Because we cannot avoid presupposing that a supremely wise God of perfect goodness, righteousness, justice, and truth alone sets the standard by which all things that fail to meet this standard must be measured. Without the sun, we’d never know that we lurk beneath the shadows. In other words, without a supremely good God, you cannot say that there is such a thing as evil.

Throughout the ages, many unbelievers have refused to acknowledge the God of the Bible directly; nonetheless, they know in their heart of hearts that such a God exists, as Romans 1:18–32 clearly teaches. Furthermore, they have surmised the basic contours of the problem of evil, yet doggedly insist that it proves that God does not exist. And yet, ironically, they intuitively know that if God did not exist, then there would be no problem of evil. Why?

Because we cannot avoid presupposing that a supremely wise God of perfect goodness, righteousness, justice, and truth alone sets the standard by which all things that fail to meet this standard must be measured. Without the sun, we’d never know that we lurk beneath the shadows. In other words, without a supremely good God, you cannot say that there is such a thing as evil. And you would have no basis to ask God the question “why?” when evil smacks you hard in the face.

Skeptical philosophers — going back to Epicurus (341–270 B.C.) and, famously, to David Hume (1711–76) — have tried to frame the problem of evil as a logical conflict between the existence of God on the one hand and the presence of evil on the other, as shown in the argument put forth below. Notice, however, that the argument does not target some generic version of God. Only the God of the Bible undergoes the sort of scrutiny that the problem of evil demands. In fact, we all know this as creatures made in his image. We don’t have to be skeptics to question how the one true God fares in the face of evil while it tests just how much faith we really have in him.

Here is the argument:

(1)           The God of the Bible is all-powerful (omnipotent).

(2)           The God of the Bible is all-good (omnibenevolent).

(3)           Yet evil exists.

(4)           Therefore, the God of the Bible cannot possibly exist.

The argument assumes that statement 3, “evil exists,” is not in dispute; and this is true. Rarely does anyone dispute this fact. What is in dispute is either statement 1 or 2. But notice that the argument has some hidden assumptions and can be reworded this way:

(1)           The all-powerful (omnipotent) God of the Bible can prevent evil.

(2)           The all-good (omnibenevolent) God of the Bible wants to prevent evil.

(3)           Yet evil exists.

This leads to some preliminary conclusions:

(4) Therefore, either God is not all-powerful (he cannot prevent evil) or he is not all-good (he does not want to prevent evil).

The supposed conflict between these two preliminary conclusions leads to the same conclusion as before:

(5) Therefore, the God of the Bible cannot possibly exist (because the Bible insists that God must be both all-powerful and all-good).

Let us examine this argument. Some suppose that statement 1 is false while statement 2 is true. This is what Rabbi Harold Kushner argued in his best-selling book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. The famed rabbi wrote, “I can worship a God who hates suffering but cannot eliminate it, more easily than I can worship a God who chooses to make children suffer and die, for whatever exalted reason.”12 People who believe this must find themselves in a miserable quandary, believing in an impotent God who can do nothing more than cry with us when tragedy strikes.

On the other hand, many smug secularists are happy to concede that statement 1 is true while statement 2 is false; this way, they can claim that any God who allows evil when he could easily prevent it must be evil himself. But are these the only two conclusions that one can draw from the argument? Christianity does not need to cower in a dark corner when faced with the supposed conundrums here.

When this argument is closely examined, one serious problem is seen with it: statement 2. All orthodox theologians acknowledge that statement 1 is true, and the Bible itself is clear on this matter. God has all the requisite powers to prevent or stop any instance of evil. But it does not necessarily follow that God in his all-encompassing goodness wants to prevent or stop every instance of evil, as statement 2 suggests. The fact is, he clearly has not done so, and the Bible is also clear on this. The skeptics think this means that either he is evil or he cannot exist. But is it possible that the God of the Bible can be supremely good, having no possibility of evil in his being, and yet somehow have a sufficiently good and wise reason for allowing evil to exist? The burden of this book is to answer that question in the affirmative.

An excerpt from Defeating Evil: How God Glorifies Himself in a Dark World by Scott Christensen. You can order the book from P&R Publishing by clicking on the book title

12. Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (New York: HarperCollins, 1989), 134.