Theodicy
Jeremiah 32: 17 “Ah, Sovereign Lord, you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and outstretched arm. Nothing is too hard for you.”
“God is love.” declares I John 4:8.
Period. Simple. Powerful. True. Eternal. Not up for debate.
Bad things happen in this world.
Also obvious. Overwhelming. Verifiable. Continual. Also impossible to argue.
These two statements together create the problem of theodicy: “How can bad things happen when God is all-powerful and all-loving? It must be that He is not truly both of those things.”
As a college freshman, I came to campus to live in my dorm less than two weeks after my 13 year old sister had been killed while riding her bike. The concept of theodicy was not just a fancy theological term; it was the question my soul silently screamed every morning when I woke up each day, the first thought through my mind being her sudden and horrible end.
As I attended my classes and wrote down my assignments and planned out my week, one particular item on a syllabus stuck out to me.
Read Elie Wiesel’s book Night and write a paper on the problem of theodicy. Now this was an assignment that resonated… one that came to preoccupy me. I read Night and I thought about Wiesel’s pain for a bit, but to be honest, even the horrific pain of the Holocaust was second in my mind’s current evaluation of suffering in those wound-wide-open days of grief for me. The evil I was staring down had a name and a face attached to it, and it felt personal, like the devil himself had stolen away my sister’s beautiful life from me.
So I wrestled, emotionally, spiritually, and academically with this enormous discord for weeks and weeks. I spent hours in the library with my head buried in books as I scribbled notes and clutched at different voices on this topic. Essentially, for me, after all my pondering and poking, it all boiled down to the concept of free will. Free will allowed us the chance to choose God … or not choose God. And because He loved us, in order to give us that choice; He did not create us as robots. He made Himself vulnerable to our rejection of His great love, and this rejection led to evil and to sin: it all began back in the Garden of Eden. Evil results from us picking something other than God as our god. And untangling that and processing that and then choosing to believe it was one of the most powerful and meaningful experiences I had in my entire college career.
I can never recall this story, though, without remembering the summons I got to my professor’s office to discuss my paper. The summons was not one to heap me with accolades for my brilliant writing and deep theological take-aways or even to express deep sympathy for my recent loss; it was an inquiry as to why I didn’t follow the assignment and include more of Elie Wiesel’s story in my discussion. I walked away from that office crying, shaking my head at the professor’s insensitivity, and yet also knowing that something extremely important inside me had been cemented forever. No longer would I make the common human mistake of blaming God for evil or being angry at Him for preventing it. Instead, I would inhale the powerful reassurance that when evil came, and when I hurt, in that pain and in that brokenness, God was there with me holding me and comforting me. In fact, He was crying with me, not because He was weak but because He had gone through the pain too to redeem humanity from it in the long run. Hallelujah, what a Savior!
