The Problem of Evil

Some time ago I responded to the question of the problem of evil  by rebuking the implicit self righteous of  the very raising of it. This position I still hold. But the implication may have been gotten that I had no answer to the problem of evil itself, or that I was avoiding the question. This is not the case, so I give an answer here, from a previous post elsewhere.

FWD

the question of why a good God allows evil like the Holocaust came up on an Arts and Letters Daily web page. This was my reply

I will answer the question as to why a good God allows the evil. But the answer is not acceptable to modern man. Man is evil and in rebellion to God. Therefore if necessary God will let man drink the cup of his own rebellion to the bitter dregs. God allows us freedom, and in our depravity we abuse it to promulgate holocausts and the vile like thereof. Most questionings arise, in my opinion from self righteousness. When the Biblical answer is that evil people abuse each other constantly, and respond with hatred to such, or feign forgiveness, and when we are all evil, we cannot blame God for our refusing to seek Him and repent of the very evil he will permit us to enact to its bitter endpoint as a means of showing to us who refuse all other rebuke what we are really made of. With the Holocaust the genie of human nature as it really is was let out of the bottle. This is Man at his most naked. We are this way for we are in rebellion to Him. Do we complain about the freedom we abuse? Do we expect him to magically stop us every time we break his Law even down to the smallest flickering of lust after my neighbour's wife? Or do we seek Him to acknowledge that we abuse the freedom that is intrinsic to His purpose.

We want to reject God, so he will let us go to the endpoint of this that some may see the vileness for what it is and cry to Him for mercy

Some truths hurt not because they are painful in themselves , but because we absolutely refuse them.

END FWD

I will amplify here further

This  above speaks of evil that men ourselves do. As to natural disasters and the general decay and fallenness of the earth, where they are not direct judgements  (itself a notion that modern man finds offensive) I hold them to be indicators that something is amiss and that man should seek for answers. For were the earth still a paradise  we would take this state as some kind of divine endorsement of our behaviour. So we long for peace and have stress and decay. Our inner discontent - for what greedy person is ever content? - is mirrored by decay in the creation, that we may know that our inner discontent is of some real basis.

Thus where evil is disaster or calamity, or even the fact that the gloss is taken off the creation, this God is the author of, as it says in Isaiah 45 - for he is the author of this kind of evil, and He does it to spur men to seek Him. Where we would rest in ungodly rest He would allow discomfort to prompt us to seek them, but he only tears to heal and would amplify our restlessness  that we seek the Sabbath rest of Christ.

Evil is not a problem which disproves the God of Israel. It is the sins of men let to go to their bitter fullness that some might repent, or it is the cursing of the earth that we may know something is amiss  where depraved consciences might think otherwise.

Thus it is only a depraved conscience that blames God for evil for it refuses the freedom of will He hold in such deep esteem that he would damn those who in freedom refuse his grace for the final time  rather than force a phony repentance