I’ve been remiss in posting my sermons lately. But I’ve got four to post, all out of Acts 9. They’re on the subject of Paul’s conversion, and a few other events from Acts 9. The link is on the sidebar.

D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, in his book Preaching and Preachers, says that Christians should never allow God to become the subject of debate. God is who He is, says Lloyd-Jones, and does not submit to the intellectual speculations of man. The Bible says that God has revealed Himself to all mankind, and man’s refusal to acknowledge the God of the Bible is simple rebellion. If we debate about God, then we are saying that man’s problem is intellectual, rather than moral. But the carnal man is not able to understand spiritual things, so that the Christian has no meeting point, no place to start the discussion, since there is literally nothing that we truly agree on.

I’m not sure if I agree. Obviously I’ve been debating about God a lot lately, so I haven’t been true to Lloyd-Jones’ position. But Lloyd-Jones’ position might be supported by my recent experiences in debating, which have not been very satisfying.

Ed Brayton from Dispatches from the Culture Wars is a very intelligent person. He debated me fiercely, refused to see any of my points, and had lengthy refutations for every one of my posts. After a certain point, I’d give up, at which point Ed would goad me into another confrontation where he would do the same thing. He tied me up in knots and deflected what I felt were the real issues with sidetracks and tangents. At the end of it, I felt like I’d been wrestling with a pig, with the only result being that we both got really muddy. His supporters on his site were naturally unanimous in declaring his victory and pronouncing me to be deluded, moronic, silly, and uninformed. And I became like the thing I criticized, becoming arrogant myself and making the argument about me, instead of about God, by the end of the discussion. At the end, I just felt vaguely soiled, and not just from all the personal abuse and name-calling I received. I have this vague feeling of having somehow demeaned the name of God, although it’s difficult for me to pin down why. Perhaps Lloyd-Jones is right. Perhaps the act of engaging in debate about the righteousness of God’s actions is itself unworthy of who God is. Who are we to question him? And as Van Til would have said, by even engaging in the debate, perhaps I justify the unbeliever’s belief that God is subject to his judgment.

What was accomplished by all of this? I spent two weeks and thousands of words and got nowhere. As far as I know, nobody on either side of the debate learned a thing or moved in their positions at all. At best, I suppose I could say I learned from my mistakes. But what did I learn, exactly? Better debating techniques? Or the foolishness of getting into those kinds of debates at all? Those who already agreed with me said my arguments were bulletproof. Those who disagreed with me said my arguments were ridiculous and without any merit at all.

I think I need to just take a break from these debates for a while at least, and ponder these lessons. I’m just not sure what to take from all of this.

Proverbs 26:

4 Do not answer a fool according to his folly, Lest you also be like him.

5 Answer a fool according to his folly, Lest he be wise in his own eyes.

According to Scripture, anyone who refuses to see the truth of the Bible is a fool. Therefore, when dealing with unbelievers, you are always on one side or the other of those two verses. How do you know? And how can you avoid both errors? Was I preventing Ed from being wise in his own eyes? If that’s the goal, I failed miserably. Or, was I becoming like him? That alternative seems more likely.

This post may earn me the honor of being one of Ed’s “Idiots of the Week”. But if I suffer shame for Christ, it should be a glory to me. If the worst thing that happens to me is that a guy like that ridicules me, it’s a small price to pay.

Last week I was at a church camp as a counselor and lecturer. I was also given a job. I was to handle collecting offerings at the nightly services and make sure they got into the strongbox at the office.

We had a good week, and collected several hundred dollars for the Deaf Reformed Ministries group. I got a couple of kids to help me take the offering. They’d pass the hats, then meet me out back and hand the money over. I’d hold onto it until after the service, count it there in the hall and then carry it over to the office.

It was night, it was dark and I was alone, on three different occasions, with several hundred dollars. I could have easily pocketed five or ten dollars each night.

I thought about this at the time, because of the conversations I’d been having lately on the nature and origin of morality. The modern rationalist impulse seems to be to take reason as the source for all knowledge. And I tried to think about a reason why I shouldn’t take that money.

I would definitely benefit, if only in a small way. Over the course of the week, I would have been $20 or $30 richer, with almost no effort. So there was something to gain.

There was, as far as I could see, nothing to lose. My chances of getting caught were pretty close to zero. I was alone in the dark with several hundred dollars. I was the only one who knew how much money was there. A small theft would never have been noticed. The camp director was surprised by how big the offerings were, making it even less likely that anyone would have noticed. So, society would have suffered almost no negative results, and certainly no negative results that it would have been aware of. If the Deaf Reformed Ministries had not yet even received the money, could they be said to have been hurt because they received a tiny amount less than they would have in a hypothetical situation that did not exist? And why should I be obliged to think of the good of society over my own good anyway?

If I felt the need, I could even provide justifications for taking the money. “Muzzle not the ox that treads out the corn”, the Bible says, and “The laborer is worthy of his hire”. I had worked hard to collect those offerings, and a tiny skim off the top would hurt no one. I deserved it.

The only reason why I didn’t take the money was that it would have been wrong.

You might say that guilt prevented me from taking it, but if the guilt was simply an internal feeling, then it would have been weakness that prevented me from taking it. It would have been me allowing society’s subjective disapproval keep me from doing something that was good for me.

You might say that the overall weakening of society’s moral structure should prevent me from taking the money. But society would have to be aware of it in order for its moral structure to decay as a result, wouldn’t it?

You might say that my own moral sense would suffer as a result. But that’s just moving the question back a step. Why should I have a moral sense that forces me to hurt myself?

Most people, I think, would agree that it would be wrong for me to take that money. My question is, apart from a God who declares it to be wrong, what objective reason could be given for why it was wrong for me to take that money? This is a non-hypothetical situation, and one that people find themselves in all the time, and any moral theory, it seems to me, needs to have answers to questions like this.

Some possibilities-

Utilitarianism- fails since I would benefit and nobody else could meaningfully be seen to be harmed. From a pure welfare perspective, I would gain, the people who gave the money would still get their good feelings from having given the money, and the Deaf Reformed Ministries would never know they lost anything.

Objectivism- I ought to respect the property of others, but I was only taking a very small part, and that properly compensated me for my efforts. If nobody knew I had done anything, how could my theft hurt me, the only benchmark of harm in an objectivist system? It was immoral to guilt-manipulate me into doing work for which I was not properly compensated, anyway.

Deontology- probably the strongest case would be the categorical imperative- I should act as I would want everyone else to act. But I think I could honestly say I wouldn’t care if everyone in the same position as I was in skimmed an equally small sum off the top, and no-one noticed, _from a pure welfare perspective_. And why should I be asked to consider the good of society rather than my own good? And again, how would society suffer if they never knew about it?

Update: On reflection and re-reading this, I think some of my objection to a deontological approach weren’t quite accurate. A deontological approach based on the categorical imperative wouldn’t be asking me to consider harm or good to society, but simply the obligation to follow my duty. But the first objection still holds, and if it’s an absolute duty we still get back to where that duty comes from. And if you accept the criticism that deontological arguments are really just consequential arguments in disguise, then the objections I gave still hold. If a deontological argument is truly rooted in the nature of God then I wouldn’t disagree, but if it’s not then I would have to question where that duty comes from, and if it’s not just another consequentialist argument calling itself something else.

La Shawn Barber comments on racism here, on her site. The experience of so many black conservatives at the hands of white liberals is just amazing. Why is it that a white liberal can refer to a black as a “house nigga” and not just get destroyed for it, when a white conservative says much milder things like Trent Lott said, and suffer a great deal for it? Rush Limbaugh just said that a quarterback wasn’t getting criticized as much because he was black, and got fired for it.

I don’t know how to avoid the conclusion that race is something the Democrats just use for political advantage. If Republicans were smarter, we’d be less scared of setting off the PC bulldogs, and figure out a way to show them up for the hypocrites that so many of them are.

Ed just won’t let it go.

Despite the fact that I let the argument go and let him have the last word, Ed has felt the need to take another crack at me. If you enjoy arguments that have far outlived their usefulness, read on. My reply is in the comments. Otherwise, go look at a tree or spend some time with the kids or something.

The issue of genocide and slavery have come up a few times in a few conversations I’ve gotten involved in, here and here. Ed and DarkSyde have been making the point that the fact that the Bible endorses both slavery and genocide are proof that modern moral standards are superior to those of the Bible. I’ve addressed the genocide issue in a couple of different places. My position would be that if God commanded the destruction of an entire people due to their wickedness, then God was right to do so because God created those people, and they richly deserved being destroyed due to their rebellion against God. Genocide wouldn’t be right just whenever someone felt like it and claimed God told them to, but only if God had actually told them to.

My critics claim this is a ‘might makes right’ argument, or a ‘divine command theory’ of morality. But neither of these is the case. It’s not God’s right to give or take life just because he’s strong. It’s right because He created everything, and it all belongs to Him. And I reject a divine command theory of morality, which would teach that anything that God commanded is moral. Rather, I believe that the Bible teaches that morality flows from God’s nature, and God cannot contradict his own nature. Therefore we avoid both saying that God could be absolutely capricious in His commands or decrees, and that God is subject to some prior or superior standard of morality. The first possibility could lead to the conclusion that God could command a heinous crime and it would then be good. Skeptics (including Ed) are right to assert that this means moral standards are impossible. If it could be shown that God gave commands that were contradictory, or issued moral principles that were contradictory, then that would be a strong objection to the truth of the Bible, I believe. I have never heard any such demonstration, however. And the second possibility fails to address the issue. If God is subject to some standard external to Him, then morally speaking He’s in the same boat we are, and we still haven’t addressed where morality comes from or what it is.

The issue of slavery is a little more complicated. The people of Israel were not allowed to own perpetual slaves that were fellow Israelites. Israelites could sell themselves and their families into slavery for seven years, but after that they were freed (with compensation) unless they wished to stay in the service of the master forever (see Exodus 21 and Deuteronomy 15). If a Jew bought a woman to be his wife, he had to treat her as a full wife with all of the wife’s privileges. He could not sell her, and he could not refuse to take care of her. Perhaps the idea of buying a wife sounds very strange, but arranged marriages were the habit of the day. This was really no different.

Further, kidnapping and slave dealing were prohibited. You could sell slaves gotten in war, but you could not kidnap people in order to enslave them. Sexual slavery also did not exist within the law. A woman who was taken for that purpose was to be treated as a wife, with all of the protections and privileges of a wife. Everyone was commanded to take care of the poor, and assist them any way they could, even giving them money just before the sabbatical year when they probably would not get repaid.

Exodus 21:20-21 is cited as an example of the cruel regime of slavery. If a man beat his slave and he or she died, he was to be treated as a murderer. But if the slave did not die, there was no punishment. Ed has claimed that this means that if the slave died a few days later, then there was no punishment. But this is not what the passage means at all. Exodus and Deuteronomy is what we call case law, or principial law. It’s not meant to cover every single case, but rather to establish principles. The principle clearly established here is that if it is clear that the slave died from harsh punishment, then the master is to be treated as a murderer. But if it is not clear (the slave lives for a while), then he is not to be punished for beating his slave. This is clearly the import of the passage, especially when combined with what comes later in the passage (Exodus 21:26-27), that if a man beats his servant hard enough even to knock out a tooth, the slave was free. The principle established is clearly that a man is not to beat his slave, or he risks loss of the slave (the slave would go free) or the possibility of criminal punishments, but that light physical discipline was permitted. Again, these laws establish principles. They do not attempt to describe every possible situation.

So, they could not own Israelite slaves permanently unless the slave agreed. The slave was to be compensated. And the slave could not be treated like an animal. He could not be beaten to death or even beaten enough to cause any permanent injury. They were not allowed to oppress or “rule over [a slave] with rigor” (Leviticus 25:43). Slavery was viewed as a way for a man to help out someone else in need. If a man had become poverty stricken, then he could sell himself and his family to another man, as a way of getting himself out of debt. This model of slavery looked nothing like the slavery that was practiced in the ancient world, or the black slavery that existed in this country for many years.

They were also allowed to buy slaves or capture slaves of non-Jewish people. These were permanent slaves that did not go free. But there is no indication that they were to be treated any different than other slaves. Further, they could join the Jewish faith, become proselytes and then they were treated as Jews. But they were still not allowed to kidnap them, kill them, or defraud them (see Exodus 23:9; Lev. 19:33-34). They were not allowed to have different laws for foreigners, but had to treat a foreigner traveling in their land the same as anyone else (Lev. 24:22). The only difference was that they were allowed to buy slaves or to take slaves in battle. So no free man could be made a slave- they could only take slaves that were already slaves, or had lost their freedom in battle. And this was not a free pass to attack other nations to get slaves. Their success in battle was dependent on God’s approval of the war, and many times in their history Israel lost in battle due to fighting without God’s approval.

In the Old Testament, God had declared the people of Israel to be His chosen people. There was therefore a distinction between the Jews and all other people in God’s decree. In God’s judgment then, the people of other nations were not equal to the Jews, in terms of what rights or privileges they had. Slavery existed because of the curse of sin that was on the world, and that curse was God’s doing. But God gave the people of Israel a foretaste of what would come in paradise by prohibiting permanent slavery among each other.

When Christ came, the distinction between Jew and Gentile was erased. No more was there just one nation or people that were esteemed by God, but all nations were brought into the kingdom of heaven (Eph 2:14, among many others). If all nations were therefore regarded as equal in God’s eyes, there would be no need for a command outlawing slavery. The prohibitions of the Old Testament on owning permanent slaves would now apply to all people.

Some have objected to the fact that Paul gives commands to slaves to obey their masters, as if this were an endorsement of slavery. But in fact, all it is is an injunction for all of us to submit to the situation God has put us in. Jesus also told us to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s (Matthew 22:16-21), and Paul (Romans 13) and Peter (1 Peter 2:13) both tell us to submit to rulers. This was not a blanket endorsement of whatever rulers did, but Christians are forbidden to rebel against God-ordained authority, even when that authority is unjust. The principles were all there, and they were quickly applied.

Everywhere that Christianity advanced, slavery disappeared. Paul taught Philemon to treat Onesimus as an equal brother in Christ, despite the fact that Paul was sending Onesimus back to serve Philemon. They not only could not teach rebellion against the Roman Empire, as it would have destroyed the early church, but it would have been wrong to do so by their own principles. But they constantly taught the equality of all before God, and this principle quickly led to the end of slavery.

Slavery in Christian lands made a brief (historically speaking) comeback due to Portuguese traders coming into contact with African tribes that made a habit of enslaving each other. The Portuguese were good at making a buck, and they recognized the business opportunity. It persisted for a few centuries, but it was again Christians who ended the practice. Yes, it’s true, Christians were on both sides of that argument, but the arguments of those supporting black slavery (principally the “Curse of Ham” argument) were ridiculously unbiblical and did not stand the test of time. Black slavery as it existed in this country and in Europe had nothing to do with Biblical slavery, and the Christian world came to recognize this, though it is certainly to our shame that it took as long as it did.

But Christians have often mis-applied the teachings of Scripture. This says a lot about Christians, but is not an argument against the morality of Scripture.

When you understand the division between Jew and Gentile that existed pre-Christ, and the disappearance of that division, and you really look closely at the laws governing slavery, you will recognize that the morality of the Bible again far surpasses anything that the world has ever invented. Slavery in Islam or the caste system in Hinduism or the slavery that existed and continue to exist under the Atheist systems of Communism, Fascism and Nazism that have existed in this century were and are horrible regimes of cruelty and oppression. Slavery in the Bible was nothing like that, and as it existed between the people of God was little more than a long-term economic contract.

But if morality is only discovered by reason, then reason has no good answer against slavery. Many regimes kept themselves in power for centuries by enslaving others. The ancient world was a world of slavery. Everywhere in that world, most of the people were slaves. It was slaves that built the Great Wall, the pyramids, and the White Sea-Baltic Canal. Slavery generated huge wealth for the South before they were forced to give it up, and the economic development of the colonies would not have occurred as fast as it did without it. It made rational sense on many levels. But it was still wrong.

Well, it’s been a fun couple of days, what with the debates that have sprouted over the last couple of posts.  But I’m off to South Dakota for a week or so.  Have a good week, all, and I’ll see you when I get back.

This is a response to Ed from Dispatches from the Culture Wars.  Ed took me to task for not responding to him in an article which was not written in response to him.  Odd.

Anyway, Ed thought I didn’t really answer his objections to Christianity in this article, but then as I said, I wasn’t trying to.  Since Ed apparently really wants to hear such an answer, so much so that he criticized me for not answering him when he hadn’t asked me to and I never said I would, I guess I’ll oblige and try to answer.

Ed,

You, like DarkSyde, keep switching the argument in the middle.  If Moses simply claimed that God told Him to destroy the people of Canaan, but God did not tell him to, then Moses is just another bloodthirsty madman.  Make that argument all you like.  It won’t convince anyone of anything. The whole difference comes down to whether or not you accept that God told him to.  Half the time in your argument, you’re trying to prove that the moral system of the Bible is repugnant, and therefore assuming for the sake of the argument that God actually did tell Moses that.  The other half of the time you assume that God didn’t tell Moses that, and we should just judge Moses like we would any other bloodthirsty maniac.

If God commanded Moses to destroy them because of their great idolatry and cruelty, just as He has destroyed other wicked people at different times and in different ways, then God is perfectly within His right to do so, and no moral relativity is suggested, since it is always God’s right to destroy wicked people and He does it all the time.  There is also no moral relativity suggested by saying Moses was correct to obey God since it is always right to obey God and always wrong to disobey Him.  Genocide is not right sometimes and wrong other times.  It is always God’s right to save whoever He chooses and destroy whoever He chooses.  All of us are guilty of terrible sin in His eyes and therefore worthy of annihilation.  And if it’s right for Him to destroy an entire nation, it’s also right for Him to destroy an entire nation except for some subset of the people in that nation such as the virgin women whom He decides to have mercy on.   

Now you can object to that if you like, but if the God of the Bible actually exists, and has created all and commanded all people to worship Him and Him alone, then He is perfectly within His right to destroy all who oppose His rule of the universe.  I’m not asking you to see that as being consistent with your own particular moral beliefs.  I’m asking you to recognize that it is internally consistent.  There’s nothing relative about it.  If I were Moses and God commanded me to do what God commanded Moses to do, I’d do it, and not concern myself with substantiating that claim to the people I’d been commanded to destroy.  There is no ‘evolution’ of morality- if God commanded it, it would be just as right today as it was then.  If God didn’t command it, it would be just as wrong then as it would be today.  Now the issue of slavery is a different one, and one that I haven’t addressed here.  I’m aware of that.  I’ll take that one up another day.

The question you’re trying to ask is, does the God of the Bible act in a moral way?  And my question in response is, by what standard could you judge?  If He exists, will you judge Him, who were created by Him?  There is no external standard of righteousness that we could use to judge what God does.  He is the standard.  We act as He has commanded us.  That never means that we can do whatever He can do.  All life is in His hands, because He has created all.  But nobody’s life is in my hands, or yours.  So there isn’t the slightest relativity in saying it’s always right for God to give life or to take it away, whether by the sword (or the AK-47), or by disease or famine or flood or any other means.  It’s never right for me to do the same thing.  I have no right to decide who lives or dies.

If on the other hand, the God of the Bible does not exist, and you’re trying to convince people of that by impugning the morality of the Bible, then you need to demonstrate that the moral system of the Bible is internally incoherent, that is to say, contradictory.  You haven’t done that yet.  All you’ve done is to say that modern sensibilities don’t approve of the God of the Bible, and my answer to that is I don’t care two figs about modern moral sensibilities.  Modern moral sensibilities have taught us to look the other way while we slaughter 45 million babies and excuse any kind of sexual perversion and quibble over a few words in a speech while Iraqis got murdered and raped by the thousands.  We’ve been standing by watching Sudanese get massacred and North Koreans get massacred and how many other groups suffer horribly while we worry about whether we’ve got enough UN resolutions passed to help.  Our own degeneracy funds the slavery of thousands of women and girls every year in conditions far more horrible than what the slaves of Israel would have experienced.  Our courts tell us that we can’t protect the right of a Texas high school to say a prayer before a football game, but that we have to protect the rights of people to publish pictures of little boys getting sodomized on the Internet, and protect the rights of people to pull their babies halfway outside their wombs and have their brains sucked out through a straw.  You’ll pardon me if I think modern moral sensibilities aren’t up to the task of judging God.

So if you can show me that the moral system of the Bible is itself contradictory, fire away.  If all you’ve got to say is that you don’t approve, I’ll bid you good day, sir.

This is a response to a commenter on a New Covenant thread.  I was going to put it in the comments, but ran out of room.  It dovetails nicely with a previous article anyway.

DarkSyde,

I am personally glad that I worship a God who destroys the wicked and mercifully protects His people. I don’t feel the need to apologize for His actions, and I don’t think He’s a God that changed in the New Testament. You don’t get to decide whether or not God fits your standards of morality. What you get to do is to decide to submit yourself to His standards of right and wrong, or rebel against Him and destroy yourself in the process.

I don’t claim to understand everything that God commanded in the Old Testament, any more than I understand everything that He ordains today. But the people of the earth are in His hands to do with as He pleases, and I’d much rather be in His hands than in the hands of the philosophers that the modern age has given us. What is it, do you think, that gave you such a high view of morality? It sure wasn’t atheism, or relativism, or naturalism, or any other philosophy that’s come along in the last couple of centuries.

If the people that God commanded destroyed were innocent, then God took them off to heaven with Him, and they’re better off. If they weren’t innocent, then no harm no foul. Ed’s wrong, by the way, when you say no human dictator has ever commanded the destruction of whole peoples. Hitler with the Jews, Stalin with the Ukrainians, Mao with anyone who looked foreign. It’s happened over and over, and I’d submit to you that there’s a major difference when the God who created them commands such a thing, and when man commands such a thing. I’m not saying I’m always comfortable with God as He actually is, but then nobody ever told me I ought to be.   Job wasn’t comfortable with how God was, and God answered, “Where were you when I created the world?”  When Paul hypothetically poses the question in Romans 9, the answer is, Who are you, O Man, to reply against God?”

So go ahead and invent a God that’s more to your liking, if it makes you feel better. Or just write Him out of the picture altogether. But you might find Him knocking at the door one day, and you might not like what He’s got to say.

Matt

I have just recently finished reading The Problem of Pain.  This is probably CS Lewis’ least satisfying book for me.  I have long heard, and believed, that Lewis wasn’t much of a theologian, and it is in this book where I see that most vividly on display.  There’s a lot to be admired in this book, and I would probably speak more positively of the book if the writer were someone without Lewis’ impressive credentials.

 

A lot of my difficulty with this book has to do with my own theological approach to the Problem of Evil, and the inadequacy I see in the traditional approach that many theologians take to that issue.  In The Problem of Pain, CS Lewis suffers from the same deficiencies that the traditional arguments suffer from.

 

The book addresses one of the oldest problems in philosophy, the problem of evil (called the problem of pain by Lewis, but not really a different issue).  The problem of evil is simply this:  How can a good God allow evil to exist?  In syllogistic form, one might look at it like this:

 

1.                  A good and loving God must wish to abolish evil.

2.                  An all-powerful God must be able to abolish evil.

3.                  But evil exists.

4.                  Therefore, a good and all-powerful God must not exist.

If God allows evil to exist, then He must be either not good, or not all-powerful.  If He were good, surely He would desire to eliminate evil.  If He were all-powerful, He would be able to do so.  Since evil exists, a good and all-powerful God must not exist.

 

I find the typical Christian response to this deeply unsatisfying, mostly because it is profoundly unscriptural but also because it is essentially a concession to the argument.  This is the free will defense, and it states basically that God was unable to create a world that was good and that also lacked free will, and therefore free will had to be included.  With this free will present, man chose to exercise that free will and chose evil instead of good.  Therefore it is man’s fault that evil exists, not God’s.

 

I say this is unscriptural because in at least two of the main places where the question is actually discussed in the Bible, the free will defense is not invoked.  These two places are the book of Job and in Romans 9.  In Job, God’s defense is essentially, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” This is God’s answer to Job’s question to why these evils have been allowed to come upon him.  God never ducks responsibility, invokes the free will of Satan, or uses any such weasel words as “allowed”.  God accepts full responsibility and claims full right.  We know from the story that God decreed these occurrences in Job’s life in order to vindicate His glory to Satan and the angelic hosts.  He never apologizes for doing so.

 

In Romans 9, Paul anticipates the question, How can then God find fault with man, for who has resisted His will?  This question comes in response to Paul’s argument of God’s complete sovereignty in salvation and damnation.  This is essentially the problem of evil- if God is in control of all things, how can we call anything evil?  Paul’s answer has two parts.  The first (Who are you, O Man, who replies against God?) question’s man’s right to ask the question in the first place.  The second graciously provides the answer, despite the impertinence of the question: 

What if God, willing to show His wrath, and to make His power known, suffered with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted for destruction; and that he might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy… even us, whom he has called…?

 

That is to say, the destruction of God’s enemies and the merciful salvation of God’s chosen reveals and glorifies God, and is therefore good.  Once we understand this, the problem of evil essentially goes away.  All is for God’s glory ultimately, therefore nothing resists His will.  The term “evil” simply speaks of our own subjective rebellion against God’s will for our lives, not any actual violation of His eternal will, since that is impossible.

 

The free will defense, on the other hand, weakens God by saying that evil exists ultimately because God was powerless to prevent it.  God somehow was ‘required’ to create a world that had free will.  He was unable to create a world where men would freely choose to worship Him, without them falling into sin, but was still compelled to create such a world, again presumably to fill some need.  But if a good world cannot exist without free will, then what of heaven?  Christian theism posits the existence of heaven, where we will serve God forever.  Will we be free there?  If not, by this argument heaven must not be good.  If so, by this argument it must be possible for us to fall from perfection all over again, even in heaven.

 

Because we are subordinate to God in the very deepest, most metaphysical respect, I am comfortable saying we can freely choose to serve God or to rebel against Him, and yet never depart from His sovereign plan for all things.  This also solves the problem of evil.  The only problem it creates, I believe, is that it forever denies any hope man could ever have of being truly independent and self-ruling.  But this is not a Biblical problem; only the problem of the man who rebels against God his Creator.

 

—

By the way, I’ve addressed this problem more thoroughly, from both perspectives, in an essay I wrote recently.  Download a copy here, under “My Documents”.