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Sometimes discussing the attributes of God, like many theological discussions, can seem like an academic exercise void of anything meaningful to the realities of life around the world. This dichotomy is especially apparent when the topic of reconciling the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient God with presence of suffering and evil is at hand.
In his book, The Doors of the Sea, David Bentley Hart presents more than a mere list of God’s abstracted attributes listed in systematic form. It gets down to a level where theology, and the words we use to describe God, matter. To Hart, God is not simply the sum of his attributes, as if he can be formularized thus making the tragedy of evil more logical; He is both sovereign and good, free and providential. Also true of his handling of the subject is that evil and suffering are handled with care as he goes to great lengths to put himself in the mindset of a character like Ivan Karamozov to truly understand the problem of evil.
What we’re left with from Hart are no easy answers. God still exists and is infinitely good. Yet the world suffers from atrocities daily. The question is: Can we come to a balance of God’s sovereignty and man’s freedom without turning creation into an equation where, as Hart puts it, there are no remainders?
The picture that we see from the New Testament is one where evil certainly exists in profound ways, but its presence in no way deters God from his purposes in the world. The God of the Bible is completely sovereign in that evil or the free will of mankind are no stumbling blocks to him. This reality immediately rules out a true theodicy because, as John's Revelation shows, the presence of evil is extinguished with a mere word from Christ. At the same time, I fully agree with Hart that we cannot saddle God with the burden of needing evil to accomplish his will, because God is in need of nothing. He is the source of all things and while he has demonstrated time and time again the ability to turn evil on its head and produce victory from it (there is no greater example than the cross), evil itself is an enemy to be undone, not a means to an end. God is not limited because of man's rebellion against him. More than that, if God were in need of evil to affect his will then in some ways we may be conceding to the possibility that God is in some way not good, which is an impossible to argue from scripture.
The story of the Bible presents evil as running entirely counter to God's purposes, with no inherent value but ultimately no real power. That is not to say that evil does not effect the world, obviously it does in profound ways. From the New Testament we are told that the world in which we live has been given over for a time to the forces of evil. This evil manifests itself through nature and human action alike. Sometimes we (humanity) play a sort of game with our treatment of suffering by ascribing man-made atrocities to our own sin nature while blaming God for "natural" disasters as if he was the culprit behind them. After all what man was it that opened the doors to the sea during the tsunami killing hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children?
Again Hart's understanding is quite helpful. If God created man, in full freedom, to have dominion over Earth and stand as creation's representative before God, then the decision to rebel against God would require that creation suffer the same penalty of corruption and death as that representative. Creation then, as with humanity, both reflect and distort the image of its creator. We see, as Hart puts it, two realities at once. One of extreme beauty and majesty that trumpet the glory of God and one of extreme injustice and death that reflect the how far creation has fallen.
Fortunately for us this is not the end of the story. Scripture reveals that while we may be overcome with the unjust events throughout the world, creation itself is in the birth pangs of the Kingdom of God coming to its consummation. The incarnation was God's ultimate intervention into the narrative of death and destruction. By overcoming evil with good and death with life, Jesus began a pattern that defines the shape of what His Kingdom will someday look like. A pattern that is carried out in a provisional way through his body, the church until the day of his return.
Until that day it is important to remember not to overlook God's sovereignty because of the presence of suffering. The danger is that if, in our need to justify its presence, we give evil more power than its due and reduce God to less than He is presented in scripture, the sovereign over all creation. On the other hand, by overemphasizing God's sovereignty to those in the midst of suffering, we can unwittingly make God out to be a cruel master who planned from the beginning of time a contingency where the drowning of thousands of Children was necessary to bring about his plan. Jesus however, as the exact representation of God the Father, weeps for the destruction of Jerusalem and mourns with Lazerus' family even as he knows that victory is soon at hand.
As Pastor Randy aptly puts it, "God is never the cause of evil, but is always the first on the scene when it occurs."
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