Why does God allow evil?

Asking “WHY does God allow evil?” is not a fair way to frame the question.

Why?

Because it presumes that He DOES allow evil. I propose a higher and worthier view of Him.

Asking instead, “DOES God allow evil in the first place?” is the fairer question. It challenges the premise itself.

Here is the key to approaching this question with new eyes. The way a non-coercive God “disallows evil” might look far different than does the way a Zeus-like god of coercion would forcefully “disallow” it.

The latter god uses ALL forms of control, violence, and coercion, and, in so doing, uses evil to stop evil, becoming a different form of the very evil he sought to disallow. The former God, however, doesn’t coerce, never coerces, but instead uses gentle persuasion and relentless patience to ultimately overcome and disallow evil. It may take longer that way but it’s a deeper and far more qualitative work.

Here is the ultimate truth. Jesus IS God’s disallowance of all evil. Once we understand this, the following verse comes into focus.

“My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into diverse temptations; Knowing this, that the trying of your faith works patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that you may be perfect and entire lacking nothing. ” James 1:2-4.

Consider the four “P” virtues of God below, virtues which Jesus personifies.

Jesus is the PATIENCE of God. He will outlast all our deception and defiance and convince us all to voluntarily enter His kingdom.

Jesus is the PERSUASION of God to to whom all will ultimately yield. Every knee shall bow and every tongue confess, from a fully persuaded heart and mouth, that Jesus is the Lord of love and light. His wisdom, beauty, and truth is ultimately irresistible. Lies and deception simply lack the strength of eternity. They will wither eventually.

Jesus is the PERSPECTIVE of God. He is God’s wisdom, through whose interpretive eyes God perceives us, our world, our inherent worth, our life situations, and all the beneficial meanings of Scripture. Most importantly, Jesus is God’s perspective on the issue of good and evil. What He considered important we consider important. What He considered unimportant we consider unimportant. We have been given His wisdom, the very mind of Christ, to use as our perpetual perspective in all things. This is why Paul tells us to put on the mind of Christ.

Jesus is the POWER of God, a power that does not move in the coercion “of” man but rather in cooperation “with” man. His power doesn’t return evil for evil, but rather acts in the opposite Spirit by returning good for evil, love for hate, and mercy for wrath. And by this all evil shall be overcome by all good. All men WILL be persuaded to turn to the Lord. And Christ will be all-in-all.

Here is my short answer as to why Jesus is absolute living proof the God doesn’t allow evil. Or, put another way, Jesus IS God’s complete disallowance of evil.

The New Testament repeatedly portrays Jesus as an antidote to all things satanic, all things carnal, all things helpless, and all things hopeless. So, Jesus is the Godhead’s decisive and all encompassing response to evil:

— He is the one who, during His life’s personification and expression of God’s absolute will against evil, “went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him” (Acts 10:38).

— He is the one the one who has conquered all fallen principalities and powers (Colossians 2:15).

— He is the one who eternally defeated death and hell (Revelation 1:18; 20:14).

— He is the one who transfused His curative energies to permanently reside both within us individually and among us corporately as His body, bride, and personal presence here on Earth. (Ephesians 4).

— He is the one who came to destroy all of Satan’s works (1 John 3:8).

Satan is the one Jesus thrice called in the book of John “the prince of this world” (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11), also calling him the “liar and murderer from the beginning” of mankind in Genesis (John 8:44). Paul likewise called Satan “the god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4), an illegitimate usurper John the beloved told us “in whose power the whole world lies” (1 John 5:19) to some residual degree– at least until Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians 15 are both fulfilled by the mature church bride.

Since Jesus was in some sense the curative “lamb slain since the foundation of the world,” I likewise see Him as God’s “disallowance of evil since the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8).

NOW HERE IS THE KEY. Exactly HOW the revelation of Jesus as evil’s antidote has “unfurled” itself over all time and all space is another question. The Christus Victor flag of “OUR deliverance from evil” and “GOD’S disallowance of evil” was put into effect simultaneously, if not even before, the Genesis fracture of creation.

This “unfurling” concept is crucial. It deserves some extended meditation.

So I don’t see God as allowing evil in any sense. I believe HOW His disallowance “unfurls” itself over time, and how our corporate unbelief slows down that unfurling, is the real question. Peter said our corporate faith and agape action can actually “hasten the day of the Lord,” or the manifest unfurling of His victory standard over all forms of subjective and objective evil on earth and it’s already been fully unfurled in heaven.

The flip side is that our individual and corporate unbelief can delay the manifesting of the sons and daughters of God as the generation that will fully and manifestly enforce Christ’s absolute victory over all evil. So, how a non-coercive God disallows evil looks far different than how a lightning-hurling Zeus would disallow it, or an omni-causative puppeteer would disallow it.

How a non-coercive God, who has injected a measure of creaturely freedom into earthly existence, overcomes evil is another matter altogether. Through divine “faith” and divine “patience,” we will “possess our souls” in virtue, and “inherit all the exceeding great and precious promises of God which provide us all things for life and godliness” (Luke 21:19; Hebrews 6:12; 2 Peter 1:3-5).

One of those promises is the heaven’s past defeat and earth’s future manifestation of that defeat of all the fallen powers and the resultant evil they have authored (and to which we have contributed). It’s been sagely said that “human nature is Satan’s favorite weapon of choice.” Thankfully, Jesus’ human-divine nature is the perfect disarming and dismantling agent for that weapon.

There remains another related challenge to reconciling the problem of evil with God’s sovereignty, an issue which is routinely raised by philosophers. This is usually expressed in the following argument: “If God is all-powerful, then He could have created the world without allowing evil’s existence. So, since evil clearly exists, God either isn’t all-powerful, or, in the alternative, God IS the creator and approver of evil.”

Here is my response to the above flawed argument.

God IS all-powerful, but only within the context of His character. There are certain qualities that are NOT in the divine nature, a nature which God won’t EVER violate. Men certainly violate these qualities, but not God, not Jesus, not the Spirit.

For instance, Scripture says that it is impossible for God to lie. Titus 1:2. But, some would say, “Sure God can lie, He is all-powerful after all.” But, no, it is impossible for Him to act outside of His flawless nature of love, light, Spirit, truth and grace. He won’t lie because it is AGAINST His nature.

This is easy to see in the context of lying, but what about other qualities which are NOT to be found in the divine nature of God? What if violence, coercion, brutality, manipulation, coercion, and pettiness are NOT in His character? Well, there can be only one conclusion: God’s omnipotence must always be defined within the context of His character. He is all-powerfully good, all-powerfully forgiving, all-powerfully healing, all-powerfully truthful, all-powerfully patient, all-powerfully restorative, etc. But, He is NOT all-powerfully cruel, all-powerfully condemning, all-powerfully vindictive, all-powerfully violent, all-powerfully coercive, etc.

Thus, God wont lie to us, kill us, coerce us, manipulate us, brutalize us, abuse us, threaten us or terrorize us. God will protect us, bless us, correct us, teach us, convince us, strengthen us, encourage us and deliver us. Consider the following passage from Saint Anselm:

“How can you be omnipotent, O God, if you cannot do all things? How can you do all things if you cannot sin – – if you cannot lie, if you cannot make false what is true? If you are unable to sin, you cannot claim to be able to do all things. Or is it that sin stems not from power, but from powerlessness? For those who commit sin have so little power over their own natures that they actually harm themselves. They are at the mercy of forces which they cannot oppose . . . .The more people have power to commit sin,the more they are powerless. So, Lord God, you are in fact more truly omnipotent because you cannot act through powerlessness.” Proslogion, Chapter 7.

So, the next time somebody pulls out the worn out argument that if God is all-powerful, He would immediately zap to oblivion all evildoers with His Zeus-like lightning bolts, THEREFORE whatever happens must be His permissive will or He would have zapped it into oblivion, you know what to say. Jesus is God. God is all-powerful LOVE. Anything outside of LOVE is not in God’s nature. God does save us to the uttermost, but ONLY by His limitless virtue. He always overcomes evil one way and one way only, with patience, love, and goodness.

The day I removed the terms “force” and “coercion” out and away from my image of God’s character, and replaced them with “wooing” and “influence,” so many things began to change for me spiritually.

I stopped viewing God as an omni-causative “control-freak,” an obsessive cosmic puppeteer who pulls all the causative strings of His creation 24/7.

I stopped viewing God as a bipolar “reality rapist” who would capriciously force His will upon us to either execute His wrathful will or His coercive love whenever He “felt like it.”

I stopped blaming God for my/our individual and corporate misuses of my/our creaturely freedom.

I stopped blaming God for the resultant evil which filled the vacuum caused by the angelic and human misuse of their creaturely freedoms.

In short, I stopped blaming God.

Instead, I began cultivating and esteeming “God’s immutable and unchangeable will to all goodness.” ~~ William Law.

I became fully convinced that, “God is light and in Him is no darkness– at all.” 1 John 1:5.

I resolved to never think, say, or insinuate that God has any causative connection to evil, or that He uses evil as a sculpting tool on us in any way, either passively or actively. James 1:13-17.

I began to realize that Jesus IS God’s complete “disallowance of” and “deliverance from” all evil. Now, again, exactly HOW that disallowance and deliverance unfurls itself over all time and all space is the real question. There are several other factors which can either hasten or hinder the speed at which this “unfurling” of God’s disallowance of evil manifests itself openly to all our senses.

The most important factor is the maturity level of His church, bride, and body. The quicker we corporately mature in unity and love up and into Christ’s full headship, the quicker the unfurling openly manifests (see Ephesians 4). Conversely, the slower we corporately mature, the slower the unfurling manifests.

Hence the admonishment from Hebrews which asks “How shall we escape [the talons of evil] if we neglect our so great a salvation.” Corporate and individual neglect slows the “unfurling,” while corporate and and individual devotional diligence hastens the unfurling.

This is what what Peter means when he exhorts us to “hasten” the fullness of the Lord’s coming– i.e. we CAN “hasten the day of the Lord’s fullness.” 2 Peter 3:12. The two master ingredients in this are the corporate Bride’s faith and patience. Hebrew 6:12.

I have concluded that God, for His part, always “hastens to the highest available good” in any and every situation, subject of course to all the various limiting dynamics which exist in a temporally free creation.

Until Christ is fully and openly manifest though US as His body and bride upon the earth, the scorched sky of unbelief, misbelief, and disbelief will continue to hinder His will from fully manifesting on earth as it is in Heaven.

The Bride’s role is to continue to diligently punch holes in this scorched sky so that the Son’s curative light can FULLY shine Heavens’s will on all our circumstances. Paul tells us all creation is groaning for this scorched sky to be fully dispelled. Romans 8:19-22.

Here is a thought experiment on Jesus’ omni-willingness to intervene and decisively “disallow evil” in our life situations with His curative powers.

I think we can agree that if Jesus, during His incarnation, was PHYSICALLY present while a woman and her child were being physically assaulted by a gang of cutthroat brigands. We intuitively know Jesus would have quickly intervened to stop it (as He did with the woman caught in adultery).

Jesus might have used some natural means, but more than likely, sticking to His normal modus operandi, He would have used some supernatural means to save the victims. He used supernatural wisdom to disarm the mob mentality seeking to kill the adulteress. Jesus Himself supernaturally slipped right through and past hostile mobs who were trying to kill Him on several occasions.

But, in any event, the Jesus revealed by BOTH the Gospel AND our Spirit-quickened consciences would NOT have stood idly by doing nothing. That’s inconceivable given the parameters of our thought experiment.

Jesus would not have:
–continued to walk past the event to keep His ministry events on schedule
–stood by watching and shaking His head in empathy while the abuse continued
–turned His face the other way in revulsion, planning to later help the victims cope with their injuries, assuming of course they survived.

As sure as the Sun rises, we know the Jesus of the Gospels would have stopped this brutality– immediately, decisively, and skillfully. Acts 10:38 tells us that, “Jesus was anointed with the Holy Spirit and power, and went around doing good, healing all who were oppressed by the devil.” No Gospel narrative (other than the events surrounding the Crucifixion in which Jesus voluntarily lowered His divine defenses) describes Jesus EVER allowing any form of physical brutality, demonic activity, or physical infirmity to go unchallenged which was afflicting any third party who was in His immediate presence and who was seeking His help.

Now, to continue the thought experiment, change the peril to any one of a hundred menacing scenarios.

–the woman and her child were in the death throes of a plague
–the woman and her child were decomposing from leprosy
–the woman and her child were being victimized by an abusive husband/father
–the woman was suffering from a severe mental disorder and was attempting to smother her child
–the child was having an epileptic fit and had swallowed his own tongue
–the mother had just suffered a stroke related to her brain cancer and was now unresponsive on the ground as her weeping child tried to awaken her
–the woman and her child were about to be killed by a rockslide

REGARDLESS of the peril, what would the Jesus of the Gospels have done in coming physically upon these situations? It’s obvious. Jesus’ immediate presence would have stopped each of these tragedies dead in their tracks.

Here then is the point. We KNOW the will of God is to always heal and protect when Jesus is PHYSICALLY present. It’s clear and irrefutable. How is it then that we have come to LOSE that knowledge of His healing will when God is only SPIRITUALLY present— here in our modern day life situations in other words?

How can we now say God’s will towards healing has gone from kinetic (moving) in Jesus’ day to static (not moving) in our day? Has Jesus changed His willing mind or curative nature? Or, is the problem imbedded somewhere on OUR side of the CORPORATE equation?

Is it possible that something is hindering or obstructing Jesus’ total willingness to do mighty works of curative deliverance here today? If so, could it be the same dark dynamic which hindered Jesus from doing mighty curative works in Nazareth as detailed in Mark 6 (except that He still healed a few sick people), where despite Jesus’ absolute willingness, their CORPORATE (not individual) unbelief kept those works from manifesting in their midst– a corporate unbelief which caused Jesus to “marvel” (and not in a good way) that they were missing the time of their curative visitation.

Nazareth is so instructive, because in that narrative we have all the relevant elements– an always willing-to-heal Lord NONETHELESS obstructed by a corporate (not individual) mindset and heart-set of unbelief.

God, as most theologians readily acknowledge, is in some sense omni-present. God is present everywhere in some continuous capacity today, here and now. But, that by itself isn’t enough to release His personal presence (which I would define as the kinetically curative Jesus revealed in the Gospels) to full manifestation.

So, again, I have to conclude that some dynamic on our CORPORATE side of the equation is “quenching” Jesus’ kinetically curative presence back into static latency.

The widespread failure to heal today simply can’t be Jesus’ LACK of willingness. So again I go back to Nazareth as the template of explanation for His un-manifested mighty works. There was a scorched sky of CORPORATE unbelief in Nazareth which kept the Lord’s healing light from fully shining through to do the mighty works which were in His heart to do. Again, He was able to heal a few sick people, just as a few sick people today continue to receive healing from time to time through prayers of faith, but not nearly on the wide scale we would see as ideal for a fully functioning body of Christ. The reason? We are living today in a postmodern Nazareth laboring under a scorched sky of corporate unbelief.

The freedom of angels and men often combine to form interference patterns of resistant force with which we must diligently deal. The Lord is always willing to manifest, but He often needs our synergistic cooperation to fully penetrate the situation at hand. He won’t (and can’t) coercively rape reality with His interventions. He travels on the active faith of men. This allows Him the consent He needs, the cosmic elbow room to deliver the situation by catalyzing it with the delivering energies of Christ.

The question then is NOT “whether” or “why” God intervenes or not in human affairs.

Rather, the question is “whether” or “why” WE (corporately as the body of Christ) intervene or not.

God’s interventions of deliverances need OUR corporate synergistic faith, catalyzing prayer, and enabling action for His deliverances to fully manifest here on earth as they are already manifest in Heaven. God has already intervened to the max in every past, present and future situation. His Spirit fills all things (Ephesians 1:23; 4:7-10). His pre-destinies (Ephesians 2:10) swirl around us like butterflies coiled in potentiality, eagerly waiting to be sprung into actuality by our prayers of faith. But our corporate unbelief can “quench” and “bench” these potentialities into the realm of the unrealized.

So, I think there are three conceptual choices when it comes to God’s response to intervening prayer:

1) God says “yes” to some healing interventions and “no” to others.

2) God says a provisional “yes” to all healing interventions, but something on our corporate [NOT individual] side of the equation hinders or obstructs the fulness of healing from manifesting. Mark 6:1-6.

3) God neither says “yes” or “no” to particular healings but remains detached and uninvolved.

1 and 3 are unacceptable for the flowing reasons:

— Jesus never said “no” to any particular request for healing (2 Corinthians 1:9-20)

— many times Scriptures say Jesus healed “all” who came to Him (Acts 10:38; Matthew 4:23-24; 8:16; 9:35; 12:15; 15:30; Luke 4:40; 6:17)

— the only time Jesus was obstructed from healing “all” came from a corporate hindrance, not from a lack of willingness or consent on HIS part (Mark 6:1-6)

— healing appears to be promised in several New Testament passages ( James 5:15; I Peter 2:24 and its fulfillment in Matthew 8:16; Mark 3:15; 16:18; Luke 9:2, 10:9; John 14:12-14)

— if God refuses to heal some mothers and children of cancer while healing others, then He is capricious and cruel

— if God stays away from healing altogether, then He is capricious, cruel, and, even worse, He has placed all of us in a death-trap creation in which disaster, disease, devastation, and destruction reigns supreme, a terminally infectious creation for which He alone is responsible.

Failed healing largely exists because the church corporate doesn’t teach, pray, or believe in unity of heart and purpose. In short, the church doesn’t effectively model coherent belief in a healing God. The church bride is here to relieve and/or cure the world’s suffering, but we are too busy disagreeing and blaming rather than agreeing and blessing.

And let me be clear– I am not attributing any particular person’s unrealized healing to any singular person’s lack of faith. That’s far too simplistic and just plain wrong. I am speaking in the corporate sense. We are all connected to one another, in seen and unseen ways, in conscious and subconscious ways, in spiritual and unscriptural ways. When the revelation of the healer bride reaches a critical mass of realization within the corporate mass of believers, I believe there will be an explosion of “mighty works” upon the earth even greater than seen in the days of Jesus and the early church (John 14:12-14). A rising tide lifts all the boats.

Christ, for His part, is always ready, willing and able to manifest His rescuing power into every situation of need. But, the church is His spigot of release here on the earth, a spigot which we haven’t yet learned to corporately open full throttle.

But, I always try to remember this champion truth toward which we are all called to evolve together. Our heavenly Abba “hath put all things under His (Jesus’) feet , and gave Him (Jesus) to be the head over ALL THINGS TO the CHURCH. Which is His (Jesus’) body, the fulness of him that fills ALL IN ALL.” Ephesians 1:22-23. It’s going to happen sooner or later. Sooner is so infinitely better, so may the unified vision begin. And may we each play a vibrant part.