Let’s Talk About the Problem of Evil

Starting in January, we began on a journey preaching through the entire book of Matthew. A huge benefit of this type of series is that it means we cannot skip over any passages that don’t make for nice clean sermons. The downside is that we are forced to wrestling with some passages that we might rather want to leave alone. This week we hit the first of those passages: Matt. 13-23. These verses tell of Herod’s plan to kill Jesus, the holy family’s flight to Egypt, and the resulting murder of all the male toddlers in and around the town of Bethlehem (an event sometimes called the Massacre of Innocents).

 

Now, it just so happened that this last week was also a family service, meaning it was geared toward and starred more of a younger audience. For obvious reasons we did not focus on the massacre of innocents in a special kids’ service. Rather, we focused on how God protected Jesus and the family by telling them to flee. This is a valuable and important lesson to learn—that God protects us. But a keen reader will instantly notice the dozens of children that God did not protect. How can we say God protects us when we read about the genocide of an entire toddler population?

 

I will start out by saying that there is not a clean, simple, and satisfying answer to this. This question is one with which I, myself, constantly wrestle and struggle. The answer most often given to this question is that God has a larger plan and works everything for good. Now, I do believe this is true. But simply stating that as a response to something as awful as the mass murder of toddlers is just cold-hearted and lacking any kind of compassion. If you were to give a that simple answer to someone grieving the loss of a child, you more than likely would be punched—and justifiably so! Sometimes the correct academic and theological answer is not the correct loving answer.

 

Despite this, how I answer this question for myself is wrapped up both in the idea of God’s divine plan and our limited understanding of its scope. I would argue that God prioritizes protecting our soul’s over protecting our bodies. Later in Matthew, Jesus tells us that we do not need to be afraid of the ones who can kill our body’s but rather we should fear the one who can destroy our soul (10:28). This hits on the notion that our time on Earth is so limited in the grand scheme of our everlasting existence. But, because we are not God, we can’t wrap our minds around anything that big. As a result, we focus on the here and now with all of our passions and mental strength.

 

Think about when you were in third grade. Can you remember the things that caused you stress? What were the day-to-day things that were your entire world? For most of us, we can’t remember. This comes from gaining a larger perspective. We can look back and realize that third grade was such a small part of the grand story that is our life that most of what happened there just fades into the background. But in the moment, while we were living them out, they were the most important things, nothing mattered but them.

 

Now, please hear me. I am not trying to callously compare genuine heartbreak and loss to a third-grade spelling test. I am in no way trying to mitigate our current feelings of loss. I am trying to illustrate how our perspective of time is so small compared to God’s and how our earthly lives are so small compared to our eternal souls. Yet they are all we know; they are all we can know right now.

 

Like I said at the top, there are no easy, clean, or 100% satisfactory answers to a question like this. But this is how I currently handle the problem of evil at this point in time. I believe that God’s top priority is protecting my soul and I believe that through Jesus I do not have to worry about the safely of my soul. While we all walk through deeply painful times of heartbreak, loss, and pain on our time here on Earth, all of that is wrapped up in the briefest of salvos across the duration of our eternal lives.

 

Please, I want to hear how you approach this question. The problem of evil is one we will never fully answer on this side of glory. How I wrestle with it will be different from how you grapple with it. Let me know what has brought you the most comfort in the moments of heartache in your lives.