John MacArthur speculates on the question, "Why did God allow evil?" in "The Origin of Evil," a message given in 2000. MacArthur's answer is, essentially, that God allowed evil because he wanted to make himself known, he wanted to manifest his attributes, his grace and mercy and also his wrath, and because God wanted to eliminate the possibility of evil forever.
The audio version is posted on Youtube in three parts: Part One, Part Two and Part Three. The passage below begins near the end of Part Two:
Now the question then comes up...why would God allow sin? There's no specific statement but I think you can make a fairly reasonable speculation beyond which I cannot go and don't find any value in tempting to go. And it is this...what did sin coming into the world bring about? Well it brought about, I would say, three things. And these are the three reasons why I believe God allowed evil.
Number one, it brought about the salvation of sinners, right? God had to allow sin; God had to decree sin in the plan though never the author of it, in order that He might save sinners. Well, why did God want to save sinners? To put on display attributes that otherwise never would have been manifest, right?
How is God going to show grace if there aren't any sinners? How is God going to show mercy if there aren't any sinners? That was a part of God's nature that God wanted to display for His own glory throughout all eternity. So God provided a means by which He could demonstrate grace, demonstrate mercy. He also wanted to show love, love that is so far reaching that it can reach even His own enemies who hate Him. How is He going to show that if He doesn't have any enemies?
So God allows evil in order that He might demonstrate grace and mercy and forgiveness and salvation. Secondly, He allows evil in order that He might display His wrath...in order that He might put His wrath on display, His anger on display, His judgment on display. How would God ever reveal that part of His true and eternal nature if there were not an opportunity to judge sinners? And so, all you can do is look at redemptive history and you see the salvation of sinners and the damnation of sinners and that is what goes on and you see ultimately a place prepared for those who are damned and a place prepared for those who are saved and you must conclude then that the eternal purpose of God was to save some and judge some in order that He might demonstrate both His grace and His wrath.
And then I like to throw a third thought in there. I believe that God allowed sin in order that He might forever destroy it. As long as His creatures have any measure of freedom, as long as His creatures have intelligence, that is they can know and reason, that is they can process that knowledge toward behavior, and choice, that is they can choose what to do, as long as they have that capacity there is a potential for them to fall short of the standard. Right? To make the wrong choice. Well it didn't take long for them to do it. We don't know how long it was before Lucifer made the wrong choice before God. We don't know how long it was even in the Garden before Adam and Eve made the wrong choice, but it was certainly before they had any children. They had their children probably around the age of a hundred or a little more.
So there is choice and the potential of a wrong choice is there. A measure of freedom is given to the creatures by which they can choose to honor God, by which they can choose to dishonor. As long as that is there, then the reality, the potential reality of evil exists when the wrong choice is made. And I believe that once the wrong choice is made, then God goes into action and one, He can demonstrate His grace and salvation; two, He can demonstrate His wrath in judgment; and three, He can then finally destroy evil. It's almost as if God wanted evil to come to the surface so that He could excise it.
That's what's going to happen when the whole of redemptive history is complete, when all the saved are saved and all the lost are cast into the lake of fire, then death and hell are thrown into the lake of fire. What does that mean? No more death and no more hell and no more judgment. Why? Because there won't be anymore sin. And when you go to heaven, there's nothing there that smacks of a sinful world, right? There's no more sorrow, no more sadness, no more sin, no more dying, no more death.
In my way of understanding God, I believe everything begins with his immense capacity for loving, and that everything he does issues forth from that great well of love. Add to that with the existence of free will resulting in evil before the world ever began (witness the fall of Lucifer), and God's desire to love and to populate existence with beings capable of giving and receiving love, even in the face of the seemingly failed experiment in which Lucifer uses his free will to rebel against God, and I arrive at the conclusion that God allows for the existence of evil because he decided that Love was SO important, necessary and ultimate that, even at the risk of the great evils mankind has seen to date, his judgement is that the possibility of love is worth the potential for even very great evil.
ReplyDeleteI like the notion that God is in the process of eliminating evil permanently. I'll have to think about that one some more though.
Todd, thank you for your thoughtful reflections on this very difficult question of why God allows evil. Your emphasis on "that great well" of God's love and His desire to love His creatures is surely on the mark, and I too am intrigued as you are with MacArthur's suggestion that God allows evil in order that he might eliminate it permanently.
ReplyDeleteBut I would not say God allows evil because he wants us to love him, or that in order to love God we need to have the capacity or potential for doing evil. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist in an eternal bond of love--the Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Father, etc.--but the potential for rebellion or sin within the Godhead does not exist. There is giving and receiving of love, but no risk of doing evil.
Also, I don't believe unsaved people have the capacity to love God, or even to believe in God, until by His free grace God grants us the faith to believe in Christ and makes us alive by his Spirit through the new birth. Lazarus was cold and inert and stinking in his tomb before Christ raised him from dead. So were we. "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins....but because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions--it is by grace you have been saved" (Ephesians 2:1,4,5).
So I would emphasis, as MacArthur does, God's purpose of self-disclosure and the unveiling of His glory, together with His intention to eliminate the possibility of evil forever, as the reasons why He allows evil. "Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!" (Romans 11:33).
Well, I want to say a little more, but this is getting long and I guess I should just go start a new post(as I suspected would be necessary as I ruminated these past weeks on what to say in response to your comment!). See you at growth group, my friend. -- Denny