Ever since the first sin of disobedience shortly after man’s creation, there has been disintegration in the world. Division, disorder, destruction, and diabolical designs are all around us and within us. Don’t you feel it?
Suffering and death aren’t merely theological ideas for scholars to ponder. The wounds are in you and me. The definitions of these two towers of human experience are written in our flesh and bones. Why must it be this way? Why do we fight and grasp and tear at each other? Why do bad people seem to succeed and the good suffer unjustly? Deeper still are the questions, “Why is there suffering at all? Why is there evil?”
It is distinctly a human thing to ask why. Zebras don’t ponder the problem of evil. If we are just super-apes, then why do we sigh for vindication and justice, and long for immortality, for something more? If evolution says it isn’t broken, then why are we trying to fix it?
We write poetry, love songs and hymns. But the other creatures don’t. Chickens don’t weep at Mozart’s Requiem, but we ache for an unending love.
How could this desire exist in us if there were not a way to fulfill it? Thirst pants for water, hunger roots for food. If our hearts yearn for the fullness of truth, beauty and goodness, then what?
The problem of evil is actually more a proof for God’s existence than it is a reason not to believe in Him. I want peace, healing, wholeness. I want vindication, justice, the victory of truth. I want redemption. There is a reason for these desires; as the Alison Krauss song says, “Love that shed His Blood for all the world to see, this must be the reason for it all.”
All of the contradictions in the world and in our lives meet at the Cross. Suffering and death have come to us through the disobedience of our first parents, and if we are honest, that apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. But He has taken on our sorrows. He was crushed for our offenses, bruised for our evils. Suffering and death are not our lot alone anymore, like a card we can trump God with. He suffered too. And even now the universe is being remade in Him. All creation groans. The labor pains have already begun. The seed that has fallen to the earth in death, in me and around me, is already breaking earth, and will blossom into new life. We believe, Lord. Help our unbelief.
