Evil

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Starts partway through Conrad Wozniak's introduction. After Greg's talk and a word about Stand to Reason, Conrad leads the questions and answers and closes the evening. Words that could not be made out are marked [unclear].

some of these questions and showing that the Christian worldview really is the only view that is capable of offering a satisfying answer to the problem of evil. Our speaker founded Stand to Reason in 1993. He is an apologist, a speaker. He is a friend of Living Oaks Church. Many of you know him well, and we're blessed to have him here this evening. Would you all give a warm round of applause to our speaker this evening, Greg?

I needed that extra applause to get up.

Thank you, con man.

I can't remember Conrad, so I have to remember Conrad. Con man gets me to Conrad. I thought that would be a funny opening. This evening I want to talk. About a serious problem that everyone faces, that no one escapes, and that no one can solve but one. And I want to introduce that problem with a personal story. Many of you know I have two daughters, Annabeth and Eva. Annabeth is the eldest. She's going to turn 22 here around Christmas.

And when she was about, oh, I imagine about eight years old, She asked me a question. Now, she was baptized here, actually, when she was six. And so she had the what stuff down, basically. But now she started to ask the why questions. And the question she asked me was, Papa, how do we know that God is true? What she said. How do we know that God is true? How do we know we're not barking up the wrong tree kind of thing?

Now, this is the kind of question I answer with adult audiences. Now I have my eight-year-old and I'm Trying to think of how to put it to her in a way that will make sense to her. And then this sentence popped into my mind. And I said, you know, honey, the reason that we believe God is true is because he's the best explanation for the way things are. The reason that we believe God is true is because he's the best explanation for the way things are.

Now, I never put it that way before, but I realized that when I said that, that really summed up the entire story. way that I went around and about defending the Christian faith. Because when it comes to any particular thing in life, any particular detail that we have to explain, it's the biblical worldview that turns out in the final analysis to explain it better than any other view. Doesn't mean there's not going to be loose ends.

I'm happy with telling people, you know what? Christianity is messy. You know why? Because religion is messy. You know why? Because life is messy. Okay? And we're not going to find anything that's going to satisfy all of our questions to all of our satisfactions. What we can do best is look at the answers available to us and see which one turns out to be all things considered the best answer. explanation for the way things are.

So I was introducing her to the concept of explanatory power. And if you're in science, as you know, this is part of the driving force, answering questions. And that can be applied to all kinds of different issues. But I think it's especially applicable to the topic that I want to talk about today. And one thing that makes this an easy topic to talk about Is that it doesn't matter where you live. It doesn't matter when you lived.

Everybody knows something's wrong with the world. And actually, everybody knows that the thing that is wrong with the world is people in the world. That we participate in this. So here's the question. What explanation of reality makes the best sense of mind-numbing reality? evil and suffering that we experience or see in the world. Now, massive numbers of people would say that it's not theism. And there's a reason why.

And I want you to think for a moment about a movie that was made a long time ago, but you might have seen it. It's called Sophie's Choice. And it accounts, or I should say recounts, The life of a Polish woman who had, actually, as she's going post-World War II, she's having all kinds of difficulties, but maybe a third of the way through the movie, she reflects with her love interest about something that happened to her during the war.

And as she's depicting this scene, she's almost speaking, this is Meryl Streep, the actress, she's almost speaking in a monotone. And here's what she says. I was arrested. My children were sent with me to Auschwitz. When the train arrived at Auschwitz, the Germans made their selection who would live and who would die. And then as she reflects, there's a flashback and you can see a soldier in front of her in kind of sepia tone.

And he says, you may keep one of your children. The other one must go. Do you mean I have to choose? I can't choose. You are a Polack, not a Jew. Gives you a privilege, a choice. I can't choose. He says, choose or I'll send them both away. John, my little boy, was sent to children's camp. And my little girl, Eva, was sent to Crematorium 2. And then as the tears are streaming silently down Sophie's face, she says, I knew that Christ had turned his face away from me.

And that only a Jesus who no longer cared for me could kill those people I love. And I think Sophie's dramatic and very moving reflection echoes many of our deepest doubts about God. And you might ask, well, what exactly is the problem? And there's a way of characterizing it that's kind of dry and academic. That there's an objection that's meant to show a contradiction inside the theistic worldview.

If God is powerful and good, he would deal with evil, he'd want to do it, he'd be able to do it, but evil exists, therefore he's either not powerful or not good or doesn't exist at all. And that's why this is the atheist's favorite argument against God. It's one of the most tenacious objections against theism of any sort, and it's a deal-breaker for many people. It's an aggressive attempt to defeat God.

the Christian worldview. Theism can't be true. It's got an internal contradiction. Okay. But there's more to this problem. And it was exemplified by Sophie's response. The real problem of evil isn't intellectual. It's personal. Sophie's dilemma wasn't intellectual. She wasn't pondering an apparent contradiction in her Christian worldview. Rather, she said, Only a Jesus who never cared for me could kill those people I loved.

And when you and I face tragedy, and we are torn with anguish, and we cry out, where was God? It's not intellectual. It's personal. Bertrand Russell said, he being the great 20th century British philosopher and atheist, How are you going to talk about God when you're kneeling at the bed of a dying child? I remember when I first heard of that statement by the philosopher Bertrand Russell and I thought to myself, I hope no atheist ever asks me that question because I don't know how I'd answer even as a Christian apologist.

That has great rhetorical force. So we're going to return to that statement in a little bit. But you understand there's the personal element. So I want to be clear about two things from the start. Given that this issue is personal, it doesn't mean that there aren't, in a certain sense, intellectual reflections that we can offer that will help the personal element. But I want to make two reflections here.

I am not addressing this problem as a theologian or as a philosopher. I have advanced degrees in both fields, but that's not why I come at this. I come at this as a human being, just like you do. I have to live in the same world everybody else does. I have to answer the problem of evil for myself. Another way of putting this, though, is that this is a human problem, not a a Christian problem. Now I want that set to settle in because there's a very significant thing that follows from that observation that this is a human problem, not a Christian problem.

And the thing that follows, and this is my second point here as I start, the thing that follows that the problem of evil is a problem for everyone and for every worldview and for every religion. It doesn't matter what your philosophical foundation happens to be, whatever you're offering, as a true story of reality, has got to answer this question. And so if someone comes to me and says, I can't believe in God because of the problem of evil, I am sympathetic to that.

I get it. I understand that. But the atheist can't just walk away at that point because he's got more work to do. Now God is gone on his view. All right. But what about the evil that he just described? Is that still here? Yes. Okay, now what? Here's another question you could jot down [unclear]. What's the alternative? And what you're going to see in just a bit is that atheism is not the alternative that works.

Because In atheism, there can't be a problem of evil. Because there is no moral standard that is native to atheism. And evil just is a departure from a moral standard. The atheist hasn't gotten rid of the problem. So the real issue, I think, regarding the problem of evil, the best way for us, anybody, to go about addressing this is who has the best answer, maybe not a complete answer, maybe not a perfect answer, but all things considered, who has the best explanation for the way things are.

Back to my comment to Annabeth. In other words, one, which way of understanding the world can make the most sense of the challenge itself? And two, which way of looking at reality gives us the best resources to deal with it? So one in a sense is kind of a, for lack of a better word, an intellectual element. The second one is practical. Who's got the best answer? Which point of view has the best resources to deal with it?

Okay. So that's my question as a human being trying to make sense of my own world. So here's where I want to proceed with our evening material. And first, I want to make a few observations about the problem itself that will simplify the problem immensely. Sometimes when you have to work something out, if you look closely at the problem, it gives you some clues about the right direction to go. And so secondly, I want...

to tell you why there's evil in the world from inside the worldview. We're talking about having a biblical approach, but sometimes we start from the outside and look at the way the world is. And then we go into the inside and we talk about how does the Christian biblical characterization of reality fit the way the world really is and what kinds of answers does it give to those problems. Third thing I want to do is show you on a biblical view that there is no contradiction between the power of God and the goodness of God when it comes to the question of evil.

And finally, I want to show you what God is doing to solve the problem. And here's what I want you to think about. I want you to... I hope you see that atheism is not the answer. It's just the opposite. The answer to evil is God in Jesus on a cross at Calvary. So, first some observations that will simplify the issue. Okay, here's the first point. So now we're into the main structure. That was just an introduction.

First point, evil is something that Thank you for that. No doubt. That's the problem. It's real. Of course, it's something. Well, how does that simplify things? Did you ever ask yourself what's necessary for there to be a problem of evil in the first place? In order for there to be a problem of evil, some things have to actually be bad in the world. Isn't that the way people raise the objection? How can there be so much evil in the world?

Out there. Now the significance of that observation is that there's a whole lot of people, a massive number of people. People you know and you encounter every day that when it comes to morality think it's just a matter of individual opinion. You have your view, I have mine. What's true for you is not true for me. You may not like abortion, other people like abortion. Maybe homosexuality is wrong for you, but it might be right for other people.

All of these ways of talking about morality reveal that at least on the surface their conviction is that there is no objective morality. There is nothing out there that is a standard over everybody. All of the standards are exist in here. So when it comes to relativism, and I know you're familiar with the term or heard it before, but I actually think it's a hard one for people to get their teeth into.

It's almost like we're immersed in it so much, but we haven't thought too carefully about it. But I want to make, maybe clarify it in a way that I think has been really helpful. And that is simply by thinking of the inside and the outside. Inside, outside, inside, Distinction. That was a hard word. The older I get, the narrower the broadband. So right now I'm on dial-up. The inside-outside distinction.

When it comes to moral thinking, according to the relativists, morality is on the inside. It's whatever you think on the inside. There are no objective principles on the outside at all that are to govern everybody. And by the way, there's more and more, you see more categories of human life fitting this characterization. You think of the gender issue right now. What is the truth of a person's gender?

It's not what's on the outside. It's what's on the inside. You do you. Whatever you think, whoever you think you are, whatever you think you are, however you think you are, however you think on the inside, that's reality. It doesn't have to have anything to do with the outside. And when you live according to what's true for you on the inside, that's now called authenticity. That's relativism. Applied in a whole bunch of ways.

But here's the problem when you apply relativism to the issue of morality. If relativism is true, and it may be, I mean, for the sake of discussion, maybe they're right. Maybe there is no big set of rules over everybody that get broken, that we all have to abide by. Maybe they don't exist, but if that's the case, then there is no problem of evil. If there is no objective morality, there is no objective broken morality.

If there is no objective broken morality, there is no objective evil. There's no objective good either, by the way. It's just all lost in the twilight of moral nothingness and moral relativism. So relativists can help themselves to the relativism when it's convenient to them. I think that's really the way it works. But they can't help themselves to the problem of evil. It does not work. And most of them have not thought about this.

I remember a long time ago in Hermosa Beach at a restaurant right there on First Street or whatever, First Avenue. And in a discussion with the gal about these things and she was shocked. insisting that morality is relative and then she raised later on in the discussion the problem of evil against god not realizing that she she's uh she's in a different world when she does that you can't have them both one or the other and maybe to help you think more carefully a little bit about this um i let me just give you some illustrations so i don't know if anybody's

a bowler here. Californians don't usually like to admit that. Now I'm from Chicago and there's a lot of Wozniak, you know, Polacks in Chicago. And they're, I mean, they go to church, they all wear their bowling shirts, you know, that's the big deal. But you know enough about bowling to know what the difference between a good bowler and a bad bowler is. How do you tell the difference between a good bowler and a bad bowler?

Again, I'm an audience participation guy. This is an easy one. How do you know the difference between a good bowler and a bad bowler? In a word, the score. Thank you. In other words, to make sense of the words good and bad, you must have some system of scoring to determine which is which. Now, of course, to a relativist, the scoring system is on the inside. It's not on the outside like... - A game like bowling.

But in order to say that something is bad, it has to be compared to something that's actually good. A scoring system that helps them. But for a lot of people, morality is just a matter of personal preference. But that reduces the objection to evil to something like this. You know, I can't believe in God, why not? Brussels sprouts. Okay, what's wrong with the Brussels? Do you ever taste those things?

They're disgusting. Now I've been using the illustration for decades, but now I realize it doesn't work as much because Brussels sprouts appear on every single menu. And I don't know how that ever happened. I think they're disgusting, but apparently a lot of people like them. So to a relativist, to say that I can't believe in God because of Brussels sprouts, as if he's saying I can't believe in a God that would create a thing, that little green, awful smelling things that are so disgusting to my personal taste.

Well, if you were to say that, you'd think, well, that's kind of a shallow objection to the existence of God. And it would be because it makes no sense. Just because God doesn't abide by your personal preferences, why should that mean he doesn't exist? But that's what you're left with. If morals are relative. There's another way of making the point. Germany has this wonderful expressway of sorts called the Autobahn.

You know what this place is? Can you break the speed limit on the Autobahn?

No, why not?

Because there is no speed limit. Okay, you can't break a speed limit that doesn't exist. Now, I've actually driven on the Autobahn in a rental car. And it was really good at 120 for about two and a half seconds. And that was really scary. Because if you are coming up on somebody going 60, that's like hitting a brick wall at 60 miles an hour. So I pedaled back on that one. But there's no speed limit there.

You can't have a traffic violation if there's no traffic law regarding that particular issue. So... The same thing is true when it comes to relativism. If there are no objective moral speed limits in the universe, then there are no broken speed limits. All right? And that would mean that relativism and the problem of evil are strange bedfellows. Okay? So I think this is actually the best way to show

that relativism is false by pointing to the problem of evil. Now I know why people complain about the problem of evil because it's so obvious. And I also know why they're relativists, because it's convenient. When I was at Michigan State University, I remember having a conversation with somebody, this is 1971, and pressing me on this issue. And I was a relativist, but I was also marching against the war in Vietnam.

And why were you marching against the war in Vietnam? Because that's an evil war. Wait a minute. That doesn't work. And I was aware at the time that there was a conflict, but it didn't bother me because what I cared about was not living coherently. I cared about living the way I wanted to live and disqualifying anybody's moral judgments against my behavior. Now, of course, I wanted to live as a relativist, but I didn't want anybody else to live as a relativist towards me.

You can see there's inconsistency there. But I want to take this a little bit further because the fact that morality, I'm sorry, the problem of evil is real. Evil is real. That's the first point. Not only disqualifies moral relativism, from the running, it also disqualifies something else. So I want you to think about speed limits again, but we're not on the Autobahn now. We are on a big island that nobody owns.

There's no country, there's no government, nothing like that. But it does have a really, really big salt flat on it. You know, like the Bonneville salt flats in Utah, that's where they set land speed records because it's really flat. You can go in any direction. So this island or whatever has one of those and you've got a Ferrari. And you take it out, you put pedal to the metal. So I want to ask you the question now about that circumstance.

Can you break the speed limit there? It's not a trick question. No, you can't. Why not? There are no speed limits there. Why not? Because there's no government. Because there's no government. Okay, now this is really significant. If there is a problem of evil, a real problem of evil, that means universally, objectively out there, There are objective moral principles that have been violated that we call a problem of evil, but they can't just be hanging out there.

If there is no government that establishes the universal principles, there is no foundation for them. They are indicators of something else above them that makes them possible. And there's only one thing that is adequate evidence To ground objective morality that makes evil possible, or good, by the way, and that one thing is God himself. Let me put it this way. If there is no lawmaker over the universe, then there are no laws over the universe.

And if there are no laws over the universe, there are no broken laws. And if there are no broken laws, then there's no problem of evil. But there is a problem of evil.

Everybody knows that.

Therefore, there are broken laws. Therefore, there are laws. Therefore, there is a lawmaker.

Therefore, there is a God.

The irony here is the problem of evil, which many people take to be an argument against the existence of God, turns out to be one of the best arguments for the existence of God. Now, this doesn't solve all the problems. More things have to be said about this. But this is a really significant discovery, and all we've done is has made the observation that evil is something. Sometimes people characterize the problem of evil this way, things are not the way they're supposed to be, which I agree with.

But if things are not the way they're supposed to be, that means there is a way they're supposed to be, and you can't have a way they're supposed to be without a sposer. So even to raise the question of the problem of evil, two options are eliminated from the discussion. Relativism and atheism. Now I had a conversation with a very well-known atheist about a year ago in New York City for five and a half hours across the table with eight cameras rolling and eventually millions of people seeing him.

His name was Alex O'Connor. He was a brilliant 26-year-old Cambridge-educated atheist. And he's probably the best-known atheist in the world right now, or at least with Gen Z and below. And he is a very consistent atheist, at least in this regard. He does not believe in objective morality. Now, This was really clear. I mean, this is his position. In fact, it's called emotivism. In other words, when we make moral statements like rape is wrong, we're not saying anything meaningful.

The sentence has no meaning on this view. It's just an emotional gushing of sorts. We're saying rape, something like that. That's his view. Well, that's consistent with being an atheist. Now, part of the problem was that he came after me on the issue of suffering in the world and the fact that how could a good God allow suffering kind of thing. And notice the problem, though he acknowledges that there is no morality, no objective morality.

And he underscored that point when we're in this conversation. There are two other people that are part of the conversation, but Nevertheless, he was taking me to task for the problem of suffering. Now, how could there be a problem of suffering if suffering itself doesn't have a moral quality? Notice how he's smuggling morality in to this other issue. He's trying to deny morality. He has to as a consistent atheist.

He's a bright guy, but then all of a sudden he makes this big mistake, and now he's complaining about the problem of suffering, smuggling morality in. Why does he do that? I'll tell you why. Because he's a human being made in the image of God. He's got to live in God's world. And this is a broken world. And it has a problem of evil. And even if he's got to intellectually deny that, to hold to his atheism, it's going to pop up somewhere else.

And it did in that conversation. All right. So evil first is something. It's real. And if it's real, then relativists and atheists are out of the discussion because nothing in their worldview is capable of making sense of the problem of evil. But now we face a different kind of problem at this point as Christian theists, and that is, well, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. I mean, he created everything that is.

And if evil is a thing, then God... Created evil. Now we got another problem. So here's my second point. First one, evil is not. Evil is something. Second point, evil is not some thing. It's not this gooey black stuff that's floating around the universe that needed a creator that latches onto us and causes us to do bad things. It's not a stuff. It's common misunderstanding. To illustrate this, let me ask you a question.

Did you ever eat a donut hole? I don't mean those little greasy sugary gut bombs you get in the back of church here sometimes. I've actually never seen them here, but some churches have those little round things, you know? No, no, no, I don't mean that. I mean the donut hole. Did you ever eat a donut hole? No, you didn't eat a donut hole. Why not? Because that donut hole is where the donut ate.

Donuts.

Okay. Well, evil is kind of like that. Evil is not a thing. It's something missing. It's a hole in goodness. I've got a shadow here. Shadow's not a thing. It's where the light is missing. And when you think about the words we use to describe evil or bad stuff, we use words like unrighteousness or impurity or lawlessness. The Greek word for sin in the New Testament is hamartia, which means missing the mark.

So all of these capture the sense of badness as a privation of some sort. Something's missing. Now, I have an illustration to kind of make this a little more clear because I think this is sometimes a little esoteric. It's hard to kind of get your teeth in. So I need an helper here. I need a pencil. Not many people use pencils nowadays, but I need somebody who has a pencil. Oh, you have a pencil? Can I borrow your pencil, please?

Would you mind bringing it? I'm a little slow up and down the stairs, but you're better. Okay, thank you for that. Oh, I like that. [unclear] I write with Ticonderoga number two. That's great. So I have a question now. But just before I ask the question, I'm just going to tell you, I am scribbling on my notes, my pencil, and I didn't like that scribble.

So now I'm using the eraser and I'm erasing it successfully. Right. So my question is, is this a good pencil?

Yeah, sure. Why is it a good pencil?

It works. It works. It does what it was intended to do. It's doing what it's supposed to do. Because there was a sposer who made it to do the thing it's supposed to do, right? It's a good pencil. Okay, now.

How was your pencil?

Now, same question. Don't think.

I'll give it back to you.

Is this a good pencil?

Still works. Still works.

There's always one week later. It still works. If you say, give me a pencil, and I give you one like this to do your thing, that's broken. That's broken. Something's wrong with it. It's not a good pencil. But has anything been added to this pencil? No, something's been taken away. It can no longer do what it's supposed to do. The evil, if you will, the lack of goodness is not a thing that's removed.

If you're thinking about a stuff, it's just that now the brokenness is a word that we use to describe when the thing can't do what it's supposed to do. It's less than it was. It's not more than it was. And that's the way it is. Evil lives. So when's evil? If evil is something, but it's not a thing, it's a kind of a hole in goodness, it's something missing. Why did it come? Where did it come from? And this is my third point, and that is, now, by the way, I'm stepping into the Christian story, just so you know.

So far, I've just been making observations about the nature of the thing and the problem, and just those observations have gotten us forward a bit. We've made progress. Now I want to climb into the Christian story and say, from our perspective, we have a way of characterizing this problem. What went wrong? What happened? Okay. And the third point then is evil is an intruder. It wasn't part of the beginning.

It wasn't, the brokenness wasn't there at the beginning. It wasn't caused by God. Human beings caused the condition that we call evil. And God saw that all that he made and it was very good. Right there in the first chapter. Pretty good in the second chapter too, except for, you know, it's not good for man to be alone. So God took care of that, finished up things and gave Adam a appropriate helpmate.

But then something went wrong. And human beings got themselves in a heap of trouble, didn't they? And I want you to think about this as parents. When you're raising your kids, you put boundaries around your parents, your kids.

- That happens. - You get older if you put boundaries around your parents.

- It happens. - Okay, I get it. I remember somebody saying once, now that I made that little faux pas there, when they were younger, you know, driving around with their kids and everything, and then they would hit the brakes, they would hold the groceries, right? When they got older, now they're holding mom. Not much laughter on that. Too many people following. No, we have boundaries for our children.

And the reason we put boundaries for our children is because it's dangerous out there. We are trying to protect them. We've learned a few things about life. That we know what's out there. We say don't go there. If you go out there, something's going to get broken. And so we get boundaries, right? And, you know, if we disobey those boundaries, something's going to get broken. It might be a vase or it might be a tool or it might be a relationship.

It might be a whole life that gets broken when we violate the boundaries. And sometimes the brokenness is irreparable. So we know this as parents, but God as our father put boundaries also for the human race because he knows there's danger out there and there's a right way to operate within his system and it's good. And when you go outside of that, you break something. When our first parents in that perfect realm that God made for them, that good thing, when they decided,

Not to obey what was outside of them, but obey what was inside of them. That sound familiar? Inside-outside distinction. Relativism. The primal heresy goes all the way back. When they did that, they broke their relationship with God. They broke their relationship with each other. They broke their relationship with the environment. When they decided to disobey God, they broke the whole world. And this is why there's evil in the world.

Because we broke the world, human beings. And we continue to break it. And a lot of what we try to do is fix things, but we know we're not up to the task. Because we just find better ways to live and we also find better ways to break things. So there's two things I want you to know with regards to the Christian story of reality and the issue of evil. First, evil is part of our story. It is not foreign to our story.

It is what our story is all about. It starts in chapter 3 and doesn't get fixed for 66 books. If there were no problem of evil, we wouldn't have a story. So it's at home in our story. It's not a foreigner. What's going on?

Read the third chapter. And the rest.

So it's part of our story. And the second thing is our story's not over yet. Our story is not over yet. So evil is something. That rules out both relativism and atheism. Evil isn't something, though. God didn't create it. Evil's the brokenness of the world that humans cause when they rebel against God. So this is my fourth point, and that is what made evil possible? And here we get to the heart of the alleged contradiction.

Because what I want to suggest is that something good made something bad possible. Something good made something bad possible. And there are different ways that philosophers and theologians have kind of unwrapped this issue at this point, and I'm just going to suggest an option. And this way of thinking is called a theodicy, if you want a fancy theological term for it, T-H-E-O-D-I-C-Y. And theodicies are speculations about why God would have allowed this to happen to begin with.

All right? And... One of those is that, and this is what I write about myself in the story of reality, this broken world. Well, God was certainly in a position to know this would take place. It did not catch him by surprise. But he had a good, being a good God, a morally perfect being, he had a good reason to allow this badness. A morally sufficient reason. That's kind of a general statement. But what might that have been?

And my speculation is I think what God wanted to do is he wanted to share his happiness with us. God is a perfectly happy being. And the reason he's perfectly happy is because he's perfectly good. And the only way he could share his happiness with us is if he created beings that were moral beings that were capable of of being in a kind of relationship with him in which they could act, act good. That doesn't sound like it's good, proper English.

You can act good, like do good things, act properly. How about that? Who learned you to spoke? I know some of you. They could choose the good. And as they choose the good, then they could grow in a sense of the kind of happiness only virtue can produce. Or they could not. They have a choice. That's the way God made human beings. That we have moral freedom, I think, is pretty obvious. And I think it fits in this equation.

I don't know we can do too much with that point, but it certainly fits in this equation that God wanted the kind of creatures made in his image, it's the way the story describes it, who could participate in the moral life that he is perfect in that makes him perfectly happy. But though we could be good, we could be bad, and we misuse that freedom. But why wouldn't God just make people happy? who were morally free, this is maybe a question, who didn't have the possibility of using that moral freedom to do evil.

And I was teaching a group of students at a university in Donetsk. I want to say Siberia, but it felt like that. But it was in Ukraine, that's where it was. It's a mining town. It's a pretty nasty place. I think the Russians have it now. They're welcome to it as far as I'm concerned. But as I was describing this particular issue, I was looking for a good illustration. I had this paper clip here and there was a young man that was sitting in the front row.

So I had about two weeks with these same students and I had a translator. And this young man was a big guy, big muscular guy. And he had a like a. You know, a pretty tight t-shirt on and he looked to me like a gangster from Chicago. So his name was Vitaly, but I called him Vito. Okay, Vito. I said, Vito, I want you to help me out. Da, he comes up here, right? I said, can you take this paper clip and can you bend it into a square?

Da. And he takes the things, he starts bending it. He's missing a little piece, but you see that's not bad. Okay, there it is. Kind of, sort of. Good enough. Okay, horosho, good for you. Okay, how about this? Can you now take that wire and bend it into a circle? Since it was just a square and he's bending into a circle, it's going to be a little bit of a bumpy circle, but it's something like that. Okay, good enough.

Now, one more thing. Can you... Take that little wire there and bend it for me into a square circle. Nyet. What do you mean nyet? Look at those guns. You're strong. You've got the strength and power to do it. You're telling me you can't bend this thing into a square circle? And of course, no strength, even omnipotence can't accomplish that because it's a false task. It's contradictory. Squares are not circles and circles are not squares.

You can't have a square circle. They have different qualities. And that's exactly what is being asked of God, essentially, when we say, why doesn't God make morally free creatures who do not have the capability of choosing evil? It's a contradiction. It's like married bachelors, you know, it's not going to work. The ability to choose to do good or evil just is moral freedom. And you would have to take away that moral freedom in order to have no possibility of evil.

But I think most people think that the freedom to act according to your desires in some measure is a good thing. And I think it is. People don't want their freedom taken away from them. Even the freedom to do evil is interesting to me. And I have raised this issue before with audiences. People complain about the problem of evil, but do they ever wonder about why didn't God do something? But they never say, why doesn't God do something about my evil in my life?

We want him to restrict those other people, those bad people who make us feel uncomfortable. But we don't want God to mess with our own life because we understand that our freedom is is valuable and that's the good thing that god gave us so that we could be like him in some measure we can participate through acts of chosen virtue and in virtue and goodness and therefore grow in goodness christians call this sanctification holiness that's what god wants but that's something we participate in

Hope you realize, you know, salvation is all God. But sanctification is a partnership. We get to participate in that. And in this case, if God does the good thing, he gives human beings this freedom, then he can't prevent the possibility of the bad thing. So I think what I've been offering here is a couple of things. First, evil is everybody's problem. Next, that Christians have power. Four things to say about the problem itself to help clarify things.

First, it's something, therefore relativism is false and atheism is false. Two, evil's not a thing. It's the loss of goodness. Three, it's an intruder. God didn't make it this way. And four, a good thing, moral freedom, makes the bad thing evil possible. Not necessarily inevitable, but certainly possible. So evil doesn't refute God, it affirms God. There's no contradiction from the Christian perspective.

But I think we can do better than that. Remember I told you about in the beginning that what I was looking for is a way of looking at it, not only that makes sense of the problem of evil, and that's what I've been talking about somewhat so far, but which is best suited to give us a practical solution. Comfort, realistic hope. And I want to go back to that Bertrand Russell quote Comment. How can you talk about God when you're kneeling at the bed of a dying child?

If you recall, I said, I hope no atheist ever asked me that. That was my first thought when I heard it. Then I heard Christian philosopher William Lane Craig respond to the question that Bertrand Russell offered. He said, what is the atheist Bertrand Russell going to say when he's kneeling at the bed of a dying child? Tough luck? Too bad? That's the way it goes. No happy ending, no silver lining, nothing but devastating, senseless evil.

He can't even call it evil.

He could just call it unpleasant. No, atheists are struck dumb while kneeling at the bed of a dying child. They can't speak of the patience and the mercy of God, future perfection that awaits all who trust in Christ. They can't offer hope. Comfort that a redemptive God can work all things together for good for those who love him and are called according to his purpose. Moving them forward to make them like Christ.

They have no good news. No hope for a broken world. I remember, I'm chuckling at this a little bit because I'm going to tighten it up to kind of sum for you. In that discussion with Alex O'Connor, Steven Bartlett, the host, this was Diary of a CEO. It's got 12 million subscribers, one of the biggest podcasts in the world. He asked Alex, because the topic was meaning and significance, and he said, Alex, if somebody comes to you and says, I have no meaning and significance in my life, what counsel would you give him?

And it was so interesting to watch Alex, because Alex looked at Stephen like, why are you asking me? I'm an atheist. I'd say, well, go to church, take drugs, read a book of philosophy. That's what he said. In other words, as Marx who said that religion is the opiate of the people, find the thing that makes you feel better because that's all there is. Find something in the moment to make you feel better.

There is no meaning or purpose, certainly not on his worldview. We can do better than that. Christians have a lot to say about what God is doing about evil. And so as I move towards my close here, I want to give you four things that God has done and is doing in response to evil in the world. Remember, I told you it's part of our story. It doesn't catch us by surprise. It fits. Here's the first thing.

God has given us institutions That were meant to restrain evil in the world. There are three of them. First one is government. According to our account of reality, government has a purpose by God to punish evil. And to reward goodness. Now, I think you can see that if you punish evil, you will have less of it. And if you reward goodness, you will have more of it. But if you punish goodness, you will have less of it.

And if you reward evil, you will have more of it. No duh. Now that alone tells you a lot about the nature of our world right now and what human beings have done and government. If government is punishing evil appropriately and properly, rewarding goodness, you're going to have less evil. That's what God wants. If government does not do that but reverses the order, look out. The second institution is the family.

All right? God has made a world. I want to be careful how I say this because I think sometimes it's described in a way that's not helpful. So God has made the world a certain way. When Jesus was asked a question in Matthew 19 about marriage and divorce, Jesus went back to the first chapter of the story and then to the second chapter of the story by our reckoning with the chapters and says this, have you not read that from the beginning, this is the way God is?

Made things, male and female. Notice the sexual binary. Cisgender. No gender confusion. The next chapter, and for this cause a man shall leave his mother and father, again those same categories reinforced, and will be joined to his wife, become one flesh, and what God has joined together, let no man separate. Now, this is a very straightforward characterization about how God made the world. And by the way, even people who have no access to the book still see the world as being made this way.

And during the Supreme Court discussions in 2015 about same-sex marriage, there was one justice who said, you know, maybe we ought to slow down a little bit here because the idea of same-sex marriage is not as old as the cell phone. I know some of you young people think cell phone has always been around. Well, however long it's been around, it seems like marriage is newer because all of these civilizations of the world understood that long-term relationships between a husband and a wife that was protected especially and privileged

Produce the next generation, which is why they protected it and privileged it. It makes a family. Now you take an ax to the root of family and you take an ax to the root of civilization. More evil is going to happen and it's going to happen more to children than to adults. Do it God's way. It's going to work out better. Not perfect, not in this fallen world. The other thing that God gave to mitigate the impact of evil was the church, is the church.

And Christians shoulder a large part of their responsibility to rescue and repair a broken world. And I'll tell you something, they're doing a pretty good job. I've been in lots of different churches over the years. Some of you know this is my church, but you also wonder why I never see you at church, because I'm in somebody else's church. And I have to listen to the same boring speaker every time.

That would be me. What I do for a living. No, Christians are doing all kinds of stuff in all kinds of ways. And every church I go into, I see it in the bulletin, the great things that Christians are doing to reach out to make a difference. We can do more, of course, but the world is civilized largely because of Christians. The world is literate because of Christians. I'll tell you that. Really? Yeah.

Because many, many years ago, a bunch of people got into masted ships and they went all over to the world and many died in the process just trying to get there so they could make a gospel. But people can't understand the gospel unless they can read and write. So they had to teach them. They had to create languages or written form of the language and then write out the Bible. That's how the world got literate, Christians.

Just as an example, slavery was practiced everywhere in the world by everyone. But it's the only the Christians who stopped it. First William Wilberforce in the United Kingdom stopped the trade, then stopped slavery itself, and then followed it up here in our country. It cost us 600,000 American lives, the Civil War, to bring that to an end. But nevertheless, it was Christians that did this kind of thing and et cetera, et cetera, go on and on.

I was actually had, I'm doing a crisis pregnancy center fundraiser in two weeks in Virginia and had an interaction today with the principals there, Zoom, and we were just talking about how, you know, people say, well, you guys don't care about the baby that you require is born because you're pro-lifers. And I told them, look, there are lots more CPCs, crisis pregnancy centers, and there are abortion clinics in the country.

And in fact, we're the only people digging into our pockets, not into somebody else's pockets, into our own pockets to take care of the women and the children. And those children that are born are women who decide to carry a term. So don't talk to me about that nonsense, because it's a libel on the Christian. Christians are doing amazing things. So what's God doing about evil? He's given three institutions.

The government, the family, and the church. That when they operate as he desires them to operate, there is a lot less evil in the world. Here's the second thing. God will give his Holy Spirit to anyone who wants to deal with the evil in their own life. You cannot do it on your own. Not very well. God will help. The Spirit is the Spirit of holiness. You get that spirit and he's going to work you over so that you can be more like him.

Holy. You can deal with that in your own life. So that's another thing that God is doing right now. Here's the third thing God is doing. There will be a time when he will return and remove every remnant of evil from his creation. He will restore perfect goodness to the world. Remember, the story is not over yet. It will be over. Sometime in the future, that's up to him, not to me. I don't know when that's going to be.

People say, are we in the last days? I don't know, but I know I'm in my last days. We're getting there. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, Jesus said, and they will be satisfied. Revelation 21 said God himself will be with them and be their God and he will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There'll be no more death or mourning or crying or pain for the old order of things has passed away.

Now when God deals with evil, he will deal with it decisively though. He's going to do a complete job. C.S. Lewis made the point, hey, when the author walks on the stage, the play is over. And a lot of people don't realize, hey, wait a minute. If God were to wipe out all evil tonight at midnight, where would they be at 12.01? Remember, our prints are on the smoking gun. We're the guilty ones. And by the way, we know that.

No one has to be told that.

Why do we feel guilty? Everybody feels guilty.

Oh, I think we feel guilty because we are guilty. How about that? Is that in the running? That's what I told the crowd at Cal a number of years ago when I lectured there.

Berserkly, yeah?

Maybe you feel guilty because you are guilty. There's going to be a time when God will bring it all to an end. But as we used to say in the Jesus movement, good news, bad news on that one. Really? What's the good news? Jesus is coming back. Whoa, cool. What's the bad news?

He's mad.

And that brings us to the fourth thing that God has done. He has sent his son to die for evil men, offering mercy instead of justice so they can be forgiven rather than condemned. He is waiting. He is waiting. He is waiting. He's giving people an opportunity to bend the knee and beat their breasts and say mea culpa, mea culpa, to my fault, to my fault. Give me Lord Jesus for my sin. God is patient towards those who are perishing.

But it will not always be so. So I think as I do close now, a couple of things are clearer. First, if there is no God, we just have to give up the idea that there's anything called evil at all. Nothing is bad, not in the ultimate sense, deplorable, tragic worthy of blame and nothing's good either by the way they go together and most people would not fare well if god dealt with evil today i think what we really want is a god who took evil seriously who provided a way to protect us from evil

And give us an opportunity for mercy instead of judgment. And if we wonder about the innocent suffering, by the way, just as an aside, why do good people suffer? There are no good people. Not in the way God counts it. To us, sure. And you ask anybody, well, where was that good line? Are you a good person? I'm a good person. Where's a bad person? Somewhere below me. It doesn't matter who you talk to.

That line of badness is almost always somewhere below them. They make the cut. Something like 70%, 68% of people in America believe in hell. And none of them, almost none of them think they're going there. They make the cut. There are no good people. Not by God's hand. I'm no Hitler. Good? One was enough? But you're no Jesus of Nazareth either. And you're probably more like Hitler than you are like Jesus.

Hitler's not the standard. Jesus is the standard. Atheism is not the answer to the problem of evil. God is the answer. In Christ. On a cross. At Calvary. He's not simply the best solution. It's the only solution. It's the best explanation for the way things are, that's for sure. Thank you. Now, I know Jon. Can you come up and just have a seat, be my guest?

Yeah, all right, fine.

You work here at your church? I'm the boss. I just want to say something about this. And I know Jon Noyes was here last week. Jon has been working as a pastor here for five years. And was that before your watch? Yeah, so they fired him to get you? Shh. Well, that's okay because we got John. Now the reason, he's been with us about eight years. I know he was here last week. I think I understand you did a great job for you guys talking about AI and all that other stuff.

But he's a great addition to our team. So he may have already explained to you these cards that are on the table. But for some here who were not here last week, let me just briefly say that we would like you to be part of our community at Stand to Reason. Our job is to train Christians to think more carefully about their convictions. and then to be able to make the case, defend their convictions when they're opposed.

And that's why we're here. 33 years now and counting for Stand to Reason. We have a website. Stand to Reason's acronym is STR. So our website is, what do you imagine? STR.org. Easy peasy, right? I understand we just upgraded the website. It looks better than ever. I don't know. I never go there, but that's what people tell me. It's a good place to go. So that's one way you can be a part of benefit from what we have.

But this card provides another way. There's a perforation there in the card. And if you are not already. Part of our community that is receiving the materials that we want to send you. I want you to take the card. I want you to tear it in two and this piece you keep for yourself. This is a thumbnail sketch of a way of asking questions to navigate effectively and safely in conversation. So that's for you.

This other part is for me. Okay. And this is where you tell me who you are, where you live and what your email address is. And then we will send you. Training material every month at no cost. And that will include an article that I usually write, but more of our team are filling in now. And that alternating months, every other month, you get one of those, about 3,500 words. And I'll tell you, each article, I'll lay it back up and put it this way.

There's some books out in the back there, but just about every chapter in each of those books showed up first as a Solid Ground article that we send out to people [unclear]. So these are, I think, pretty high quality things that will help you navigate in the culture. At alternating months, you'll get a one-page, 800-word mentoring letter where we serve to mentor you in some concept, okay?

But we have to know where to send it. So if you're not receiving this and would like to, please take a moment and just fill this out. And when you leave here, go to the table where the books are, and I'm going to give you something that's really our first gift Piece of training material to you. You'll see a little booklet there that says, Jesus is the only way. A little red booklet. Okay. I actually found 100 verses that teach that Jesus is the only way of salvation in the New Testament.

Can you believe that? So that's what's in this booklet. But I'm not going to give you this booklet. That costs three bucks. I am going to give you... Okay, sweet. I am going to give you a summary card, a quick reference card. Jesus is the only way. 100 verses and give you the nine lines of argument that these verses kind of fall into categories and also the key verses that are involved there. So it's not for sale.

This is an exchange for your card if you turn it in. Now, if Jon was here last week and you turned in a card and he didn't have these to give to you, you can go. Get one of these this week. So I'm just saying that's what that's for. So, OK, I beg your service, brother. Take a seat.

Can we thank Greg one more time for being here?

questions here. I have a couple. If you've written down something at your tables, pass it to one person and have that person just kind of hold it just above your head. You don't have to stick your hand way up there. Laura's going to walk around and collect some of these and we'll see how many of those we can get to in the next 15 or so minutes. And then I know that Greg will be around at his book table in the back for some questions.

But you made an interesting comment you know, in the middle portion of the conversation and then really at the tail end. And you talked about that atheist smuggling in suffering with the conversation of evil. I'm curious, could you like parse that out a little bit? Sure. The differences of evil and suffering because there is some overlap.

Yeah. What he smuggled in was a moral assessment of suffering. And of course, the problem of suffering has a lot of emotional implications. the word a currency with people because they go everybody suffers and so when somebody's suffering it's easy to ask the question why is god allowing that in my own life and by the way christians ask this all the time which i think they shouldn't if you read the scriptures with any breath you realize that

They are, the scriptures, especially the New Testament, is just thick with acknowledgements that the Christian life will be a life of suffering. You know that the book of Hebrews was written as suffering Christians. The book of 1 Peter was written as suffering Christians. The book of 1 Thessalonians was written as suffering Christians. The book of 2 Thessalonians was written as suffering Christians.

Ephesians, Philippians, and... Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and 2 Timothy were written by Paul when he was in prison. So our revelation advises us, warns us, informs us that life is going to be hard for us. And I mean, it's fair to say, I wonder why I'm going through this. But just understand that you've been forewarned. It has been granted to you not only to believe in Christ, but to suffer for his sake.

That's not Koukl, that's Paul. What Philippians 2. Just as Christ suffered in your flesh, arm yourselves for the same purpose. That's Peter, 1 Peter 2. Just to take a couple examples. Now, so suffering is a human phenomenon. And the irony is, and most people don't, Understand it as something amiss. Something's gone wrong, and I think that's true, characteristically. And therefore, this isn't the way it's supposed to be.

And therefore, it's kind of evil. Something's wrong. And when we say it's evil, we're not just saying we don't like it, though we don't. We're saying that this shouldn't be this way in a perfect environment. Like God made in the beginning. So when you have an atheist then that comes up and denies the existence of morality, which is consistent with his atheistic position, so he can't be caught out there, but then complains about evil, he is using an emotionally charged issue to subtly suggest that there's something morally wrong with it.

Because he raised it to me as a Christian who believed in God, who was good. So what do you do with the evil? Okay, I'm sorry, what do you do with the suffering? So in his mind, the suffering is in contrast to the goodness of God, which means it has a moral component. But he didn't say that right out. It was assumed. It was just smuggled in there. And I called him on it. And he said, I have not said anything about morality at all.

I said, no, you just smuggled it in here. Now, afterwards, there's all kinds of things you wish you would have said in a situation like that. In the fog of war, you miss opportunities. But I think it would have been fair to ask him, okay, Alex, then what is wrong with suffering? Well, it hurts. Okay, so what? Well, that's not, what are you saying? That's not good. That's not right. He can't say that.

But so you'll see this a lot when people have conversations that if you stay alert, even though they deny objective morality, they will smuggle objective morality into all kinds of things. How about the person who says morals are relative morality? There is no objective morality, therefore it's wrong for you to push your morality on me. Do you guys catch that? Okay. What he should have said is there is no objective morality, so it is not wrong for you to push your morality on me.

Push all you like, no complaint, not morally speaking. So that's just another smuggling in. But they cannot do that because they are human beings themselves. Made the image of God and that which is inside objectively true. Things that God has built on the inside is going to come out on the outside and they're going to show their hands without realizing.

That's a great response to that and a reminder that this is such an emotionally charged conversation. I think you even led out with. There's so much emotion in this conversation. I have some great questions here, and three of them are almost asking the exact same thing. So I'm actually just going to read them all. What about Satan? Did God create Satan? There must have been evil in the world before creation.

Lucifer went against God. And then what role does Satan have in evil? So obviously you talked about Adam and Eve and making that free will decision. Yeah. And this even goes just a step before time in that regard.

So, well, the first question, what about Satan and the role he plays? You might think of Satan just like human beings in the sense that even though he's not a physical creature, he still is a person who was created good and then went bad. And so in his realm, probably before the rest of the world was created, with the rest of the physical world. It's hard to know all the particular details, but in his realm, he made the same kind of wrong choice that human beings made in their realm.

Satan didn't break the realm that was given to humans, though, that they were given responsibility over, stewardship over. They broke that. That was my point. So there was evil and sin before that, but it was really in a different realm. And then Satan was thrown to earth. And this apparently, from what Revelation says, he certainly does a job here on earth. And Jesus encountered lots of demonic activity and had to deal with it.

And some of it had to do with manifested itself in illness. in deafness and being mute, for example, or in kind of what appeared to be kind of an epileptic fit, but another kind of crazy behavior. So the devil certainly has a role here, and he is called the prince of the power of the air, and he's the king of this world in a certain limited sense. Now, that doesn't take away the sovereignty of God.

God is allowing that kind of activity just like he allows our sinful activity. So there's a lot of parallels between the devil and that realm and human realm and the brokenness of human beings. There is no salvation that God has arranged for the demonic realm, none, which underscores something very important that a lot of Christians have not consciously worked into their theology, and that is that God does not owe anybody a pardon.

God does not owe anyone a pardon. If he decided to judge all of mankind for their sin, then he would be fully within his moral rights to do so. Fortunately, he's opted not just for justice, but for mercy. It has a very unique way of managing both of those so that he could be both the just and the justifier because Jesus took the punishment that we deserve. So justice was accomplished. It's another topic, but justice was accomplished.

And mercy is now made available to sinful, broken people. So the devil is a force. The New Testament talks quite a bit about demonic schemes. Ephesians 6, I should say, is where it uses that language. But it does talk quite a bit about the power of the devil. And I want you to think about these four things that it says about, see if I can get them all. But they're all saying the same thing in a different language.

John writes in 1 John 5 that the whole world lies in the power of the evil one. Paul writes in 2 Timothy chapter 3 that human beings are held captive by the devil to do his will. In the book of Revelations, it says that the whole world is under the power of the evil one in just a little bit different language. And then in 2 Corinthians chapter 4, it says that the world is blinded. By the devil. I mean, this is a serious control he has over human beings.

There's only one way out. And that's if God takes the initiative to rescue us from the slavery we are in to the devil. It's part of our story.

I like what you said there in that middle part. And it actually goes into a question here. You said God doesn't owe anyone a pardon. Right. Say it again. You said God doesn't owe anyone a pardon, which which shows the moral nature of not just evil, but but sin. And so we have a question of consequences here. A question of consequences. We're all, you know, on Earth. We're all in time. You know, we're all, you know, afforded, you know, 10 decades, maybe.

Right. Like we all have a very short time.

Yeah.

So the question is about. Eternal consequences for short-term, in-time mistakes, sin, failure. So the question is, doesn't condemnation for eternity seem quite harsh on people who for a short time on earth made these mistakes?

I'm sympathetic to that objection because I think people who make the image of God, they do value – Something inside of us does value justice. And this is why we, I think, maybe this is more a guy thing than it is a girl thing, but I love watching movies where I can see the bad guy get his comeuppance. And sometimes if they go out too fast, it's a little unsatisfying. Realize, oh, no, I'm kidding. I saw Reacher last night.

The bad person died slowly and that was kind of satisfying. So we have this sense of justice but at the same time and that is we do bear testimony to the fact that bad people ought to pay in a way that's commensurate with the crime. That's by the way what was meant by an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth that the crime The punishment should fit the crime. You don't cut off somebody's hand for stealing an old bread.

Okay? Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Now, Jesus was quoting it in the Sermon on the Mount in a disparaging way because of the way this was being used, but that is actually an Old Testament principle of justice called lex talionis. But the law of the club... Is that right, lex talionis? I think I got it right. In any event... However, when we think about what the scripture says of the final judgment, and there is some debate about this, but my conviction is the standard classical conviction of eternal conscious torment, ECT.

And I missed I wrote a piece on it, but I said, I did it with Tim Barnett. I said, you know, it's kind of awkward to be in a position of being the apologist for eternal conscious torment. I'm not happy about that, but I think that's what scripture actually teaches. So, yeah. That's when people say, okay, that's a bit much. Okay, I'm sympathetic to that. It seems to me a bit much too. But what I have to be guided by when it comes to these kinds of things is not what seems to me to be right, but what the texts that I have reason to trust is God's word and God's counsel to us about what it actually teaches.

Now, there is a problem with people thinking, though, I have to pay an eternal penalty for a temporal sin. The punishment for no crime has anything to do with how long it took you to commit the crime. You might spend weeks and weeks planning a burglary where you get a watch. That's it. But you could be mad at an incident and grab a weapon and shoot somebody in the head and commit murder. The second is much more egregious than the first, even though it took much less time to do.

Most sins don't take much time to do. What determines the appropriateness of the punishment in that case? And we have a human sense. Look, if your children... If you have a kid that slaps another kid, that's not good. You take action. If you have a child that slaps you, do you understand that's a very different kind of thing, right? Because you're not just a human being, you're their parent. And because of the role that you play in their life, that action is much more egregious than what they did to another child.

So that helps us get in touch with the sense that the gravity of the crime is related to the one against whom the crime is committed, not how long it took us to commit the crime. Now, David says something interesting in Psalm 51. He was guilty of adultery and murder. Bathsheba, he committed adultery with. Then he had her husband, Uriah, murdered, essentially. Put him in the front line and he heated the battle so he was wiped out.

He wanted him dead so that he could marry Bathsheba and cover up the impropriety. But when he confessed his sin to God in Psalm 51, he didn't say, I have sinned against Bathsheba. I have sinned against Uriah. He had. But that wasn't the main problem. He said in Psalm 51 against you and you only have I sinned so that you are justified when you speak and blameless when you judge. So in comparison to the human element, the human element kind of disappeared.

I should say compared to the divine element, the human element kind of disappeared because the real sin was against God. And all of our sin is a sin against God, first and foremost. And so then the judgment is meted out in light of, pardon me, the one we offended. That's the pepperoni coming up. It wasn't my fault. I mean, you guys made that decision. I kind of go along with it. I'm trying to be a good guest here.

So again, I think that It's easy for us to be concerned about the proportionality there. And that's because we're human. And that's because we're the criminals. But when you have a perfectly holy God, which is impossible to count, because we've never encountered in a very concrete way that somehow Isaiah chapter 6 he encounters the holiness of god and he's flattened depart peter said the same thing when jesus worked a particular miracle i am a sinful man so um most of us haven't had that exposure to realize how holy and good god is and by contrast to see the

Extreme nature of our own depravity.

I think those are the things that I would factor in as you try to think about this issue. I think that's a really good and balanced answer. And as you're talking, I'm reminded of the New Testament story where Jesus looks and says, he who is forgiven much loves much. And that's just an understanding of the weight, the depths, the depravity of even a small sin. Like stealing a watch, right? It goes against who God is at his character.

Maybe one or two questions, and then we'll wrap things up. If you have kids and you need to pick them up, please feel free to do so. This is a theological question. So God being omnipotent, which means all powerful, he's able to do anything. It's all powerful, omni, all potent, able, all powerful. And during the fall... Humans' wills, minds were darkened, right?

As a result of the fall, you mean.

Yes, as a result. So therefore, our ability to reason, our ability to almost even cry out to God is tempered down. So the idea is how do we then account for the culpability of evil for those whose wills are already constrained under God?

evil due to Adam you know this is one of the most thank you for that it's one of the most difficult questions for me to countenance because um I am very sympathetic to this I think Adam and Eve had it better than we did because they weren't fallen and so it's easy for us to imagine okay they get what they deserve but wait a minute we're crippled now morally And in our mind, our reasoning, our judgment, everything is influenced as a result of that fall.

So it's a different situation. It is a different situation. But the temptation is to think that that changes the moral equation. And the answer is it doesn't. Even with our corrupted natures, well, again, I'm trying just to look for just the right words. And they're hard to find with this issue because it is a, I don't want to say controversial, but it is enigmatic. How about that? Enigmatic. Our corrupted natures themselves are damnable.

We are guilty from the womb. That's basic Christian theology. Now, people who disagree with that, like Pelagius in the 4th century, he was a heretic. Now, to us, this seems unfair.

I get that.

But the best that I could do to kind of give you an illustration that you might be able to relate to or something is How many saw, and who didn't, The Lord of the Rings? That wonderful Peter Jackson. I did not. It's unbelievable. I keep watching it. Now it's been 25 years since they made that. It's still great. Okay, my favorite is The Two Towers. And I love the Battle of Hornburg or the Helm's Deep.

That whole thing. And [unclear] go down and everything, you know. So, and it was a long fall. When he got shot with that arrow, he had a long fall. So that was satisfying. And he lands on the stake, and the thing goes down, and he goes, "Okay." It's a guy thing. But do you remember when he was making the Uruk-hai, the crossbreed things between the orc and the goblins? The Uruk-hai were this thing, these big kind of beastly characters that didn't mind the light, and they were really awful.

And they were making them up. They were birthing them out of the mud. And one comes out of the mud thing. It was very clever the way. You know the scene I'm talking about right? Well. So Saruman is making all these. Uruk-hai. He's creating them all. And they're all evil. And when one big giant strong. Greasy. Covered. Coming out of the womb of the earth, as it were, breaking through the whatever, and he comes out.

Then he grabs the midwife, Orc, and strangles him. Remember that? This guy's bad. He's bad right from the get-go. Kill him. No mercy. Because he's bad from top to bottom. Now, I think that to me is as close as I can get to an illustration that might deliver. We can imagine somebody who is bad from birth and still deserves justice. Now, we're not Uruk-hai. We're not. I was going to say we're not that bad, but we're pretty bad.

So that's all I have to say about that. So two towers, that's the homework, I guess, is to watch the two towers. One final question, then I'll give you the final word. You know, you talked about making the problem of evil extremely practical. You also made it very intellectual. You've talked through some of these questions, which are deeply theological and complex. But everybody here looking in the room today has experienced evil in their life.

They turn on the news, they see evil. You know, we walk down the street, we see it, we hear it, we can't avoid it. How do we deal with evil, the evil in our lives? What hope, what encouragement can you give us? You gave us God and Jesus Christ on the cross at Calvary. That was a phrase that you said, which is a great reminder. Maybe that's all it is. But everybody here, we've all experienced evil. So maybe just give us a little bit encouragement as we encounter it in our lives.

I guess I have two thoughts about that. Very fair question. And the answer is, part of the answer just comes directly from the New Testament, right out there. Put your hope, fix your eyes completely on the hope that is set before you. The second coming of Christ, the, how does Paul put it in 2 Thessalonians, the parousia, the... When you read a book like Pilgrim's Progress, which is like the second most best-selling book in the world, if you set aside Harry Potter and the Bible, it would be number one.

I don't know how I've mentioned Harry Potter ever since that explosion was... But, I mean, people for hundreds of years have been reading this book that's been an incredible characterization of the Christian life. And it is, if you read it, it's a fair characterization of difficulty, hardship, and toil. And so there's a sense of which we accept the reality of the hardship of this life. And the rest of the world wants to imply that we can escape it.

some way uh ai is going to rescue there's a whole movement about now about how ai is helping with the medical field and everything so it'll fix our genes so we can live forever the problem with death is it robs us of our our beauty and autonomy i heard somebody say that last week at this conference that was that was a great observation but you look at the death rate is still the same it's 100 percent

They're not going to beat that because it goes deeper than something physical. All right. So I have a little saying. I mentioned it in the conversation earlier that I live by. It's very helpful to me. And it is, life is hard and then you die. Now, nobody laughed at that, but that's okay because it's sobering. But because I think, and I'm not a dark person, but there's a certain realism that I understand about the nature of the world and being a Christian that this is hard.

Momentary light affliction is producing for us a eternal weight of glory. Now Paul calls it momentary light. That's in 2 Corinthians 4. His affliction was a momentary light. Keep reading in 2 Corinthians. You know, like whipped, what, five times 39 lashes. Beaten with rods three times. Twice shipwrecked. Three days in the night in the deep. Stoned in Lystra. That's where they throw rocks onto you and leave you for dead.

Momentary light? Yeah, compared to. Compared to. And the way the verse goes is for momentary light, affliction is producing, by the way, the verb's important. It's producing the glory. That's why when I say life is hard, I think, yeah, it's hard, but it's going to pay off for me. It's my 401k, eternal 401k.

I'm adding up good stuff that's going to pay off here.

It's producing an eternal weight of glories. We look not at the things that are temporal, but the things that are eternal. For the things that are temporal are passing away, but the things that are eternal are forever. So that's how I deal with this. I do the best I can with my friends and, you know, and make life that far easier. There's lots of ways we can do that. But I also have this conviction it's never going to be just right.

And, you know, when you're single, you think, oh, wait till I get married. Then I'll be, this could be great. And you get married. Well, that's not it. Oh, I have kids. Yeah, that'll be it. Everything will come together. Then you have kids and you say, well, that's not it. Then you, well, we get rid of the kids. And you say, well, that's not it because the problem isn't with being single or married or having kids or not having kids or whatever.

It's with life. Francis Schaeffer said that all utopian ideals are ultimately cruel because they can never be fulfilled. And so I just have this kind of attitude about, let's go make the best I can of it, log as much for eternity as I possibly can. There's a little couplet, a song couplet, or I don't know if it's to music or not, but it says, only one life will soon be passed You know this? Only what's done for Christ will last.

Only one life will soon be passed. Only what's done for Christ will last. So there's where you make your big investment.

It's good. We're all about perspective. All about our perspective in evil. In Genesis 50-20, Joseph looks at the brothers and says, what you meant for evil, God meant for good. And he had that matter of perspective that you just gave us as well. Final word for us this evening on how we think biblically about the problem of evil in our life today. Final word? Yeah, give us a final word, final sentence, final quote.

How do we walk out of here thinking about it? The last thing I would say, I'm just going to bookend what I started with. And I actually ended with my talk. What we're trying to figure out as human beings is what... about the world what is the world like what is the ultimate structure of the world what is the nature of reality and one of the things we know is that there's evil in the world and that's a clue to the ultimate meaning because if there is true evil in the world there has got to be a god that one wants the world to be different made it different and wants it to be different again

And that, I mean, that goes a long way, I think, to direct. Then this God is there for us to help us deal with the evil in our own life and the culpability, the blame for the evil, to provide mercy. And then we're in the family when we bend our knees and beat our breasts, like I mentioned earlier, and say, mea culpa, mea culpa, my fault. Nobody else, just mine before you, forgive me. Then we come into the family.

And then we're children again. We're not subjects in rebellion. We are children of a father. By the way, that relationship is only for believers. As many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God. There is no sense of the brotherhood of man in Scripture, not like that. We're all made in the image of God. We all have value in that regard. But that special filial relationship is just for believers.

But in that relationship, that changes everything. Hebrews 12 says, okay, now we're children. Now, we've got a dad, and he's going to take care of us. Now, sometimes that's the woodshed, but he's doing it for our good. Because all discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful. But afterwards yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. So we're with him until he takes us home, or we go home to be with him.

And then it's further up and further in. I like that. I love that a lot.

Can we thank Greg for being here? This is a challenging conversation. It's deeply intellectual. It's deeply practical as well. Greg will be around for a little bit after the books after the back. So we have some of his books, the story of reality he mentioned a second ago. We have that in the back. We have his book. tactics as well. Feel free to go in and check those out. And then if you walked in this room this evening without street smarts, you can walk out with it.

So check out those books in the back. He'll be in the back. Would love to chat with you guys. One final reminder. Next week, we're back here at the same time. We have Sean McDowell talking about LGBTQ plus ideologies. You won't want to miss it. And it will start at the same time. Doors open at 530, dinner at six and conversation at 630. One Once again, thank you all for being here. Thank you, Greg.

Have a blessed evening, everyone.