Why Did God Create A World Where Evil Exists? Part Three.

If God is truly God, why didn’t he (or doesn’t he, right this instant) snap his fingers and create a perfect world? Couldn’t he have decreed, “No evil, only good will exist in this world?” And if evil somehow has a legal right to be here, why can’t God call a time-out, change the rules and give evil the boot? He is God, isn’t he? From my limited human experience of God, I believe he would have created a perfect world. But that world obviously is not our present-tense world…

In “Part Two,” we settled that the world was designed by a good Creator, so now let’s consider why his world contained an evil tree. Let me give a few initial disclaimers: I am not asking in these next paragraphs if there was a war in the heavenlies before evil fell like lightening to earth. Nor am I trying to address where evil came from. I’m inquiring as to why we, as a crown jewel in God’s world, encounter evil and struggle with sin. Let me just say right now that I do not have the solution to this problem; rather, I am simply trying to give us a few new half nelsons to use as we wrestle with it.

Let’s imagine here: suppose that creation is, first and foremost, founded on what God likes, not on what is “best.” Now, “likes” and “best” may be one and the same. But taking “best” out of the equation for a moment, what if God, being completely good and loving, played all the scenarios out and decided that out of all the alternate realities, a universe where he created a perfect world was not going to give him as much of what he really liked? What if he saw that an imperfect world would reveal the depths and heights of goodness on a battleground forged by the challenges of pain and sin? What if he saw that the clearest stories of love—the ones with the sweetest, most passionate endings (I mean the ones he liked best)—could only come from great and agonizing birth pains?

You know that when you hear a good song or see a vibrant painting, the artists probably derived their inspiration and emotional energy from a place where they encountered either intense goodness or tragic evil. Now, assume again with me that what God likes and what is best are really synonyms. So, building a world that gives space for the pain and suffering that stem from free human choice (but then climaxes in a final triumph that sets everything right) wouldn’t be too bad, would it?

I’m not going to shove my two-year-old’s finger in an electric socket to teach her not to get shocked, but neither am I going to keep my 13-year-old from playing football so he won’t get hurt. Most children end up getting shocked once or twice and learn their lesson, even though we warned them the best we could. Most boys playing football have to experience the tough knocks and tackles and overcome the pain to become good players and enjoy the game. If we protect them from injury and failure, they won’t become good players. God does not stick our fingers in the socket to teach us, nor does he fully protect us from the hard knocks of evil, because we were created like Him, to overcome evil. To live wholly good.

To say that evil doesn’t exist is blatant denial. To say that God doesn’t “use” evil for good is flight from reality. To say that God’s first choice is for us to suffer evil is a poor assumption. For example, I don’t like to see my boy tackled, but I do like to see him catch the ball! Similarly, God is not in agreement with or in partnership with evil, but he is able to “work all things for good.” And good coming from God is not half good or mostly good because of evil’s existence. God’s good is 100% the genuine article. Not 60% good, 40% rayon.

I don’t think evil troubles God like it troubles us. Yes, he hates it more than we do, but he also sees it as a momentary blip on the screen of our lives as eternal beings. What is seventy years of hardship to make our lives the best stories ever compared to 7 million years in eternity? Just as the atheist says, “If God is really God, he should have made a perfect world,” I would say, “Assuming God is really God, one day our world will make perfect sense and be more splendid than we can conceive.”

God may have decided that although we would constantly misunderstand him in the pain of our present-world scenario, the end result will bring him (and us) the most pleasure in the future. If God’s character is 100% good, loving and pleasing as Creator, he has no need to make a different universe than the current one. The existence of evil in God’s very good world was not a miscalculation. He is God and can make all things right in the end. So much so, that everything then will be 10,000 x 10,000 better than we can now comprehend…because it will give a flawlessly good God what he likes most on that final day.

The end (and new beginning) of the story will also give us what we like most: the most fulfilling ending and clean slate beginning a human being could ever dream up or concoct. It will be a final evolution where heaven comes down to earth. Where love’s triumph over suffering is as plain as full sunlight, and all confess the amazing wisdom of God in Jesus.