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Where is God? #2

What God Cannot Do

Let’s get right to the point. Someone once expressed it like this: If God is perfectly loving, He must wish to abolish evil; and if He is all-powerful, He must be able to abolish evil. But evil exists. Therefore God cannot be both all-powerful and perfectly loving. He can be one, or He can be the other. But how can He be both?

That, I believe, gets right to the heart of the dilemma we are looking at this week: Why does so much evil and suffering exist in the world if, as many people believe, myself included, that there is a loving and powerful God who watches over us? We looked yesterday at the fact that--despite all the good reasons to believe in God, and there are good ones, very good ones—we always are faced with the challenge: Why, if there’s a loving God in heaven, is there so much wretchedness here on earth, such as the terrible tragedy of the earthquake and tidal wave in South Asia?

I knew a young man who spent his first thirty years as a faithful church member. Then he lost his wife of three weeks in a freak accident. Not only did he lose her, he lost his faith too. “How could God, a loving God,” he retorted, “have allowed this to happen? I no longer believe. I can’t believe.”

Yes, friend, as many of us know, the Bible says “that God so loved the world” (John 3:16), or that “God is love” (1 John 4:16) , or that “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us” (1 John 4:10). If that’s true, how do we explain everything from the Holocaust to the thousands swept to their deaths while enjoying an idyllic Christmas holiday? This is the dilemma faced by all who believe in a loving and powerful God.

Nevertheless, the Lord has not left us without some answers, some understanding, some reasons to believe in Him and His love--despite these horrible things. And that’s what we are continuing to study together.

You know, I had a friend who didn’t grow up in a Christian home once say how he was confronted by missionaries. When they began to witnesses to him about God, he replied, as obnoxiously as he could: “Oh, yeah. Let me ask you this, If your God can do anything, can he create a rock so big that He can’t lift it?” (Brilliantly original, don’t you think?) Now, as old and as trite as that argument is, there’s something important in there, and it has to do with that quote I just read. Let me read it again: “If God is perfectly loving, he must wish to abolish evil; and if He is all-powerful, he must be able to abolish evil. But evil exists; therefore God cannot be both omnipotent and perfectly loving.”

That’s a good argument--unless you understand that omnipotence doesn’t mean the ability do to things that are--by nature, by definition--impossible. What do I mean? Let me ask, Can God make a square circle? Again, think about it: Can God make a square circle? No! Because, by definition, a circle is round, not square. The moment you make it square, it’s no longer a circle.

Or how about this: Can God create a triangle that has four sides? No! Because the moment is has four sides, it’s no longer a triangle.

Can God make 2 + 2 = 5? No--because the moment it’s 5, it’s no longer equal to 2 + 2.

Can you see? There are certain things that by their very nature, by their very definition, are impossible even for God to do.

A girl of eight once asked her father, “Daddy, if you could, would you force me to love God?” He thought about it, this father, who surely wanted his daughter to love God, but then said to her, “No, sweetie, I wouldn’t force you, because then it couldn’t be love.”

Think about this: God, the One who could speak the earth into existence (Gen 1), the One who moves the stars across the cosmos, the One in “whose hand [our] breath is” (Daniel 5:23), He cannot force you to love Him, because love, to be love, must by its very nature be free. The moment love is forced, it is no longer love, just as the moment a triangle has four sides it’s no longer a triangle.

According to Jesus, the first, and most important of all commandments was to “love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind” (Matthew 22:37). How interesting that the first, and most important commandment, was the only one--unlike adultery, stealing, or killing, etc--that could not be forced. It’s the only one that, by its nature, has to be freely given or it can’t be given at all.

Thus, for us to love God, we had to be created as free moral beings.

Suppose in the future scientists are able to create robots that can rush into burning buildings and rescue people. Despite the good things that those robots would do, no one would call them “moral,” would they? There was no freedom in their actions. There was nothing noble or moral or good about these machines themselves, regardless of the good things that they did because, in the end, that’s all they were--machines.

Right?

Come back with me to the Adam and Eve story. Whether you take this as literal or as a metaphor, there’s a crucial point here. God had created a perfect world, with perfect and sinless beings made in His image. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:7).

Now listen to what God says to Adam, a perfect being. “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it . . .” (Gen 2: 16, 17).

Now, why did God give this warning to Adam? Why did He say, Don’t eat of that tree? What’s implied here? What’s implied is that Adam had the freedom to eat of it. He was given the moral capacity to choose to obey or to disobey. If God had made Adam and Eve are mere machines, He could have had programmed them not to eat of the tree--period. It wouldn’t have been an issue, and thus He would’ve had no reason to warn them, just as I have no reason to warn my computer to stay away from my wife. It doesn’t have the capacity to bother her, because it’s not programmed to bother her. It’s just a machine. Obviously, God didn’t make Adam and Eve as mere machines. He made them free moral creatures; hence the warning that came with that freedom.

Now, I think we can better understand the freedom they had by what happens next: “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat” (Genesis 3:6).

What do we see here, friend? They chose wrong. Talk about freedom! They wouldn’t have done that, they couldn’t have done that--were they not free. Even in their perfection, even in their sinless environment, not only did they have the capacity to choose wrong--they did so. That’s the risk of freedom; that’s the risk inherent in creating beings who can love.

Someone once wrote a science fiction story about a man whose dead wife was replaced by a robot. This robot (remember this is science fiction) looked, felt, smelt, talked, and acted exactly like his wife. If he hadn’t known what was going on, he would have sworn it was her. But he sends the robot away because, in the end. the robot didn’t love him. And that’s because the robot couldn’t love him. It wasn’t a free moral creature; it was a machine, and he didn’t want that.

And neither did God. God wanted free creatures, moral creatures, because only free moral creatures could love. Yes, God, an omnipotent God, couldn’t have created beings who love unless He created them free.

And thus we have here an important component in understanding the existence of evil and suffering. God created humans free and we have abused that freedom, and this has led to suffering. God didn’t create pain and suffering; He created free beings who, unfortunately, made choices that led to the mess we are in now.
OK, you say. In order for God to have beings who love Him, He had no choice, He had to make them free. Fair enough. But this leads to another question: If God is all-loving, why did He create free beings if He knew that they were going to abuse their freedom and bring in pain and suffering that we all know so well? Why did He create us, knowing what was going to happen—knowing that in a world where people chose not to love, all the evils and tragedies of a world-run-amok would be unleashed?

Good question--and it’s one that needs to be answered

And we will look at those answers tomorrow.

But in the meantime friend, we ask--You have been created with freedom of choice. What choice are you making? There is a God who loves you and wants you to love Him back. But He can’t force you to do it. It’s a choice that only you, in your God-given freedom, can make. You have the freedom. We say, make the choice, the choice of love.