Why does evil exist?

Why would an all-powerful, all-loving God allow such terrible things to happen? This problem of evil is behind many of our questions and doubts about the existence of God.

Each of us has had some pretty terrible things happen to us. Each of us, in one way or another, have had our innocence taken away from us. We’ve each received tremendous wounds at the hands of other people, at the hands of this world. We handle these wounds in different ways, but the end result is always the same.

Some of us just avoid danger. We build walls around our hearts – big, stone walls with archers on top, ready to shoot at anything that has the potential to hurt us. We live our lives within these walls, inside a nice chamber that we’ve decorated with every comfort imaginable. We feel safe, far away from danger, and we are. And we stay safe because we never venture beyond our imaginary chamber, and certainly not beyond the stone walls.

Others of us choose to try and manage the danger rather than avoid it altogether. We construct rules and guidelines for moving about in the world, most of which are designed to try and reduce the probability of being hurt. We create rules about relationships, about work, about our lifestyles. If we’re unable to come up with these rules ourselves, we enter into an organization or an institution that will hand us our set of rules. We join fraternities or sororities, we sign up for addiction groups, we join a church. None of these are bad things in themselves, but we become dependent on them to make decisions for us so we don’t have to risk getting hurt again. The true beauty of these groups is that if something does hurt us, we can blame the group and find another one.

Still others of us simply kill our hearts. We decide that the easiest way to avoid getting hurt by the world is to become like the world – cold, bitter, ambivalent. We engage in any kind of debauchery we can find. We hurt others before they can hurt us. We close our hearts to the possibility that there’s still good.

Many of us find that distraction is the easiest way to avoid the hurt. Rather than dealing with it, we simply fill our lives up with busyness. We work 60 hours a week, we set little goals for ourselves and choose to “take each day as it comes.” We spend our nights playing video games or watching movies. Even our time in the car is spent tuning out with the radio blaring. From morning till night our days are full of noise, which is a terrific way to keep from thinking about past hurts or the potential for being hurt in the future.

We all believe that evil exists in the world – we’ve felt it. And we all know that because of the horrible offenses that have been committed against us, we’ve found ways to deal with it. We’ve managed to create a separate self, a self whose heart is protected or busy or simply cold and lifeless. It keeps us from getting hurt again, but it also keeps us from living with total abandon for anything. We become, slowly or not-so-slowly, puppets of ourselves. We’re the ones pulling the strings, but we know the things we say and do are not who we really are.

Which brings us back to the point – why would God allow evil to exist? Why would he allow us to get hurt in the intensely traumatic ways that we have? Why would he allow us to receive wounds that don’t heal? And why would he allow us to construct puppets of ourselves and live our lives largely out of fear? It doesn’t seem like an all-loving God would do such a thing, and so many of us decide that God must not exist.

Most of us have been in love before. And many of us have known the sadness, the tremendous heartache and loss that comes when the love isn’t returned. Despite our best efforts, they leave us and run to someone who obviously isn’t right for them. They leave and run to someone who’s heart is cold, who deals with their wounds by displaying a false sense of pride and arrogance. What if they left for someone who’s goal was to hurt your love before they were hurt themselves? What if they left, and were indeed hurt? Physically? Emotionally? Sexually? Spiritually? It absolutely destroys us to see our love get hurt like that, and yet we allow them to do it because we do love them.

We sometimes wish that we could just force them to love us, but we realize that that’s the one thing we don’t have the power to do. Even if you held your love at gunpoint and made them spend the rest of their lives with you – even if you made them sleep with you, cook you dinner, do your laundry, and bear your children – you still wouldn’t have the power to make them love you.

And what if you did have that power? What if you could forcefully make your love interest love you back. I’m sure on one level it would feel great to have your love returned. But when you stopped to really think about it, you would most likely find the love to be hollow, empty. If they didn’t love you out of their own will but out of your own, would that be fulfilling? Doubtful.

What if the same is true with God? What if God really was all-powerful, but chose not to exercise some of that power and give us free will to make our own decisions? What if God put us on Earth for the purpose of loving Him, but knew that if he forced us to love Him it wouldn’t mean anything? What if he gave us the freedom to not love Him, to reject Him outright, to pursue other loves? What if he gave us the freedom to hurt each other and to commit sin, even though he knew it would hurt us and even though he knew it would tear Him up inside to see it happen, because He loved us?