Why doesn’t God make things easier?
Perhaps the most vexing faith question of all time is the problem of God’s silence and his seeming indifference: Why does God allow evil? Why do bad things happen to good people? If there is an all-powerful and all-loving God, how do you explain that millions of innocent people suffer and die in all sorts of horrible situations.
Where is God in all of this?
Why is God (seemingly) hidden? If God is so massively real, why do so many people not recognize, acknowledge, or care about his existence? Why do believers have to live, almost always it seems, on the edges of doubt? Why doesn’t God make his (her) existence clear, a fact beyond doubt? Why doesn’t God silence his critics?
Classical Christian theology taught that evil exists because God respects freedom, both in nature and in human beings. When we are confronted with the problem of evil in the world, the conclusion we might draw is not that God doesn’t exist or doesn’t care, but rather that God respects and values freedom in a way that we don’t. What does this mean?
God doesn’t make things easier because God can’t make things easier, at least not without making us and the world into something far less than we are. When God made us, we were given as much freedom, creativity, and spunk as was possible. God didn’t play it safe but gave us as much godliness as he could without making us into gods ourselves. Simply put, in making us, God went so far as to give us a freedom that even God won’t tamper with.
God is perceived as silent because he allows human freedom and ingenuity to be precisely what they are meant to be, non-coerced, even by God.
Things could only be simpler if God had made us Swiss clocks – wonderfully tuned to pre-set rhythms, with no mess, no sin, no evil, and the beauty of perfect crystal. But then there wouldn’t be any love, freedom, creativity, or meaning. No. God built us on a razor’s edge, so full of godly fire that we are capable of both martyrdom and murder.
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