Is God to Blame?

The following was posted on the forum* the other day (with reference to God in the Dock by C.S. Lewis).

It is highly ironic that those who claim that God brought Evil into the world repeatedly refer to Romans 9.

They refuse to accept that God is only Good and look for evidence that He helped bring Evil into the world. The reasoning then is: see, the Potter makes bad pots. And that must be right, because I see bad pots all around me. And He made Pharaoh bad, and He made Esau bad, and He made everyone a sinner. For the latter, Romans 11:32 is wrongly cited. God gets blamed for everything.

Yet this entire chapter is precisely about the fact that man can have nothing to criticize God for!

This is the question: will man judge God, or will God judge man?

What is being said here is not merely a caricature of what is presented on the GoedBericht site (UltimateGoodNews.com), but it is also completely wrong for two reasons. First, I believe with all my heart that God is nothing but good. And second, I resolutely reject the idea that God is to blame for the evil in the world. I will explain both points further.

Scripture teaches that God, precisely because He is good, created evil (calamity), because knowledge of the good (e.g., grace, compassion, forgiveness) is possible only against the background of the knowledge of evil. In Scripture, evil serves as a backdrop (it is the dark display on which God’s goodness is exhibited), and therefore God receives the honor for the fact that He brought evil into the world. He created “the ancient serpent,” He placed the notorious tree in the middle of the garden, He “locks up all together in stubbornness,” He gave Israel the law “that the offense should be increasing,” etc. These were, of course, not ends in themselves, for then He could not be called nothing but good. A God who creates evil as an end in itself is a malevolent God. But if, on the other hand, He creates evil with a view to a good that can only be known through a temporary stage of evil, then this precisely demonstrates His goodness! It is reprehensible when someone wounds another person with a knife. But when a surgeon makes wounds with a knife, that is highly commendable or even lifesaving! Wounding another person is an evil, but when it is necessary to achieve a good purpose, we speak of a necessary evil. Whoever strikes a child does it harm, but a father who strikes his child sometimes commits a necessary evil. Such an act, in that case, testifies to love. You could even doubt someone’s goodness if that person were unwilling to commit such a necessary evil!

Anyone who fixates on the present evil in the world would conclude that God is either not good or not almighty. But anyone who knows God’s ultimate purpose can trust that all the evil in the world is a necessary prelude to the revelation of God’s ultimate goodness.

It also follows from the above that God, of course, bears no guilt for the evil in the world. For the same reason that a surgeon bears no guilt for cutting open a patient. Such work is precisely to his credit! Guilt applies where someone fails, and especially where that failure is blameworthy (=preventable). If the sin and suffering in the world were not in accordance with God’s planning, then God would have missed the mark (sinned). And if He could have known this beforehand, then this failure could also expressly be held against Him. In other words: in that case God would be guilty of the evil in the world! C.S. Lewis’s reproach in the quotation above thus comes back to him like a boomerang. Only when we accept that God created evil (mind you, His own solemn declaration!), with a view to coming to know the greatest good of all, only then does God’s goodness not need to be called into question, nor can any failure be attributed to Him.

seeing that out of Him and through Him and for Him is all: to Him be the glory for the eons! Amen!

Romans 11:36

(*Forum is no longer online)

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