LEX LUTHOR AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL: A THEODICY

 

Part Three: The Existential Problem of Evil    

Everything that I have stated to this point in parts one and two is true, whether you believe it or not is a different matter. But there is another aspect to this whole issue that gets more to the heart of the problem. Though conversations of this nature may commence at the intellectual level, they seldom remain there. The crux of the issue tends to be more of a personal one, the experience of some loss or some deep-seated suffering, mental, emotional or physical. It ultimately falls under the Emotional Problem of Evil (EPE), sometimes referred to as Existential Problem of Evil (ExPoE). But the answer to the problem may be viewed as somewhat paradoxical given the answer to the grief experienced. While accusations for the existence of evil are typically directed at God, He is never the cause of evil, “God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.” (James 1:13b, ESV)[1] He reaches out to comfort us in our grief. But people are generally too angry to respond if they believe He is the cause, or the cure, that was not realized. I’ve experienced such views from family members and coworkers who were angry with God for not curing their ailing loved one.

     If we look to the Old Testament and the prophet Isaiah, he foretold in a vision the kind of man the coming Messiah would be, “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. (Isaiah 53:3, Emphasis added) Of import here is what Isaiah says regarding the type of a man the Messiah would be. Two Hebrew words that provide us with that type of information are the nouns מַכְאֹב (maḵ’ôḇ) which is in the plural meaning, suffering, or to be in pain, translated here as sorrows. And the Hebrew noun, חֲלִי (ḥălîy) meaning, sick or to be weak translated here as grief. So, the Messiah would be a man enduring multiple kinds of pains and sorrows and stricken with or weakened by the grief of His experiences. By these alone He is well able to understand our suffering. Moreover, the Hebrew verb בָּזָה (ḇâzâ) has the niphal stem in the Hebrew indicating a passive voice and meaning to make despicable or to be worthless. How demoralizing, that He should also be seen as worthless, holding no value. Ever felt like that? Isaiah continued, “But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. (Isaiah 53:5, Emphasis added) Notice the singular pronouns he, him, his, contrasted with the plural pronouns our, us, we. This indicates what He did for us in going to the cross. “He was pierced”, “He was crushed”, “on Him was the chastisement”, “by His wounds”. “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8, Emphasis added) We are the recipients of His grace. What He did was done “For our transgressions”, “for our iniquities”, it “brought us peace”, and by it “we are healed”.

     You want to talk about what’s fair? The apostle Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians stated, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God”. (2 Corinthians 5:21, Emphasis added) Peter also articulated, “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous”. (1 Peter 3:18a, Emphasis added) The just for the unjust, again that doesn’t sound fair, but it was necessary. We may never know the reason or be able to answer the question of why. But Christ has promised, “Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you”. (John 16:7) The Greek noun, παράκλητος (paraklētos) can be translated a number of different ways, helper, intercessor, consoler, advocate, comforter. The word means, a call to aid or to plead the cause of another. One of the tasks of the Holy Spirit is to “comfort” meaning, to come with or give strength when we are suffering. So, He comes with strength, to give us strength. C.S. Lewis had been a confirmed bachelor for nearly his entire life, that is, before he met Helen Joy Davidman late in life. Upon her passing very shortly after they were married, he was overcome by grief at her loss, prompting him to write his little book, A Grief Observed. In it, he began to sense the futility of it all,

And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job – where the machine seems to run on as usual – I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much. Even shaving. What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth? They say an unhappy man wants distractions – something to take him out of himself. Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he’d rather lie there shivering than get up and find one. It’s easy to see why the lonely become untidy, finally, dirty and disgusting. (C.S. Lewis 2001, 5)

     Solomon’s observations caused him to conclude, “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. (Ecclesiastes 1:2) In like manner, Lewis queried, “What does it matter now”, losses such as this are painful, no question. It makes us question the futility of it all, what ultimately matters? Is what I’m doing really matter at all? Is there not something more? Something lasting? Something permanent? All Lewis observed early in his suffering was that God appeared, to him, to be silent. As a door slammed shut, bolted and double bolted. At the beginning of grief all our boisterous flailing about both blinds and deafens us to the One who wants to rescue us.

And so, perhaps, with God. I have gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted. Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face...you are like the drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.[2]

     Lewis speculated that there may have been something to be learned in it all. About God and about himself. It wasn’t so much a test of faith or love, “He knew it already”. But that which was needful to be learned in her living, had been completed in her passing and so, as Lewis puts it, “the teacher moves you on”. The whole painful experience brought him to one final conclusion, “I need Christ, not something that resembles Him”.[3] It is as I said before, it’s paradoxical. The very one on whom we heap our verbal abuses, is the very one who can help. It is not a call to arms; it is a call for aid. A.W. Tozer observed, “What comes into our mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us”. The most significant questions a person can contemplate, why am I here? what’s the meaning of life? what happens when I die? These are all important questions that, sooner or later, everyone asks and that need answers. But without God there is no ultimate meaning, value, or purpose to life. Without God man is just an accident of nature with nothing to look forward to. When we die, we just pass out of existence with nothing after. Would it matter that we lived at all? Oh, sure we attempt to create meaning and purpose, but to what end? Without God you would have to create it, but only with God does meaning, value and purpose even exist.

     Francis Schaffer developed a two-story model in which the upper-story represents a life with God and equates to a life with meaning, value, and purpose; while the lower-story functions as its antithesis, it is a life without God and devoid of these same qualities. The man who lives in the lower story without belief in the existence of God cannot do so consistently. So, to give his life meaning he needs to make a leap of faith into the upper story. He needs to manufacture something that will give his life meaning, something to take the place of God. Dr. L.D. Rue calls it, “the noble lie”. Within moral relativism is the pursuit of self-fulfillment to the exclusion of social coherence. But doing so creates anarchy across societies. Conversely, the imposition of social coherence under a relativistic outlook against self-fulfillment creates a regime based on totalitarianism. Thus, the necessity for some “noble lie”; that while not believing in objective, universal truths, the lower story, they create the “noble lie” of the existence of objective truth in order to move to the upper story. They cannot adhere to their own paradigm consistently and happily without manufacturing some noble lie that will move them into the upper story to give their world view some meaning. Blaise Pascal has made reference to “a God-shaped vacuum” or a void, which exists in each of us, and to which Augustine affirmed when he stated,

“Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee”[4]  

     To argue that, in life there is no ultimate meaning, therefore one must create meaning for his life, is entirely inconsistent. A universe without God, is one that exists without meaning, or purpose. Without God life has no value. Atheistic/secular humanism could not argue one way or the other whether something was loving or good, hateful or evil. It’s all relative, there is no objective morality. But a life without God cannot be lived consistently happy in this manner, he must make a leap into the upper story. “For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity. All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.” (Ecclesiastes 3:19-20) why do we suffer so; we may never know, or it may take a lifetime of learning to discover it. Just because we cannot see an apparent purpose to our suffering doesn’t mean there isn’t one, it simply has not yet been revealed. Lewis has said,

“God whispers in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain; it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”[5]  

     But must it always be so, regrettably often times it is. An evil man contented to be so needs strong correction, if he learns from it, he has gained; a recompense for the evil he has done if he hasn’t learned. Lewis points out that we progress through life surrounding ourselves with all our creaturely comforts and pleasures, whatever tickles our fancy, until we are abruptly met with some head, heart, or abdominal pain which threatens to bring about some serious illness which causing us to recall our own mortality. He observed,

“I try to bring myself into the frame of mind that I should be in at all times. I remind myself that all these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world and my only real treasure is Christ. And perhaps, by God’s grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources.”[6]

     The danger of course is that once the pain is past, we slip back into those things that distracted us from Him in the first place. For this reason, tribulation becomes a necessity; all those toys with which we pleasured ourselves become meaningless in the shadow of our mortality. Of course, all suffering is not the result of evil acts, death and disease are the outgrowth of a fallen world and God is willing to intervene if we turn to Him. But in my experience and in scripture I have observed that people have one of two responses to the evil they experience, either turning to God or turning away from Him. Pain may seem to us a terrible way for God to gain our attention, but the old adage is still true, “there are no atheists in fox holes” and that may be the extent to which He must go to get it. These three articles I have written on this subject will not, in all likelihood, answer all your questions or settle the issue once and for all. But hopefully in some small way it helps you to understand how much God really loves you. Not by His allowance of certain evils to persist, but that there are reasons we simply do not understand and that may take a lifetime to understand, so in the interval we need to trust Him. Either directly or indirectly we chose this. The human condition was self determined, and we bear the consequences. But He knows us, He loves us, and He can help us if we trust Him. It doesn’t mean that there will be no more pain or death or disease, “For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” (Matthew 5:45), but it does mean that He will go with us through the storms in our lives. And in a day yet to come all these will pass out of existence and not we ourselves,

“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:4)

 

---

[1] Unless otherwise indicated, all scriptural quotes are from The Holy Bible. English Standard Version, with Strong’s Numbers (Wheaton IL: Crossway, 2008).

[2]   C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (HarperOne Publishers, New York: NY, 2001), 46.

[3] Ibid., 65

[4] Augustine of Hippo, “The Confessions of St. Augustin,” in The Confessions and Letters of St. Augustin with a Sketch of His Life and Work, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. J. G. Pilkington, vol. 1, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1886), 45.

[5] C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (HarperOne Publishers, New York: NY 1996), 91.

[6] Ibid., 106-7.