By John A. Huffman, Jr
Question 6: If God is so good, how come there is evil and pain in the world?
This is perhaps the question I run into most frequently. You would be amazed how many people come to me, deeply upset by clergy sexual abuse. One person shared with me most recently the stories of people he knows personally who have children and adolescents who were used by pastors and priests for their own heterosexual and homosexual gratification. Years later, these trusted leaders deny their diabolical activities when men and women, now in their adult years, lift the veil of secrecy and tell their heartbreaking stories.
What about television and radio religious stars who profiteer financially on their unsuspecting followers?
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How can a good God allow disease to run rampant, divorce to crush children, murder to snuff out lives, and corporate greed to wipe out decades of employee pension investments?
If God is all powerful, why should my own daughter, Suzanne, have her senior year at Princeton University so abruptly disrupted by her cancer diagnosis? Courageously, while going through chemotherapy, she completed her senior thesis and graduated Magna cum laude, only to have the cancer come back with a vengeance the following year and take her life at age 23. Why did she and others like her die, when we know stories of some who have been healed? Is God diabolically capricious? Does He zap one, inconsiderately shattering the hopes and dreams of one family, while, in cavalier fashion, healing another, causing those to celebrate the goodness of God?
These are heavy questions, aren't they? I don't have easy answers. But let's look at the alternative. The fact is that God has given us some degree of freedom as human beings. From Adam and Eve to the very present, you and I have had the opportunity to choose to obey God and live the smart way, or to go our own way.
Let's assume that instead He has created us as automatons, mechanical men and women, with no choices. We are programmed so that we can't live near beaches where tsunamis might hit. We are not free to engage in premarital sex. Therefore, because everyone is living according to the smart way, as outlined in Scripture, there is no such thing as venereal disease and AIDS. We are not free to choose our own marriage partner, political ideology, or to say yes or no to God's claims upon our lives. Is that the kind of world in which you would want to live, a world in which there are no choices, no opportunities to distinguish between the shades of the better good or the greater evil?
God could have, when He saw our human predicament, chosen to not have Noah build the ark. He could have wiped civilization out completely. He could have started all over again here on Planet Earth, or have gone to another planet, creating new arbitrary ground rules in which His creation had no capacity to choose.