Can We Trust a God Who Allows Evil?

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Collin Hansen
Welcome to breakout. Round number one. You’re in the session. Can we trust a God who allows evil? You have decided to just jump straight off the deep end

Collin Hansen
here at TGC. 25 often when I’m teaching, I’m an adjunct faculty member at Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama, and often when I’m teaching, I have bleary eyed seminary students at 8am but you all just heard from John Piper, so I’m expecting you to be fairly warmed up for today’s session together. This just make sure to introduce myself. My name is Colin Hansen. I serve as the editor in chief, the Vice President of content at the gospel coalition, been here since 2010

Collin Hansen
and I also had the privilege of serving as executive director of the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics, which is kind of a place where a lot of these ideas that I’ll be talking about today have been worked out together with our fellows, as well as Our our late namesake Tim Keller, before he died. Our sponsor for this breakout is crossway. Crossway is a long time and very faithful partner of the gospel coalition. They are a nonprofit ministry that publishes gospel centered, Bible based content that seeks to honor our Savior and serves his church.

Collin Hansen
What I’m going to be doing today is not a sort of a word for word walk through, but inspired by a new book that I have out. It’s with crossway. It’s called, Where is God in a world with so much evil in that? In that book, I’ll give a little bit more detailed biblical explanation, especially working through the Old Testament and a number of the ideas. It is a short book. It’s part of our series with crossway at the gospel coalition called hard questions. Very simple premise. Every one of these little booklets, you can go pick up all of them, cross the way in the bookstore. It’s asking really hard questions on anything ranging from the trans movement to the resurrection, the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ, and about everything in between. So we’re working it’s an ongoing series. We’ll be adding to it, but the idea is to help you, in eight to 10,000 words, be able to process through these difficult ideas and share them, then with others as well. What we’re going to be talking about today is I actually wrote this when I was with my family over at Tyndale house in Cambridge, England. And I would talk during the time. We’d have tea with you, with the other scholars. And so it was some some I was a little intimidated, who was pretty, pretty impressive people, and I would start to share what I was writing about. And they would look at me like, good luck with that. So you knew was kind of difficult. The challenge when you’re talking about the problem of evil is that you could be working with, I mean, how many words would it take for us to exhaust that concept, whether you’re going to approach it with 8000 words or 800,000 words or 800 million words, it’s it’s not enough to find the resolution that we all desire. But I think John Piper set us up well to understand that many of us are here in the room now, not because this is an academic or merely academic question, but this is deeply personal. I don’t know all of you, but I do know that all of you, in one way or another, have encountered this question in very personal and very often painful ways about the things that have been done to us, the things that are done to the people we love, or simply done to other people around the world. Perhaps they are also in reference to the things that we ourselves have done, the way that we have also contributed to to evil. I do want to warn you, if you’re familiar with my work through the gospel bound podcast, my work with the Keller center, you probably know that one of the areas that I teach on most frequently is the Second World War. I was a European history major, and so I look at a lot of these questions from a historical perspective, trying to bring them into our own day. And that’s what I do, opening with a discussion in this little little booklet about the Holocaust. You certainly won’t offend me if if you choose to walk out of this session, I’m not doing anything deliberately to be provocative or anything like that, but we are dealing with the most basic questions about why is this world the way that it is? Whether it’s in your own life or whether you turn on the news, whether you open your history books, it’s pretty painful, no matter where we look, and that’s part of what makes that glorious grace we just heard about and studying the book of Ephesians and that we sang about so wonderful because of what it delivers us from. It delivers us from the evil done to us and the evil that we do to others, and ultimately toward God Himself. Of so again, no no offense on my side, if this is not what you signed up for, there are a lot of other good sessions going on right now as well. Well, of all the harrowing images from the Second World War that of mushroom clouds and floating corpses in the ocean, there’s one of them that stands out to me. It might be one that you are familiar with. It was taken as a picture taken in 1942 outside of the town of Ivan Harad in Ukraine. There’s a mother in this picture. She’s running from left to right, and she’s holding and perhaps shielding her child. The scene itself was not rare. It played out millions of times across dozens of nations, to families that have been learned long since forgotten by history. What is rare is that someone chose to capture this scene on film. There was somebody who not only approved of what this photograph depicted, but also celebrated it. At left stands a German soldier with the rifle aimed at the mother and child, and in just a split second after this picture was taken, they would both be dead.

Collin Hansen
Well earlier this year, we learned the fate of a Jewish family captured in the terrorist attack of October 7, 2023 I can already tell I’m going to be emotional in this talk. Terrorists from Gaza captured the bebus family then killed the mother, Sheree and her two sons in captivity, one child who was strangled to death by Bare hands was four years old. The other with red hair like his brother, was just 10 months old. Earlier this year, we commemorated the three year anniversary of Russia invading Ukraine and what Vladimir Putin described as a de nazifying campaign. And just like that, with these two wars, the fields of Ivan Harad don’t feel so far away anymore, and 1942 doesn’t seem like that long ago. So we ask whether it’s our personal lives, the people that we know are just watching the news, where is God in a world filled with so much evil? On a question that I can avoid asking today as I look around the world, is a question can avoid when we look to history, can this fallen, brutal and cruel world really be God’s plan. Every night, my family gathers in our home library to read the Bible, to sing and to pray. My son, who is my older son, who is 10 years old, often asks me. He’s very into, you know some of these things? He asked about the war in Ukraine. He knows about it. How do I answer him? And how am I supposed to explain any of these things as a parent, as a as a Christian, and what is God’s answer? More importantly, to all of our fervent prayers, of simply asking God, where are you? Where are you in a world filled with so much evil? It’s not merely an academic question, one that is deeply personal to us. What I’m going to do today is work through four different answers given to this question and explain why I don’t think any of them works, and then conclude with what God offers, which is not necessarily an explanation at all, but ultimately the gift of His presence, the gift of His Son. So let’s start there, looking at the first, first answer that’s often offered to this question now and through history. Sometimes we assure ourselves that others suffer because in this world full of evil, because they were not careful and they were not thoughtful. I was reading a book a number of years ago about the book of Job, and maybe you already know this. I don’t know why it was so revolutionary to me, but the question was about Job’s friends. And Job’s friends, we often forget they get a bad rap. We forget how long they sat there in presence with job, mourning with him. But the question is, why were they so persistent on job being able to understand what he had done wrong. The reason is because if Job had done something wrong, then they would be okay. We often assure ourselves that these things that happen in a world full of so much evil will not happen to us because we do things the right way. Asked somebody about why is Hollywood filled with so much violence, so much so much murder, so much gore? I said, Isn’t this evidence that we think often or even are overly comfortable with this, with with with violence and evil in this world? The answer was no, it’s precisely because we’re not comfortable with it, because we think that those things we’re seeing on screen will never happen to us. That’s why we’re not afraid of them. That’s why we watch them. That revolutionize my perspective on how we try to cope with this difficult question. In the early years of our modern State of Israel, many Holocaust survivors carried a stigma the Jews who had not spent their time not in Europe during the Holocaust, but in the Middle East in the 1930s and 40s, could not understand how 6 million Jews could have died in Europe without more resistance, without more fighting back. Surely, the victims should have done more. They should have fought back harder. They should have known it’s not God’s fault. Some said it was the Jews fault themselves and the Jewish leaders themselves. These were other Jews who were saying this in Israel as refugees trickled in the 1940s and 50s.

Collin Hansen
The challenge is the sheer scale of the Holocaust overwhelms any of our traditional defense mechanisms about this problem of evil, and certainly any efforts to fight back. You have an example, the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising failed against a determined Nazi brutality, and there simply is no way to explain the scope of this evil by blaming the victims. This is one of our one of our go to ways to solve this problem is to blame the victims. When I teach students who are training to lead churches, the final assignment is to write a sermon that incorporates what they believe is the most powerful objection to Christianity. For me, this is not a difficult one to come up with. It is the silence of God in the face of suffering, especially the suffering of children. We cannot blame them for their suffering. There’s no way to say those kids in the Holocaust, they didn’t deserve it, exactly, but they should have done something else. How can it doesn’t work. You can’t do that at all. In fact, this question is so difficult that sometimes I’ll be in an apologetic conversation with somebody who’s not a Christian. They’ll be asking me questions, and I’ll say those are good questions, but they’re not half as difficult as this one. So let’s just jump to that one, because if you can wrap your mind around this one, everything else seems pretty easy by comparison.

Collin Hansen
It’s not just that most of us can relate, though, to the simple question of asking, Where is God and receiving an answer of seeming silence. We can all relate to that. It’s that this question of God’s silence. Why did he allow this to happen? Where was he speaking up about this in the Holocaust has precipitated nothing less than a complete moral revolution in western civilization. The historian Alec Ryrie in the UK, at Durham University, observes that World War Two exposed Christians for having the wrong priorities in their lives. He says that now seemed plain, that cruelty and discrimination and murder were evil, in a way that, by comparison, the things that Christians were fixated on, fornication, blasphemy and impiety were not essentially. What he’s saying here is that this evil was so overwhelming. Certainly, there were Christians who participated in it, but many other Christians were just totally overwhelmed. They couldn’t really fathom what was happening and had no explanation for it and no defense for how it happened in the cradle of what had been Christian civilization. It just overwhelmed everyone, and we’re still living with the consequences of that today. In other words, the Holocaust, it transformed our standards for evil in the shadow of Auschwitz. How can anyone be worried about such supposedly relative little differences, like different Christian denominations? Or why should anyone care if two adults engage in consensual sex or a little cursing in God’s name? Can’t be a big deal when God didn’t bother to stop millions of Jews from marching into the gas chambers. You see that just makes everything else pale in comparison. And there’s just and there’s no way for us to be able to account for it. Robbery goes on to say something that has simply just blown my mind since I first learned it years ago. He said that until. World War Two in the Holocaust, Jesus Christ was the most potent moral force in Western culture. And anybody who’s been to Europe or is simply familiar with that area, you don’t have to look hard for evidence, just looking around at medieval art and visit ancient churches and town squares with bells tolling on Sunday mornings. And even non Christians surrounded in that culture still felt like they needed to follow the example of Jesus’s love and he set the moral standard in His sinless life. But the Holocaust changed all of that. The overwhelming tragedy of the war displaced Jesus as a fixed reference for Good and Evil today, the bells still toll, but the pews are largely empty. The Fine Art only includes Jesus to be ironic today, and you can pass nearly every day except maybe Christmas, in relative ease and comfort without giving any thought to Jesus at all. So who replaced Jesus as the new moral standard? According to historian Alec Ryrie, that would be Adolf Hitler. Hitler replaced him as the standard of morality. Here’s how Ryrie explains this, it is as monstrous to praise him as it once would have been to disparage Jesus, while Christian imagery crosses and crucifixes have lost much of their potency in our culture, there is no visceral image which now packs as visceral an emotional punch as a swastika. Think about this, friends. It’s the tale of these two crosses. The Cross as we know as Christians is not only literally, but also figuratively. It is it is this ultimate brutality, this ultimate evil, the crushing of this empire of in this case, the Jews, in this case, the Son of God Himself, this ultimate brutality, but the Cross does not evoke those kinds of emotions. Now, light show going on in here. I don’t know what’s going on. Sorry about that. I didn’t plan for that.

Collin Hansen
But if you think about it this way, if somebody walked down your street they were carrying a Christian cross, you might think that’s a little strange, but you wouldn’t probably think much of it. If somebody did that down your street with a swastika, you would feel threatened. You would feel like there’s something dangerous in there. The point is, I’m simply trying to illustrate is that this overwhelming tragedy, the Holocaust, empty, emptied people’s sense of Christianity having a way of explaining this problem of evil. And the response then, this is our second response. The first response then, was to blame the victims. The second response to this problem of evil is to blame the dictators. Think about it this way. Have you had an evangelistic conversation with someone and said, You know the kind of the typical line, if you had to say today why you should go to heaven, how would you account for yourself? And the response you will typically get today is, well, I think because I’ve been a good person, okay? And here’s what they mean by a good person, and they’ll usually say this, at least I’m not as bad as Hitler. Okay? I’m just trying to explain to you people didn’t talk this way. Of course, there wasn’t a Hitler to talk about, but they didn’t talk this way about how we’re okay as long as we’re just not really, really bad. That’s the moral revolution of trying to explain away this problem of evil. We blame the dictators. We’re not as bad as everyone, as everyone else. The problem with this one, though, is, how do you know who are the baddies? Who are the bad guys today? Now think about this. This is where this argument falls completely apart. I would think that the most Nazi thing a person could do is invade, unprovoked, a neighboring nation in Europe. That’s like, that’s like, textbook definition Nazi, right there. So why is Vladimir Putin saying that he’s de nazifying Ukraine? How does that work with its Jewish president? How does this work? It’s very simple. If he can cast the war as being in the script of World War Two, where they had been invaded, and indeed, a number of Ukrainians had joined in that Nazi attack because of their hatred for the Russians and the communists especially. He can, it’s okay. He can do anything he wants. So. The problem is, by just blaming the dictators as if they are some uniquely awful group of people, we are then absolved. Whatever we do instead is okay by comparison. That’s how we try to sell that. You can see why this, this falls apart. One of my absolute favorite writers is a Russian writer named Vasily Grossman. He wrote an incredibly harrowing account of the Holocaust in his book, Life and fate. If nothing, it’s a big book. I’m not gonna, not gonna pretend like it’s not, it’s like think about Tolstoy’s War and Peace, but think about it, for world war two in there that was actually supposed to make you think that it’s good, make you scared of it. But anybody walks away and says they read life and faith, I’ll consider this a success. But here’s part of what, part of what he understands in this. He writes, he covers the same problem that I’m trying to get at right here. It’s the problem of the suffering of innocent children. He’s building on what Fyodor Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov talked about, as well as the suffering of innocent children.

Collin Hansen
There’s I’ll give you one scene in that book that just brings so much emotion to me as a young child who becomes separated in this book, Life and fate, this novel, from his parents during this selection for for the Treblinka gas chambers, Vasily Grossman was one of the first people to walk into Treblinka when it was liberated. Okay, so he knew what he was saying. His mother, he was Jewish. His mother was Jewish, and she was actually killed by the Nazis in Ukraine. So he understood what he was talking about. I can just hardly tell this story without just weeping. It’s so emotional. There’s a Jewish doctor, a woman who could have avoided immediate she could have been saved because she was a doctor. This is the selection. If you have a profession or you’re a man, you go right. If you’re a woman or a child, you go left to immediate death. She could have gone right. She decides to go left. But she does this because of this child who becomes separated from the parents who knows where they are at this point, this woman, who never had children of her own, has one last thought, according to Vasily Grossman, before she dies, she says, Today, I have become a mother. Her last thought, again, the question of innocent children, innocent suffering. It just overwhelms our system. What ends up happening, though, is, if you try to say, well, it’s about those evil dictators, well, the problem there is that, look what the Russians. Look what Vladimir Putin have done. They’ve murdered all sorts of children and taken them captive, it justifies you in doing anything. And the reason Grossman ended up being blacklisted by the Soviets was because he said, evil is not about the bad guys over here, the Nazis and the good guys, the communists over here, you’re basically the same you’re doing the same things. You can justify all kind of evil by saying, at least again, I’m not as bad as that other side in there. And that’s the third then objection. It’s the third one. Okay, so we’ve we’ve blamed the victims, we’ve blamed the dictators, the really bad guys. Okay, at least I’m good compared to them. Third then we are now blaming the people I don’t like, the people on the other side of things there I mentioned. That’s exactly what Grossman was trying to capture. There’s another writer who was especially good at talking about this, and that was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Christian, and he’s worked the Gulag Archipelago and others as well. His line is one of the most famous, really, of all time, and it is as true today as it was 1000s of years ago, as it was to the height of the Russian Soviet system and its evils. And it’s just true today. He said, we like to imagine that the line between good and evil runs between me and you, instead of inside every single human heart, that is where the line of good and evil runs through, not through people, not through people groups, but through each individual person. So what’s happened then, if we answer these questions the wrong way, is it shifts evil from something that the scriptures talk about comes from within us. Us as we inherit that original sin and evil that comes from within us, inside of all of us, to something that is merely out there with our enemies. What this does then is it moves us from the defendant to the judge of morality, as if today we’ve become virtuous just because we’ve been born after Hitler, just because we’ve been born later than that. The thing is, friends, you know, as Christians, we need an objective standard of morality that is bigger than just not Hitler. There has to be something beyond that. All manner of evil begins when we underestimate the human penchant for self deception of saying I’m righteous because of the people I hate, I’m righteous because those people are bad. This is so tempting now, as it is in any other time, the people we already hated are always to blame. And now finally, then we get to the last of the objections or explanations for this fourth then the last person to blame for the problem of evil is God Himself, or more likely than the

Collin Hansen
perception of God or the absence of God. So perhaps we are tempted then to in response to this question, to silence God, to erase him from history as an echo of humanity’s ignorant past. And maybe we expect that an answer to this question, a satisfactory answers to this question, will erupt when we when we stop raging against a God who isn’t there. It’s the basic atheist response to the problem of evil. He’s not there, so stop complaining about him who can’t respond. Years ago, I was talking with an elder at a church about a man in his congregation. And this man had endured a job like existence. It was so it was so sad, loss of his family, loss of his jobs, loss of his health, everything. In the end, he the elders have been walking through Him with all of this. And in the end, he left the church because he blamed God for it, and with all of the genuine, genuine compassion that I had for this situation, I said, Did it help? Did it help friends, he didn’t suffer any of these things because of his belief in God. He suffered these things because we live in a world full of evil. We live in a world that is longing, a creation that is longing for its Redeemer to return, a creation that has been subjected to utility, a world that is is subject to the evil that is done by us and committed against us, from and ultimately toward toward God. The thing about rejecting God in this situation is that you lose your only chance. You lose your only hope. There’s no answer to this problem by saying God isn’t there, or that saying God is not competent to deal with any of it. This doesn’t solve any of your problems. Think about it this way. I guess there’s some comfort to know that God isn’t just holding out for us in our misery. But does the baby Stop crying if she knows her mother isn’t in the next room? I mean,

Collin Hansen
do you stop crying if you know there’s no mother who will ever come to comfort you. Doesn’t make any sense. Would it bring comfort to know that her mother has left and will never return? The thing about knowing that your mother is still around, if she’s somewhere in the house, she might eventually hear your cries and bring you comfort, to hold you, to bring you, you milk, and there’s ultimately, hope, and that’s why I think so often in this situation, we’re not talking about the silence of God, because friends, our very cries about the state of this world and about what’s happening to us are evidence that God does exist, and they’re evidence that he does care, because these are things that we do, because we have been made in His image. Think about this. No other creatures ask these questions. It’s not the dolphins do not cry out in the silence for God. The Eagles don’t ask each other, where is God as we soar over the earth, the gazelles don’t wonder if they should forgive every man, woman and child, regardless of whether they believe in Jesus or acknowledge him as creator. Has been made in His image. So we demand an answer to this question because we’ve been made by a God who is just that this is not the way things should be. We cry out for mercy because we’ve been made by a God who is merciful. That’s exactly why we answer and ask and answer these questions. God is not silent at all in response to our pleas amid the evils of these worlds, he listens even when we’re not calling out to him. Our very sense of this justifies, testifies of this justice, testifies that God hears every child’s cry. We can blame others. We can blame the victims. We can blame God. But even the search itself proves that God is there, that he does not care, he does care, and that he is not silent in the midst of all of this. And if we need more evidence of this, then other than what we simply know from looking around the world, we see this explicitly all over scripture, said again in my little book here, we look at it a lot more. But what I love many things, many things I love about Scripture is when we turn there, we find anything but safe and sanitary answers to the most difficult questions, and find instead, we find many of the most faithful, inspired writers of Scripture asking the same hard questions. This is the inspired words of God. They’re asking these same hard questions about God. I think about lamentations three. I bet a lot of you don’t you’re not necessarily familiar with the passage, but you know it from the song, okay? It’s one of the most beautiful passages in the Bible, inspiration for the greatest songs in our hymn book, we read in Lamentations 321, to 24 this, but this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope, the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, says my soul. Therefore I will hope in him. One of my closest friends had his son die suddenly middle of the night with absolutely no explanation, and he wrote a book based on the hope of this passage. It’s an absolutely beautiful passage, but that’s not what I’m trying to highlight here. Read on in Lamentations three, and the Prophet Jeremiah’s perspective begins to change and even darken, and this is where we see no matter how hard your questions, no matter how painful your experience, it can only match what we already see in Scripture itself. Lamentations, 343, to 48 you have wrapped yourself with anger and pursued us, killing us, killing without pity. You’ve wrapped yourself with a cloud so that no prayer can pass through. You have made a scum and garbage among the peoples all our enemies open their mouths against us. Panic and pitfall have come upon us, devastation and destruction. My eyes flow with rivers of tears because of the destruction of the daughter of my people. I haven’t seen any hymns written on that part of the passage, friends, again. I don’t know what you’re going through, but I have a feeling that it, Scripture can handle it, God can handle it. These experiences, they are as true to life as anything could be.

Collin Hansen
I just want you to know that your belief in God, it can survive your worst nightmare, whether that worst nightmare is in the rear view mirror and you’re still dealing with it, or whether it’s ahead and you don’t know, but your belief can survive your worst nightmare, because it is not the strength of your faith that holds you to God, but the strength of God’s grip on you that holds you through any of these circumstances, which is what we see so clearly in in the scriptures. So I just want to close here and say we’ve looked at a few different ways of kind of the different aspects of fault. We can the question of evil. We can can blame God, and as a consequence, we can essentially say we’d be better off if God simply didn’t exist. We get rid of him. We can blame the dictators. Those are the really bad people. Thankfully, I’m not that bad. I’m not Hitler, so I’m okay. We blame the other side, the people we already don’t like. We can blame them. Them for whatever goes wrong. Or we can blame the victims themselves. We can say, well, maybe they had it coming to them if they did something wrong. Now we’ve also looked at every one of these reasons of why I think they fall short. But the reality is, when you’re looking at this situation, the answer could involve some of these. It could involve all of these in some way. Of course, it can also involve us. We talk often in the problem of evil, about the things that have been done to us or done to other people, but some of us deal with the guilt of the horrible things that we have done to others and wonder if God’s grace could be enough. We wonder about that problem of evil, of what we’ve done in our past, maybe even our recent past. So what’s the solution? We’ve been exploring it here, but we know then that God does something totally unexpected, something totally unexpected. In Scripture, we find that he is not silent at all in the face of this question. In fact, rather than silence, he sends us the word. He sends us the Word of God to dwell among us. We learn that the very Word of God is the Son of God. You see here how it’s so easy I just think about my own kids. For many of us, that’s a worse nightmare relating to our kids. And how amazing is it? How perfect is it that the very solution God gives to the problem of evil is the offering of his own son, his one and only Son, the offering of his perfect, spotless, sinless, obedient son as a father to make us then sons and daughters of the living God as well. So his son lays down his sinless life, and he substitutes not only for the sin in here, inside us that separates us from God, but also for the sin that separates us from each other, and all the evil that results from that, the sin that then afflicts us, he has already given your life for yours so you can live now knowing that inheritance belongs to you and that no one and nothing can rob you of that even through your worst nightmare, that is the ultimate hope and that he is coming soon again to silence all sin and all evil forever for good. Let me see if I can take a couple questions before we stop. A question right here. I’ll repeat it as long as I can hear it.

Speaker 1
I’ve had the question asked me several times. Yeah, God is sovereign. Yeah, right. Verse. Began, holy God. He loves

Speaker 1
us. God is sovereign, right? Why does he still allow evil? My daughter, yeah, I don’t know.

Collin Hansen
Well, yeah. So the basic question, I mean, when you’re boiling down the problem of evil, this is kind of the gotcha question. It’s one that we ask, but it’s also the one that’s often asked of us, the question of, if God were truly sovereign, then he would not allow, he would not allow evil. Got to say, I finished. I was teaching a kind of delivering a sermon in class as a model, and I worked through this, one of my students was angry at me, and he said, You didn’t answer the question. As it was so interesting, as I went back to a scene from BROTHERS KARAMAZOV in and Dostoevsky, brother Karamazov, and it’s a scene that depicts Jesus on the witness stand. He’s being accused, accused and accused. In the end, he doesn’t respond. What’s interesting is it’s kind of a fictionalization of Isaiah, 5253 okay. He’s silent before his accusers, and he approaches and he offers a kiss to the person who’s accusing him there, and he’s like, Wait a minute. No, where’s your answer? Where’s your answer? Okay, well, in Scripture, once again, what do we look at? What’s the answer to this question? In Scripture, there’s two of them. Number one is the book of Job. And what does God say at the end of the book of Job says, I’m God. So it doesn’t get an explanation for everything. It’s just, it’s just not there. And then the second explanation is, whatever the answer might be, it can’t be because God doesn’t love us, because otherwise, what is the point of the cross? What is. The point of the sacrifice of the son of the sinless Son of God, what is the hope of the resurrection? I mean, that’s where scripture goes. It doesn’t give us a complete resolution of that, but the way to flip that around, though, is, of course, we clearly have a problem of evil. But I would love to know another explanation. That’s why I did this talk. This talk this way. Give me another explanation that explains it in a satisfactory way. These are the other explanations. They don’t work. Second, Christianity has an explanation for the harder question, which is the problem of good, of why is there good in the world? Because, apart from God, there is absolutely no explanation for good. Everything is merely preference and power. And preference is a form of power to dictate your will in there. So there’s no easy answer to that question, and you can read as many tomes as you want as long as they are or as short as my little book, and that’s basically where you’re going to end up. I will say one last thing, this is not my belief, but some people will also say that’s why God’s not sovereign. That’s why we have free will. That’s one of the most common defenses. I don’t subscribe to that based on my own conclusions, biblically, but that’s that’s one of the other most common ones. A question right here, the Free Will defense. Well, certainly it is the case. Let’s talk about the Free Will defense here, just very quickly. I talk about this fairly often, and Don Carson himself had a privilege to be one of his students. Part of the answer is that, why are we blaming God for what we do to each other? Yeah, that’s part of the Free Will defense right there. But within that, I would just say paradigmatic for me theologically would be the book of Acts, specifically the sermons of Stephen and Peter, and what is known theologically as the doctrine of compatibilism. What you see very clearly there are two streams held intention that we can’t fully explain. The one is that Peter and Stephen both say, who killed Jesus? The Jews, the Romans, you. You killed Jesus. Whose idea was it? God’s huh? How’s that supposed to work together? You’re responsible for doing this. You’ll be judged in doing this, and it was according to God’s plan. If you think that’s an exception, go back to what I said in Lamentations. That’s the whole explanation for the exile as well. Who did this? The Babylonians did this. The Assyrians did this. They’ll be punished. Whose plan was it mine? Why? Because of my love to discipline you. So I don’t know how to explain all that, but that’s, that’s what the Bible holds, intention in there. See if we get one more question right there. Yeah. So within the table argument, there’s also the idea that we’re from love to be possible, yeah, that it needs to be free possibility of rebellion.

Collin Hansen
Do you think that works within Yeah. So the question then is, what about there’s there’s no love without freedom? Essentially, I think that relates a little bit more closely to a hard question as to the origins of evil, especially in the book of Genesis, you get strange questions about the fall of Satan, by the way, this came up my home group recently. Like that was a that was a head Twister, so, but yeah, those questions came up there as well. I think, though, the challenge there within Reformed theology, but then also, just plainly biblically, everywhere you see that God’s love comes also with God’s sovereign, God’s sovereignty. So we just heard that from John Piper, from Ephesians one. So I don’t think we want to go so far as to say that love can’t be real unless if it’s compelled, because I don’t think I would have any hope apart from the compelling love of God to raise me from being dead in my transgressions. So that’s where I don’t go with that question. But yes, I do go when you look down there at the beginning, there is some sense of we need to preserve this, that God’s sense that God is not the author of evil in there, but also that nothing happened outside of his plan. Don’t know exactly how to reconcile those but there are smarter people than me that work on it, but they end up about the same place, right here. Quick last question,

Collin Hansen
yeah, yes. So does Jesus answer this in the parable of the wheat and the tares basically just that we can’t really know until the end, until the separation, or what aspect? Yeah, he’s not going to risk tearing up the wheat. I see he can tear out the tears right now. But yeah, yeah, that’s another way. That’s another way to look at it as well. Another way, just existentially, to talk about this is to think that we have such a small inclination of what God is doing and the problem. Of good is, in part, if you just think about it this way, instead of thinking about the bad things that God allows to happen in your life, which I don’t minimize at all. We all have those things when you start to think about all the good things that God allows, including things that we don’t deserve. I mean, in one sense, we don’t deserve anything. We don’t deserve life, but in a sense, the things that we don’t choose that God allows, then you truly have more of a problem of good, and I will just say, in terms of attitude, and that’s the thing part where Jesus is leading us there, it leads you to an attitude of general gratefulness, which is a good way. It’s good antidote to these problem of evil questions. Let me pray for us, and then you can move on to your next, next session. God, thank you for guiding us through such difficult questions. And Lord, I can’t possibly know how everyone wrestles through these in a room like this, but I take great confidence, God that you do. You love each one of us so personally, so intimately, and that God, you can not only answer our questions, but you offer us something better, which is yourself and your promise. So God, hold fast that promise. Hold fast to us. We pray through our worst nightmares and everything else In Jesus’ name, we pray amen. Thank you. You you.