicy. The purpose of salvation is the principle of creation; and the ruling power of the world is the purpose of God.
It is no light problem that faces the Creator in His world. There was never such a fateful experiment as when God trusted man with freedom. But our Christian faith is that He well knew what He was about. He did not do that as a mere adventure, not without knowing that He had the power to remedy any abuse of it that might occur, and to do this by a new creation more mighty, marvellous, and mysterious than the first. He had means to emancipate even freedom, to convert moral freedom, even in its ruin, into spiritual. After the first creation drew on His might, the second taxed his all-might. It revealed His power as moral majesty, as holy omnipotence, most chiefly shown in the mercy that redeems and reconciles. To redeem creation is a more creative act than it was to create it. It is the last thing omnipotence could do. What is omnipotence but the costly and inevitable action of holiness in establishing itself everywhere for ever. The supreme power in the world is not simply the power of a God but of a holy God, upon whose rule all things wait, and may wait long. It is no slack knot that the Saviour has to undo. All the energy of a perverse world in its created freedom pulled on the tangle to tighten it. And its undoing has given the supreme form to all God’s dealing with the world. But at the same time the snarl is not beyond being untied. Man is born to be redeemed. The final key to the first creation is the second; and the first was done with the second in view. If moral freedom is the crown of the first creation, spiritual, holy freedom is the goal of moral; and it is the gift in the second creation. The first creation was the prophecy of the second; the second was the first tragically ‘arrived.’ There was moral resource in the Creator equal to anything that might happen to the creature or by him. And that resource is put forth in Christ—in His overcoming of the world on the Cross, and His new creation of it in the Spirit. All God’s omnipotence is finally there. The great goal is not the mere fruitage of the first creation, but another creation more creative still. The first does not glide into the second; there is a crisis of entirely new departure. (pp. 122-124)
And the book’s final paragraph also must be shared here:
Faith is more than an individual calm; it is the Church’s collective confidence on the scale of the world for the destiny of the world. The evil world will not win at last, because it failed to win at the only time it ever could. It is a vanquished world where men play with devilries. Christ has overcome it. It can make tribulation, but desolation it can never make. (p. 223)
Until the Lord returns, there will be more Bondi massacres – and likely even worse. But he WILL return. That is our blessed hope, and that is our ultimate answer to the problem of evil and suffering. As we read in Revelation 21:3-5:
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.”
