Day 15: Why Does God Allow Evil?
Day 15: Living Daily in Reality: Why does God allow evil? ========================================================
Living daily in reality entails seeing clearly that you personally have a loving father who made you inside his own son so that he could live the life through you that he has planned. What we saw yesterday was that we have had no time for that kind of thinking; we are utterly taken up with getting enough food, clothing, and shelter to gain some sense of security from these things; getting enough respect and recognition from other people to give us some sense of significance; and arranging circumstances and events so that we have a little pleasure and happiness to make life bearable. All of this focuses us – not on some creator somewhere out there – but solidly on this world around us; it is the source we look to for our livelihood.
Why does our maker allow this to happen? Because of his own nature – which is love – a real desire to give what he has and is – to others – not because he has to but because he wants to. This means giving the free will that he himself has – so that we are truly free to return that to him; so he gives us the freedom to reject him and his love or to love him in return. This was expressed by his son here on earth when he said “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered you as a hen gathers her chickens, but you would not”. It’s why throughout the years in which the nation of Israel turned away from him to other gods, the prophets said “the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end”. Although God has planned that the rarest flower has a bee or moth that is able to pollinate it and that the air pressure of our atmosphere is precisely right for us to exist without exploding or imploding – and although he has carefully planned your life in detail, yet he bears all the independent selfishness and irritability you choose to express.
The result is that this world is actually a picture of what life would be like without a creator who is our loving Father. Just as permission to eat of the tree of life and to reject the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was given in the Genesis account of creation, so this present world is a clear presentation to us of life or death – it is our opportunity to acquiesce to our creator’s plan for us or to reject it. However, there is no permanent life apart from our Maker’s, so our father faces a devastating situation when He creates us. We can only be what he is if we have his freedom, but if we use it to reject him, then we lose any possibility of retaining life – because there is no life apart from him!
This is why he made us in his son.