Why do I believe I am surrounded by God’s grace?
Part 6: The problem of evil is always lurking at our elbow and must be addressed
Of course, I must face the challenge of those who suffer terribly, whose lives are filled with disappointment, who are oppressed and brutalised. My initial answer is to point us again to the remarkable fact that so many people whose lives are – to my mind- agonisingly painful with the wounds of life, manage to live with a faith that puts mine to shame. To explore this further, we need to delve into the problem of evil and why it is that a good God does not end evil. I have considered this in other articles, but very briefly now I will point us to the two key points:-
- In a changing material world, it is not possible to have a world without evil.
- Freedom is not possible without the possibility of evil
Perhaps I need to go into more detail in another article soon, but briefly (and so sounding somewhat callous to those who suffer terribly) the points are:-
Imagine God created a perfect world in which he had eliminated all possible harms. Think of an idyllic scene – I am imagining a couple enjoying a lovely summer’s day, sitting under a spreading oak tree, by a bubbling stream. There are no possible causes of harm in this world. Then time passes. The stream erodes a little valley with a cliff edge along its banks – now there is something to fall over. The oak tree becomes old, and as it reaches the end of its natural life, a massive branch becomes decayed and falls on one of the descendants of the original couple.
In a changing material world, it is not possible to guarantee that there are no causes of harm.
And the problem of freedom is familiar to most of us. We all love freedom, and we probably would not thank God for preventing us from doing something that we’ve decided we’d really like to do. If any of those actions are foolish or selfish we are extremely likely to harm others. So, for all who complain to God – and a complaint is certainly understandable – the thing to do is to consider in very practical, concrete terms: “What is it that you want God to do for you?”. The answer is usually a desire that God would intervene in how events turned out in order to stop harm coming to a loved one. However, once God intervenes to change events we lose our freedom because God is over-ruling our will and diminishing the value of our decisions by only allowing a limited range of consequences from the actions we took.
Thus, we are left in the world as we know and love it. A world of wondrous beauty – and great danger. Where heartbreak is always following at our heels and all that we love can be taken away from us. A world which we love viscerally and which produces in nearly all of us (subject to that question about those who have only ever suffered) a sense of the wonder of being alive, and which those who believe encounter as a sense of God’s grace. Strangely – and this does not comment well on our society – as we grow richer and have lives more at ease, we neglect, reject or despise God, while those who struggle with difficult lives, often in comparative poverty, remain attuned to this awareness of God’s grace that we have been exploring.
With my religious hat on, I cannot help thinking that human beings often become shallower in spirit as they pay more and more attention to material well-being, while those without these distractions are somehow more alive, or at least, retain the ability to value the whole range of human experience in a well-judged way. I should just note that some may complain that I am ignoring the struggles of many British people when I seem to assume that life is pretty good for most of us. Yet I believe it is, and a simple recalibration of our perspective confirms this. Many people today have no conception of how comfortable their lives are compared to people in Britain a few generations ago, or compared to those living today in abject poverty in other countries.
Spiritual Devotion 