The Mystery of Evil: Not What You Think

We’ve been looking at how God communicates with Wo/Man. The prophets reveal to us the secrets of God, which are called mysteries in the New Testament. We’ve looked at the first two mysteries: 1. The mystery of godliness, which speaks to the origin and the root of goodness, that God is the source of goodness and that all good things from God, and that there’s probably more good in the world than there is evil; and 2. The mystery of iniquity—of evil and suffering and pain. 

As a physician, I’ve always been fascinated with the meaning and the subjectivity of pain and suffering. Some people can, and do, bear untold pain and suffering without a word of complaint; others are nearly disabled by a hangnail. We see this dichotomy in the story of Job, which is often used to explain why bad things happen to good people. 

Job was a wealthy man with many earthly blessings. But he also had an adversary—the devil—who accused him of taking bribes from God. This of course indirectly accused God of offering the bribes for reasons hard for us and certainly hard for Mrs. Job to understand. God allowed the devil to reverse Job’s blessings. As a result, Job ended up losing his wealth, his children, and his health. His wife said bitterly to him:

 “Do you still hold firm your integrity? Curse God and die!” (Job 2:9)

He replied:

 “You are speaking as one of the foolish women speaks. Shall we actually accept good from God but not accept adversity?” Despite all this, Job did not sin with his lips. (Job 2:10) 

As the narrator commented: Job was right—he did not “sin with his lips.”

Job’s plight elicited the sympathy of three of his friends who, finding him in bad shape, themselves became so distraught that they could not speak. They sat in silence next to Job for a week. As we shall see, it would have been better for them to keep their mouths shut. When they recovered their power of speech they proceeded to badger Job and lecture him, telling him in essence: “God is punishing you because you’re a sinner. Confess, and God will restore everything to you.” 

Job suffers in silence. We imagine, at least, that he is suffering, because unless we see Job covered with boils and sitting on a bed of ashes, we might (if we just listen) believe that Job is not suffering at all–he utters no word of complaint. Mrs. Job, on the other hand, sounded like a colleague of mine who used to tell me: “If you’re suffering in silence, Weaver, you’re not really suffering; because if you’re really suffering, you will not be silent.” 

I recall one patient of mine who had recurrent colon cancer. It had recurred around the head of his pancreas. In a bold move to try to cure him, I proposed two big operations: First, a two stage procedure where we transplanted a portion of his small bowel away from where the tumor was, waited a week to make sure that that bowel was viable; and then performed another operation to remove the pancreas, the bile duct, the duodenum, and all the tumor at the root of the so-called mesentery of the small bowel and all the remaining small bowel.

By all rights, he should have abided by a strict diet following all that, which he did recover from. But he ate and drank whatever he wanted—kielbasa, Coney dogs, beer. The stuff would run right through him, but he never complained. Every time I asked him: “How are you?” he would reply: “I’m great. I feel wonderful.” And when it came time to do his endoscopic procedures, he would pass the scope himself without anesthesia. He never had a complaint, he never took a pain pill. 

Last week, I removed a small growth from the leg of a young man. It was about the size of a marble. I sewed it up with absorbent sutures and send him home. He called me every day for a week to tell me how much pain he was in, and how he needed more pain medication. You’d have thought I had cut his head off and reattached it. 

It’s difficult to quantify suffering. We believe that joy comes from goodness and that pain comes from evil. If it makes us more comfortable, it must be from God. If it makes us more uncomfortable, it must be from the devil. But the story of Job and the story of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil tell a much different tale. The key to the Job story is that he recognizes the fallacy that we can know good from evil:

He said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
And naked I shall return there.
The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away.
Blessed be the name of the Lord.”   

Despite all this, Job did not sin, nor did he blame God. (Job 1:21-22) 

Mrs. Job, on the other hand, as well as Job’s friends, cannot see things that way. They’re willing to make the call. They see that God is the source of both good and evil in a cause-and-effect kind of way, which means that if you behave, and if your attitude is right, and you live a good life, goodness should follow you. But if your behavior and your attitude and your life are not good, God gives you evil. 

This paradigm—good for good and evil for evil—is deeply rooted in our psyche. No matter how hard we try, we cannot shake it. But we take it a step further: We place goodness (that is, our perception of goodness) in God’s hands, and we place evil in the hands of the devil. Job, however, leaves everything up to God, both the good and the bad (“Shall we not indeed except good from God, and also not adversity as well?” “And I know that my Redeemer lives and in the last day he will stand upon the earth,” he said (Job 19) 

Job represents the Tree of Life—the tree of goodness, the tree of grace. Mrs. Job and the friends of job represent the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—the tree of discrimination, the tree of law and legalism. In the garden, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil embodies both mysteries—the mystery of godliness or goodness, and the mystery of iniquity, or evil. From the very roots of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to its branches and to the fruit, good and evil cannot be separated. 

Indeed, in Scripture we see that the deadly, toxic poisonous fruit looked good to Eve:

 When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took some of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband with her, and he ate. (Genesis 3:6)

We see that the perception of the senses about good and evil is utterly unreliable. Good and evil are inexorably bound, like the sap and the pulp and the bark and the leaves of the tree. You cannot separate the elements of the tree; you get the bad with a good.

The mystery of goodliness and the mystery of evil, the mystery of godliness and the mystery of iniquity, is that we always want to make it about ourselves and about us. We want to make the good and evil about our behavior, our discrimination, our attitude; about the way we live our life. We think that things are good for food, they’re desirable, delightful, when in reality they’re toxic—poisonous and deadly. 

Even Job nearly fell into this “It’s about me” temptation when he threatened to sue God for defamation. Of course, it’s easy to succumb to that temptation when you’re being constantly bombarded by your friends about your sinfulness and about how you ought to respond to God by repenting. But Job responded by protesting that he was a good man, not a sinner, therefore God was treating him unfairly, therefore he would win in principle if he sued God for defamation. 

 Behold now, I have prepared my case; I know that I will be vindicated. (Job 13:18)

Though confident of his innocence, Job knew that as God was the judge and the jury and the executioner, in practice he could not really hope to win his case, so he’d better just listen and learn: 

 I would present my case before Him And fill my mouth with arguments. I would learn the words which He would answer, And perceive what He would tell me. (Job 23:4-5)

But on the other hand, he sensed that God was also his defense counsel:

 Even now, behold, my witness is in heaven, And my advocate is on high. (Job 16:19)

So the court that was stacked against him was also on his side. No wonder it was confusing to Job. 

God himself weighed in on the argument between Job and his friends. With a narrative dripping with divine sarcasm he compared himself and his awesome might to insignificant little Job, but he ignored Job’s question about why bad things had happened to a good person like himself. A little bit of order in life, Job thought, would prevent bad things happening to good people. But eventually he reached a spiritual point beyond the expectation of order in life, and that’s when he prayed the great prayer:

“I know that You can do all things,
 And that no plan is impossible for You. ‘Who is this who conceals advice without knowledge?’
Therefore I have declared that which I did not understand,
 Things too wonderful for me, which I do not know. ‘Please listen, and I will speak;
I will ask You, and You instruct me.’   I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear;
 But now my eye sees You; Therefore I retract,
 And I repent, sitting on dust and ashes.” (Job 42:1-6)

Like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, the three Hebrew worthies who resigned themselves to King Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace, Job recognized that God’s will alone would and will always be done. 

But more drama was to come when God chastised Job’s three friends for misrepresenting him as a God of retribution and justice:

 “My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends, because you have not spoken of Me what is trustworthy, as My servant Job has.” (Job 42:7)

In the end, God never revealed why bad things happen to good people. But he left Job enlightened, and that enlightenment shines through his prayer. Bad things happen to good people because we live in a broken world without oneness with God, as we talked about last week. The mystery of godliness and the mystery of iniquity, the truth revealed, the truth not previously understood, is that…

 For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not a result of works, so that no one may boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9)

To seek to discriminate good from evil, to seek to litigate it (as Job was considering doing to God) is to repudiate grace. Grace does not weigh good and bad. Grace does not discriminate between right and wrong: That is the truth revealed. That is the mystery. It doesn’t answer the question of why bad things happen to good people, because that’s not something we can know. 

What is bad, after all? Who decides what is bad? And who is good? Who decides what is good? This is the judgment for divinity. The truth revealed, the question answered, is what happens to us who are the recipients of God’s grace. We are transformed by that grace. Good and evil, like the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil itself, is a single entity. “No-one is good,” Jesus sold the rich young ruler; “only God is good.” And no-one is evil. We know because:

 … where sin increased, grace abounded all the more,… (Romans 5:20)

That’s why we have no answer to the question. We can’t define goodness or evil, only God can. We can only accept the grace that comes without merit and without price. 

How do we get meaning out of suffering? I’ve noted in the course of my work that believers who become ill and suffer pain and loss often lose their faith, or at least have it severely challenged. And those who are not believers often turn toward God. 

Can you live without an answer to why bad things happen to good people? Can you see that there can never be an answer, because we cannot know good from evil? We cannot define it therefore we cannot answer the question. Does it make you uncomfortable to just leave everything in God’s hands? Or do you need to know, to measure, to discriminate?

And is it possible to even lead a moral life and not discriminate between good and evil? Can you live by grace alone? 

Donald: This is a very difficult concept. It’s fundamental to what we think and know. Most of us were taught to pray: “Thy will be done.” Does “Thy will” include evil? What is good? Is comfort good and discomfort evil? What does it mean to walk with God?

Kiran: This is a radical shift from what I used to believe. In church we separate good from evil. The scapegoat in the Old Testament bore everyone’s sins, so there had to be a clear differentiation between what was a sin and what was not. But Job says you can’t really do that. 

The way of grace, which doesn’t even ask whether you’re good or bad and abounds all the more if your sin is more, is so liberating, because we don’t have to worry about good or bad. We just have to accept that there is grace and it’s going to do its job, which is to transform me, freeing me to to focus on others. 

That’s the dogma of Christianity, I think: Don’t worry about yourself; accept God’s grace and take care of others. We constantly agonize about who is good and who is bad but nowhere can we define who is actually good. We stretch our reasoning until we find a good reason why bad people do what they’re doing. It’s all kind of confusing. It almost comes to a point where we want to excuse their actions, because they have a reason for doing it. It gets us into a messy, gray, area 

I have to think a lot about this. It is a new concept for me, but I’m excited to know about it because it feels very liberating.

Bryan: Good and evil are very subjective terms. Ask 10 people and you’ll probably get 10 different responses for what is good and what is evil.  As believers, we think we’ve taken out an insurance policy against evil, so that when stuff we define as evil or bad happens to us it’s easy to curse God and say: “Look! My insurance policy says this shouldn’t be happening to me, whereas those who are not believers never took out that insurance policy, so maybe they think that’s the reason bad things are happening and they need to go get the insurance.” 

It doesn’t make any sense, but the argument I think holds. As the song says, we were never promised a rose garden. Maybe walking with God is accepting what happens to us through life with grace. Grace and how we react to it defines our relationship,  whether we consider it good or bad.

Donald: That’s an interesting idea, because we strive to create joy, peace, lack of suffering, warmth, shelter, all the rest of it. Those things we tend to control. But as Brian says, we there are some things we can’t control, so what do we do?—We buy insurance policies. I have a 10 year old car so I buy a warranty. How much risk are we prepared to accept? Risk is an interesting mortal term—I’m not sure it can be applied to spirituality. 

Michael: Viktor Frankl is well known for his talks about finding meaning through suffering. He described his experience in a concentration camp and wrote a very interesting book on the topic. He says that whether people were able, or not, to find meaning through the suffering they were going through in the camp meant literally the difference between life and death. 

He didn’t define or describe it exactly or tell how one achieves it, but in his own experience he saw that once you lose meaning under those circumstances you’re just not doing what you have to do. And then the guards basically dispose of you because you’re not doing anything useful. It is such an interesting concept.

C-J: I watched the news last night about a man in Afghanistan. They showed a little girl—she might have been two and a half, three years old. They were showing what has happened with the Taliban and rights and food and shelter and all of that. The little girl looked like she was being forced to be out in front of her father. The reporter said he had been told this little girl was being offered for sale. 

The interpreter working for the reporter says: “What will happen to the to this little girl?” The father said: “Do you want to buy her?” And he says: “Well, what will happen to her after that?” The father is smiling, and I recognize that smile because I’ve known lots of immigrants from the Middle East: It was a very sarcastic smile. “You see what you’ve done? This is not me doing this to my family; YOU have done this to my family! You, America, have done this to my family.”

He wasn’t going to take any responsibility. What I heard very loudly was accountability to one another through humanity that transcends all cultural norms and belief systems in terms of spirit. The evil is when we allow bad things to happen, when good people stand by. America no longer had the taste for war and no longer wanted their money spent that way. Afghans were tired of losing two generations of young men in war. Even though we left everything behind we framed it as if we will let them defend themselves, but it would have cost more money to bring that equipment back. 

So where does the truth lie? Who is responsible? In terms of our bodies and other situations, being robbed innocently, all the things or bad things that happen—I do think it’s still God in the room. I still think it is grace. I still think that it’s not a test, but it’s building fortitude. God never wastes anything. When we become victims, when we have less, it’s an opportunity to shore ourselves up. You’re right about people in concentration camps—people who really know what hunger is, people who don’t have clean water, sanitation, who died from sickness young, innocently, and children who are orphaned, the list is long. But is that really evil? Or is that just nature at work?

Jay: I’d like to propose a hierarchy of good and evil and our ability to interact with it or discern it or understand it. It seems to me that I could look at why bad things happen in three layers: 

1. The good and evil that is within me and practiced by me.

2. The good and evil practiced by others.

3. The good and evil of God.

It seems that my ability to discern is highest at the personal level and lowest at the level of God. I would propose that at the level of God I am incapable of discerning his good and evil—what happens, why it happens, where it happened. It’s cloudy—as Paul says, we ”see through a glass darkly”)—as I think is reflected in Job and Isaiah. 

The discernment of good and evil at the level of others really isn’t direct. When we look at things happening in the Bible, the only way we can discern the goodness and evil of others is not direct judgment (which we are told not to do) but to judge people by their fruits. It’s not the specific acts that we should be judging but the results, the fruits, the things that take place from there. We do not judge individuals directly as good or evil, but indirectly by their good or bad fruit. 

But at the personal level—the level of self—it seems that there is a call to judge. We have conscience, we have the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we have the law—the 10 Commandments directly give us some very specific things to help us understand at a personal level what is good and evil. And then we have the ministry, the example, of Christ, which—when we apply it to ourselves—can very much help us discern what is good and evil. 

Our ability to discern good and evil is highest at the level of self, but as we extend judgment to others and eventually to God, our ability to discern lessens and eventually becomes impossible. However, our natural inclination is to not be reflective about what’s happening with us, but rather to apply our notions of good and evil to other people and to God. 

Michael: I thought Paul said that sin came to the world through the law. it’s pitched as God’s law, but it sounds to me more like human law, being based on a system of cause and effect and fairness. 

Donald: Christ’s life was relatively short. How did he spend his time once he began his ministry? It sounds like he did a great deal of healing. Of course people flocked to him once it was recognized that he could heal, but why did Christ just want to heal people? Did he just want the best for that person? Did he want to demonstrate his power over evil? Healing is one of the primary things that Christ participated in during his ministry. Why did he focus on healing people?

C-J: Because I believe that God created us with intention and purpose. When we’re healthy, at various levels, we are more productive, we can fulfill the purpose for our life when we’re not hungry, when we’re happy. We’re productive. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. But I think what happens is we get trapped—in sin, in deceit, in economics—and that defines our life and we interpret it internally. We have a cultural norm that interprets it. We look at America and we say: “It’s a wealthy nation, maybe one of the wealthiest on the planet, and yet we have profound poverty here, and injustice.” But for the people that live in another place, that’s where I want to go. For me sometimes it’s like: “Where else can I go?”

Reinhard: It’s unfortunate that we disobeyed God’s decree not to eat the fruit. The consequences of that rebellion were sin, disease, and suffering, and the hard work of making ends meet. Those consequences are reflected in Job, but God had a backstage talk with Satan about Job. We know Job never sinned in his early—good—life, but he seemed to slip later, in challenging God’s justice, earning him this reprimand:

 Will you really nullify My judgment? Will you condemn Me so that you may be justified? (Job 40:8)

There are times when we think we are good with God, in line with God. But then how come bad things happen? I think God, in his sovereign power and as is his prerogative, allows his children to suffer; knowing that in the end, Jesus defeats death, the ultimate suffering. God has already defeated death. God allows suffering because he knows that our time on this earth is not long, compared to eternity. 

Paul suffered greatly during a storm (Acts 27–28). God didn’t heal him, even though he was his prophet, his apostle. God said “My grace is sufficient for you.” Grace doesn’t mean that good people will be healed or that God will take away pain, but if we stay strong with God, in the end, we’re going to be a winner. In the end, everything is in God’s hands. 

Janelin: God’s will is just impossible—mysterious, hard to understand. Three years ago I was at a mosque attending a service for my colleague who had who been killed by a drunk driver. The person sitting next to me was saying “It’s God’s, it’s God’s will.” I felt angry. I couldn’t digest that. 

My neighbor probably wasn’t a Christian, and I found her attitude so hard to comprehend. Maybe it’s what Job’s friends went through. I think our human brains just want structure, we want things to be so clear, and that’s how we try to live our lives. But you get these curveballs and it really can shake you. 

In the end, it’s impossible to understand God’s will and his understanding of good and evil and how he functions. 

C-J: That internal critical thinking dialogue that Reinhardt spoke of is important to our relationship with God because we are stuck in this limited mindset. It’s good to question God, it’s good to question ourselves. We need to get our head on right, when we read the word. We each have read passages of Scripture in a time and place in our life for our purpose in that particular study, and we walk away with something, and then we read it again and we see something else because we’re in a different place, where God’s doing a work in our heart in a different way. But that internal dialogue of questioning ourselves and God is very critical to our growth spiritually, and as mature adults.

Kiran: The key point in the Book of Job is to recognize that we can’t distinguish good from evil. I may think I did something good, but as I keep thinking about it, what I thought was good for somebody might not be really good for somebody. I can’t really comprehend because my mind has limited capacity, I can only think to the order of maybe one or two people down the line. But the ripple effect of it? I can’t really comprehend it. 

But Jesus also says to overcome evil with goodness, even though we can’t properly recognize good from evil. That means whatever we think is good, we just have to apply it. This is what is puzzling me. In the Chinese concept of Yin and Yang, both are equal and neither wins, though they continually devour one another. They keep circulating, and are inseparable. Maybe there is some wisdom in that. 

The first question God asked Adam and Eve was: “Who told you that you’re naked?” They thought being naked was bad, but who told them that? That example alone tells us that what we think is good and bad may be different in the eyes of God. But how do we overcome with goodness the evil in this world or within ourselves? 

Carolyn: When a parent disciplines a child, the child feels the hurt and does not see anything good in the discipline in that moment. I think of the cross and how the all-powerful God allowed his son to suffer all that evil. Part of me can’t help but worship and love God, but part of me also wonders how could he treat his son like that? I’m not being negative—I’m just asking the question: How could he possibly be all powerful and allow something so evil to happen to his son, when he can heal everybody! It’s just an awesome thought to me.

David: I think he can allow it because he knows that he—God, goodness—will always prevail in the end. There has to be more goodness than evil—goodness must prevail—otherwise there would be no world. Yin and Yang make a very nice picture, but I cannot agree that goodness and evil are equal in any sense, because if they were there will be no creation. It would be stalemate. There would be nothing. And if evil were more strong, there would also be nothing because evil is destructive and whatever was created would be destroyed, nothing could ever be created. 

The fact that there is ongoing creation means that goodness unquestionably does prevail. To me, that’s the whole point of Job, yet even the devil didn’t get it. God had to tell the devil twice: In Job 1, God told the devil to do his worst against Job and see what happened. And what happened was that goodness prevailed—Job remained good and faithful to God. Then, because the devil still didn’t get it, God told him again (Job 2) to do his worst and see what happened. And sure enough, goodness again prevailed. 

The whole point here is that goodness will prevail. It doesn’t matter what evil is done. God—goodness—will always prevail. It just has to be so. As Brian said earlier, we basically just have to live our lives as best we can and have faith that goodness will always prevail in the end. We will never understand it, as Job realized; but it’s not difficult to have faith, when you recognize that all around you there is a creation, and that there is more good than evil.

Donald: We have all heard the phrase: “This is my lot in life.” Who defines “my lot in life”? Is it a lock thing? Is it a chance thing? 

“Thy will be done” and “This is my lot in life.” I’m not sure how to put those two together. This is a challenge.

Anonymous: This is great subject, but I would like more light shed on one part of it, namely: Morality. Can we undo our rules of morality? Aren’t they universal? Aren’t they defined in the 10 Commandments? Can we just say God’s grace will rule in the end so we can live according to what we think is moral? What if my thinking affects someone else? Would that be selfish? Would it be against God’s rule or against God’s right? It’s a dilemma to go by the moral rules you were raised on and go by what other people think about morality and what God thinks about morality. 

I think we have a conscience—the “guidance” Jason talked about—that can tell us whether we’re doing good or bad. But even to give up this to God’s sovereignty by saying “I can’t even judge myself! God knows better what’s right and what’s wrong and it’s none of my business to even judge myself”—where does that leave us in the end? What rules are we to go by? What is morality? 

This is really confusing, because your actions or my actions or anybody’s actions sometimes have their root in goodness. For example I might be doing something that my reason justifies as good but my judgement tells me isn’t really good—it could be wrong, it could be evil. The dilemma is that we have no power, no understanding, no sight like God’s, by which to judge correctly. That leaves us with a problem. To believers who care a lot about morals it’s not clear. I hope we can expand on this point.

Bryan: God treats us all as individuals. What may work for one may not work for another. There is no cookie-cutter response in God’s talking to us. It depends on how we hear him and on what we do with the information he’s given us. But each one of us is treated as an individual.

Don: I’ll second that by going back to the to the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus talks about the narrow way and the broad way. We want to make that a moral highway but it’s very clear that the narrow way is the way of grace, the way of salvation. I think that the narrow way means that this is a one-on-one individual walk on the path of life. 

Going back to Donald’s question about healing: In the Gospels, Jesus heals lepers three or four times. Leprosy is associated with loss of pain. Part of the seriousness of leprosy is that the peripheral nerve system is disrupted and people don’t feel pain and therefore they injure themselves. They have serious injuries in their extremities which end up causing necrosis and infection, all because they don’t have pain. 

The healing of Jesus is to restore pain in the lepers. Think about that, as you think about the concept of good and evil, which we’ll talk more about next week. 

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