The Mystery of Evil: Separation from God

We are talking about how God communicates with man—directly and indirectly, through the prophets. The prophets, we are told, reveal to us the secrets of God:  

God reveals his secrets through the prophets. (Amos 3:7)

In the New Testament, these secrets are called mysteries. They’re not whodunit mysteries; rather, they are mysteries of the truth revealed—things previously not known or not well understood but now revealed to humankind through the prophets. 

Last week, we mentioned the four great mysteries spoken of in the New Testament, revealed by God through Jesus and through the prophets:  

1. The mystery of godliness. What is the source, the origin, of goodness? 

2. The mystery of iniquity, the source and the origin of evil and suffering in this world. 

3. The mystery of the ubiquity of God’s grace. Why is God’s grace everywhere? Whose God is he anyway? Who owns God? 

4. The mystery of the transforming power of God’s grace. What does Grace do to us? In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, we are changed. 

Why does God have secrets? Why are the mysteries so important? We talked last week about the first mystery—the origin and the root of goodness. We know that goodness is next to godliness, and that the mystery of godliness can be understood by recognizing that God is the source of goodness, and that all that is good does come from God. Moreover, we are called by the prophets to display God’s goodness to others—the mystery of godliness may only be seen by some as it is demonstrated in our goodness. We also learned that there is probably more good in the world than there is evil. We just need to look for it. 

Today we begin a discussion on the second mystery: The mystery of evil, of iniquity. This is a mystery that troubles us greatly and challenges our faith. Why does a good God allow such evil and suffering in the world? To set the stage for our thoughts, we need to go again back to the garden of Eden. 

Before the Fall, man and woman were at one not just with God but also between themselves and with nature and with the beasts of the field. God reinforced this unity, this oneness, of man and woman and nature by putting Adam to work in nature and to run it:

 Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and tend it. The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may freely eat; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for on the day that you eat from it you will certainly die.” Genesis 2:15-17) 

Adam and Eve, as a husband and wife, are also one, a unity: 

 Then the man said,  “At last this is bone of my bones, And flesh of my flesh; She shall be called ‘woman,’ Because she was taken out of man.” 

 For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. (Genesis 2:23)

The concept of oneness—of God, between God and man, between man and nature, between man and woman—is the key to understanding what happened in the garden. The garden had two significant trees: The tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. in contradistinction to the tree of life, the tree of knowledge might be called the tree of death. Because, as we just read, “from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat, for the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.” 

So the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil might also be called the tree of good, and the tree of evil respectively. Since the ability to discriminate between good and evil, between right and wrong, is really a function of law, we might also think of them as the tree of grace, which bestows life indiscriminately, and the tree of law, which is capable of bestowing death. 

With the fall (and this is the key) oneness died in the garden. Fear came as a result of the loss of oneness with God: 

Now they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. (Genesis 3:8)

Then came the loss of oneness with nature and the introduction with of pain: 

 To the woman He said, “I will greatly multiply
Your pain in childbirth,
In pain you shall deliver children;
Yet your desire will be for your husband,
And he shall rule over you.”  Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’; Cursed is the ground because of you;
With hard labor you shall eat from it
All the days of your life.   Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you;
Yet you shall eat the plants of the field;   By the sweat of your face
You shall eat bread,
Until you return to the ground,
Because from it you were taken;
For you are dust,
And to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:16-19) 

So the statement that by eating of the tree of knowledge they would surely die did not refer just to mortal death. It also referred to the death of oneness, which is something that needs to be—and can be—resurrected. In oneness, there is no struggle, there is no pain, there is no evil. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve were innocent, naive, and in communal harmony with everything around them—with God, between themselves, and with nature. They were not self-aware. But after the Fall, they were afraid. They lived in communal disharmony and individual pain, and they were very much aware of themselves. 

A newborn child has no sense of difference between itself and nature, between itself and its parents. Newborns seem to be at one with nature and with their parents. They’re oblivious to being naked, just like Adam and Eve before the Fall: 

 And the man and his wife were both naked, but they were not ashamed. (Genesis 2:25) 

Scientific experiments have shown that up to the age of about 18 months children are so un-self-aware that they cannot even distinguish themselves in a mirror. When lipstick is smeared on their noses, they seem oblivious to the disfigurement. But after they reach the age of about 20 months, they start trying to rub the lipstick off. The most dramatic sign of self-awareness in a child comes around the age of two years—the so called “terrible twos” when the child starts to say “No!” The child realizes its independence, recognizing that it is different and separate from the parent who is treating it as though it were an extension of the parent, and the struggle then begins.

Scripture calls for a reversal to that childlike state of innocence, naïveté, and oneness, back to a place where there is no fear, no shame, no need for self-defense. We should give up the struggle and accept the blessing, as Jesus seems to say to Nicodemus: 

 “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless someone is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” (John 3:3) 

All we can be reasonably certain about is that the reversal to the newborn state back to a state of oneness is the key to a mystery that matters to us almost as much as the mystery of God itself: The mystery of evil, iniquity, and death. 

In one of the most powerful and portentious passages in the Bible, the apostle Paul wrote: 

 Now I say this, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold, I am telling you a mystery; we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For this perishable must put on the imperishable, and this mortal must put on immortality. But when this perishable puts on the imperishable, and this mortal puts on immortality, then will come about the saying that is written: “Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O Death, is your victory? Where, O Death, is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the Law; but thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Corinthians 15:50-57) 

The reversal of evil, the reversal of death, is rebirth. The death in the garden of Eden was both a physical death and a spiritual death. It was a temporary stage marking our separation from God. It was the destruction of oneness with God. Scripture often describes physical death as a sleep, a temporary stage marking the end of our separation from God, awaiting our return to oneness with him. Physical death is spiritual rebirth. 

When the prodigal son returned home his father said: “For this son of mine was dead and now has come to life again. He was lost and has been found” and began to celebrate. There was great meaning in the celebration. When the elder brother complained about how lavish it was, his father said there was no choice: “We had to celebrate and rejoice, for your brother was dead and has begun to live; was lost, and has been found.” “Dead” here means to be separated from the father; “live” means to be reunited with the father. The parable is about spiritual life and death, not about physical life and death. 

But the return to oneness with God requires a recognition that we are separated and that we need his grace. This is a humble and righteous self-awareness, in contrast to the fear- and ego-driven self-awareness associated with ritual confession and with Adam and Eve as they hid from God after disuniting with him.

As awful as our disunity, our lack of oneness, and our spiritual death was, the resurrection and return to unity with God in his kingdom—the death of evil and the death of death itself—is correspondingly wonderful and triumphant and worthy of celebration. The Book of Revelation says: 

 And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among the people, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.”   

And He who sits on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” And He said, “Write, for these words are faithful and true.”  (Revelation 21:3-5) 

Salvation is a return to oneness with God. (It’s very interesting that the concept of reunification with God is shared by all religions. In most religions it is the ascent to paradise.) 

Oneness eliminates fear and struggle. A consequence of the fall and our loss of oneness with God was the introduction of pain into the world. Because we lack omniscience and omnipotence, and without knowing God’s plan from start to finish, our prerogative to distinguish between good and evil—to judge what is good and what is bad—is extremely limited. But we have no trouble recognizing pain and its proximate causes. We can reliably distinguish pain from joy. But it is much harder for us to judge when a given pain is actually evil, or a given joy is actually good. 

In retrospect, we can see instances of great goodness arising from historical events judged to be evil by the men and women of the time. That the notion of pain as evil might be quite wrong is illustrated in the story of the raising of Lazarus. It shows us how faulty is our assessment of evil. To Mary and Martha, the family of Lazarus, his death was not only devastating, but also it was God’s fault. When Jesus met first with Martha and then with Mary, they both said the same thing: “If you, Jesus, had come, my brother would not have died.” 

We see only the immediacy of the moment, but God sees the entire picture. We see what affects us personally, but God has a different and more expansive view. We want answers, but God has questions. In the garden, being at one with God, we had no self-awareness and therefore no questions, no need for explanation. There was no cause and effect in the garden before the Fall. All was well as long as we ate from the tree of life. We need no answers because: 

 She is a tree of life to those who take hold of her,
 And happy are those who hold on to her. (Proverbs 3:18)

But the family of Lazarus wanted answers and explanations. They saw only evil and loss in the death of their brother. They were working on a dataset driven by laws and commandments, based on a loss of oneness with God. They were unaware of the fact that actually the resurrection and the life had personally come to the funeral. They were about to witness the death of death itself: The restoration of oneness with God. 

You have been severed from Christ [you have lost oneness with God], you who are seeking to be justified by the Law; you have fallen from grace. (Galatians 5:4)

So here we are in this world, not in oneness with God, buffeted by life, asking questions, trying to make sense out of the craziness of living, trying to use laws and commandments, believing in cause and effect. But being out of oneness with God is the mystery of iniquity, the mystery of evil and suffering and death, the mystery of sin. We want things to make sense, to conform to laws, but evil doesn’t make sense. Evil is random. It is arbitrary. It is unpredictable. 

Being out of oneness with God makes us associate sin and evil with pain and with loss. That may be right or wrong, true or not true—only God knows. What we do know is that the lack of oneness creates longing for it. Our pain, our emotional disruptions, our distresses we associate with evil, but it drives us to a new longing for oneness again with God. In that sense, loss becomes gain, pain becomes healing, and death becomes life. 

John 9 tells the story of the blind man and the disciples’ desire to make a connection between his suffering and individual sin. Jesus disputed that. Suffering is the natural state of being out of oneness with God. It defies explanation. It challenges our reason. It is arbitrary, random, and unpredictable. Suffering is, and produces, a longing in our hearts for oneness. It is a reminder of the Fall, of the separation. It is a call to return to oneness. 

Like the Lazarus family, we are inadequate to tell good from bad. If it causes pain, it must be bad. If it causes joy, it must be good. But we must recognize that the loss of oneness with God clouds our senses. We can only long for our resurrection. We can only long for the death of death itself. 

David: The key is our association of evil with pain and loss and suffering. In the garden, the tree of knowledge—the tree of evil—was the great tree, the one with delightful apples, pretty to look at, delicious to eat. We’re not told what the fruit of the tree of life was like but it had no interest for Adam or Eve so presumably it didn’t look very appealing. I think that’s the key mistake we make. We mistake so-called “blessings”—the good things in life—for goodness. This is in many ways a devastating mistake.

Donald: Why does God allow this? Why does God allow that? It’s a little bit of a struggle. It’s always a perplexing thought that God “allows” something. We live in a war zone where some of us get hit and some of us dodge the bullets. Government has to declare a war before it is a legitimate war. I think it’s fair to say that God declared war: He declared that there would be evil. 

So does God actually get down to the level of allowing a bullet to strike me? Or are bullets just a part of life? It is troubling when I hear God allowed evil, or allowed pain as part of the process. 

Reinhard: It’s a valid question. Why did God put the tree of knowledge inside the garden in the first place? God only knows. In the end, free will would play a big role when he created human beings and God already knew that. To see how humans would worship him and obey his commandment, he placed the tree inside the garden, knowing, surely, that he had created humans with the power of choice. 

God said that “the time you eat the fruit is the time you shall die,” but to God, a day is 1,000 years, and Adam lived almost 1,000 years. So we will die, sooner or later. God finally defeated death through Jesus’ resurrection. The point is that eventually God give us back life, although we have to go through death, through the consequences of evil, first. 

The coming of Jesus showed us how to live as his followers, as his children; he showed us the way to do it. He sacrificed his life and was resurrected to convince us that even though we’re going through all this evil, eventually God is going to provide a place—the kingdom of God—where we will regain the goodness of God. 

C-J: I think God’s intention was for us to cut the cord. The only way we grow spiritually, physically, is to have adversity that goes deep, so when the wind comes, we don’t topple over; to know our source and resource, metaphorically and spiritually. But I think God always knew the cord had to be cut. 

We should remember that he didn’t leave us hanging out there when he did cut the cord: We still had relationship with God, we still had the key, which is forgiveness, to recognize that we can’t do it alone and to come back and say, not just to God but to others: “Forgive me.” Without forgiveness, we can’t receive grace; but without adversity, we won’t grow and have empathy. 

Humanity is very diverse and each of us plays an important part in God’s plan in terms of how we are taught and what we give.

Jay: How do we really define evil? What things are good and what things are evil? We tend to automatically assess pain, sorrow, sadness, and so on as bad or evil things. For me, the real question is: Did those things exist and were they felt even before the Fall? How do you know you’re happy if you don’t know what sadness or sorrow is like? How is that even possible? How do you know what feeling pain is unless you know what feeling great is? 

The verse quoted in Genesis earlier, about pain increasing in childbirth, doesn’t say God will now give woman pain in childbirth—it says God will increase the pain of childbirth, suggesting that even before the Fall one could be hurt, suffer pain, and feel discomfort. We so very quickly align those things with evil. 

I cut my finger on a knife last weekend. It taught me a lesson to be really careful around things that are sharp. Is that not good? Is there no goodness that that comes from such an event? We get into this really mucky place where we’re trying to discern or understand what is good and what is evil, but perhaps the overlap between the two is so complex that it is a very difficult thing for created beings. 

So in a heavenly or perfect state, those things exist, but my reliance is not on being able to distinguish between the two of them, as represented by the tree of knowledge and good and evil: My reliance is on the tree of life. If I only partake of the tree of life—the tree of grace—then the intermingling of pain and sorrow with health and bliss doesn’t affect my life. That is just what is. My reliance is on this grace. 

Anonymous: The way Dr. Weaver has presented things shows the accuracy of them in our feeling when we are lukewarm. It’s kind of separation from God. It’s against oneness with God. This is my own experience. When I feel lukewarm, and I’m not in constant connection with God, I feel really bad. I cry and I beg him to return me to my previous spiritual condition. 

The main sin here is separation from God. We are suffering from the lack of oneness with God. Nothing else.

C-J: I think when God says the pain in childbirth will be increased… he [God] is referring to humanity having control over our relationships. We are spirit beings having a human experience. We need to be mindful and do no harm. But when we multiply, and we create community, and relationships, they impact us. You might have a child that’s a loving, sweet child, or you might have one that’s just rebellious. You might be given in marriage that’s arranged, and it could be a marriage that is cooperative or constant conflict. 

But I think that the increase of pain is teaching us about community, and God is about community—we are in the body of Christ. And yet, we’re also individuals. So how we do things, how we move our experiences, we bring all of that to the table, wherever we are joined in relationship, but Anon is right: Everything is birthed in that relationship of grace. And when we get off the sidewalk, we know intuitively, this isn’t where I should be. This is what I need to be doing right now. I need to get closer to God again.

Donald: I guess I’m struggling with the oneness with God and the idea of pain and adversity. I think we would all agree that when sin entered the world, everything became complex, everything was going to be a challenge. You wanted to grow something, it was going to be surrounded by weeds. So it’s going to be a battle. You can maybe suppress the weeds, but you can’t win, ultimately; you can just keep working at it. 

So what was work prior to sin? Did everything just flourish? It was already there? I certainly understand oneness, but the idea of pain and suffering is a result of separation. Is it a result of sin? Of living in a sinful world?

C-J: It’s necessary. If I don’t learn to walk, if somebody is always carrying me, I’ll either be a burden to that person and my muscles won’t develop. It’s necessary. Conflict is necessary in order for us to mature. God wants both. He gave us dominion over the earth. Literally. So what we see in terms of conflict is that we are not surrendered to God, we are not surrendered to being good stewards of the earth. We are not surrendered to God in terms of grace, in our relationships with others.

The Ten Commandments say at all: We are independent, but part of independence is temperance. We are held to a higher standard when we’re in a relationship with God. He gave us very clear pathways to maturing. Some people just aren’t risk takers, but to whom much is given, much is required. Those are the people who break new ground, write laws, rule. They are, hopefully, in alignment with God, because when they aren’t, terrible things happen. 

Michael: I really like the idea of not calling pain “evil.” I don’t think pain should be equated to evil. It seems to me that it is a human thing to put much more emphasis on the sadness or the pain, rather than on the good times. That’s a human curse. We tend to emphasize the bad times and on feeling bad rather than feeling good. It seems inherent to being human. 

At the same time, it seems to me there is a lot of relativity to the topic. For example, my state of mind can really affect how much pain I feel, how much a situation affects me, how I see myself in the world (as being in a good place or in a bad place). It seems to me there is a lot of relativity, and I’m wondering how the state of oneness would look at resurrection? Is it more a state of seeing things a bit differently? 

David: I would agree that absolutely it is a matter of seeing things a little bit differently. I think that’s what churches are struggling with today. When they look at issues such as same-sex marriage, they have simply got to look at marriage differently from the way they used to look. 

I wonder, before there was evil, could God have known that he was God? I think we would all assume that God, being the sole creator, created everything, and that evil did not appear until after God finished the creation. But then how could God know that he was God? Because there is good and evil, we can discriminate between the two, albeit very badly. This was a problem that God surely foresaw. 

If we win the lottery, we thank God. We shouldn’t be thanking God for that. We should be thanking the devil, because we all know that if you amass millions of dollars, you’re not going to be a very nice person, you’re going to lose a lot of any goodness you might have had. It’s just the way we are. 

We discriminate so badly that we’ve got good and evil quite back to front.

Carolyn: Swinging the pendulum forward into the future: In heaven there will be no discrimination to make, because Scripture says there will be no more pain, no more sorrow. Swing it back to before the creation, when God decided he wanted to create our world, and he made it perfect. When did evil come into the world? I think we’re trying to find out where it is, what it is, and how it came to be. God can make something good out of anything. We know that. He’s omnipotent. He’s all powerful. But I think the mystery comes right at the very beginning, when he cast Satan and his angels down to this earth.

Were the trees of life and of knowledge on Earth at this time? I know we are going to have the tree of life in heaven. I think the contrast between both swings of the pendulum is where our dilemma comes as far as when pain started. 

As for oneness with God: To me, Eve was one with God but she strayed. On the other hand, if God is omnipresent…. Gosh!  There are so many questions!

Jay: That’s exactly where I’m at. There are verses that talk about no more pain, no more sorrow. How do I know the bliss of heaven? Was there bliss in heaven before the Fall? Is that the question? What was heaven before the Fall? Was heaven a place to be after the Fall? The other point that you make is that God made the garden a perfect place for humans, except it had this tree of knowledge of good and evil in it. You could say evil was in it. 

Our understanding of pain and sorrow as bad things resulting from sin and the Fall is maybe where our thinking is a little bit clouded. We don’t have the capacity to understand it, hence we struggle with it very much. But, I would propose, if you stop struggling with it, if you can let it go and decide to focus on the grace of God rather than the discernment of good and evil, if you can pivot your brain somehow, I believe you would find yourself in the kingdom of God, in heaven.

Kiran: We think about ourselves all the time: “What’s in it for me? What’s the bliss for me? What’s the comfort for me?” But the thinking of Jesus is not about him. It’s about Lazarus and his family and all the other people. I think the fundamental difference between heaven and earth is that we will not think about ourselves in heaven. The angels are constantly serving everybody. I often wonder why they don’t get fed up serving us and having to put up with us, yet they cry for us. Jesus cries for people. He weeps, not for his own pain, but for the pain of others, which is more heartbreaking for him than his own physical pain. 

I think that’s the state of mind we will get into when we get into oneness with God. We will no longer think about ourselves, we will think about everybody else. That’s very hard to achieve without Jesus. That’s why I like the point that you can only push the evil out of your own self when you’re in union with God. On my own, I can’t push this evil out of myself.

Bryan: Oneness was present in the garden. Adam and Eve had oneness with each other and oneness with God. To me, it’s a relationship issue, which requires communication—questions and answers. I think sin existed before creation and came to this earth. The oneness then was severed when sin entered our world. This loops back into the question of how do we ask God for things, and what kind of answers do we expect to get? 

Maybe we’re looking in the wrong places for the answers. We ask for things. Maybe we don’t have the capacity to see the answers that we’ve been given. Maybe the answer is not a one-item thing, a black or white issue. Maybe it’s a series of events that creates the answer that we need. But for us, it’s hard to see. Rather than ask for specific things maybe we should ask God to make the walk of life with us, and we should be open to the paths where we are led, and try to see God’s answers not so much in black and white but perhaps in a series of events that leads us to the place where the answer may be. 

For me, this “oneness” is at best hard to achieve and at worst impossible to achieve, while sin is here, because of the relationship having being severed—the questions and answers, the feedback loop, has been broken. So I’m not even sure that it’s even possible. We just struggle along until we find out, but for me, it’s a really difficult thing.

David: I’d like to propose a (heretical?) alternative to the notion of the broken relationship. Caroline said something I think everybody accepts, namely, that God is omniscient and omnipotent. What if he isn’t? Would that explain why we can’t get access to everything that we see? How do we know that God is omniscient and omnipotent? Because we’re told? How well do we know God— well enough to know that he is omniscient and omnipotent? I’m not sure that we do.

Maybe God himself doesn’t know, yet. This fits my process theological viewpoint of a God who is in the process of becoming, a God who is learning to become what he already is. This is hard to get even my twisted head around, but I think we should challenge some of our base assumptions—such as the omniscience and omnipotence of God. It would certainly explain evil: Because God cannot stop it! If he is (a) good (b) omniscient, and (c) omnipotent, he can have a good world without any evil in it. Isn’t that right?

Dewan: With regard to how to communicate with God: I think the Lord’s Prayer teaches us how. When we ask for our needs to be met for a single day in life—”Give us this day our daily bread”—we are asking only for one day, not for days, not for weeks of bread. I think when we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we are communicating with God. 

Reinhard: God revealed himself through Jesus. He showed what he is all about through the life, teaching, ministry, and healing of Jesus on earth. So I think we know what God wants and needs us to do. The introduction of sin in the garden is complicated. We have to remember that when Lucifer was cast out of heaven, he came to earth. Did God already have a plan, knowing that Lucifer was going to tempt human beings? 

As the Creator, I believe God had to continue to channel his love to his Creation—to us, God created us to show that he is a loving God and he wanted to show Satan that he is not very domineering, not very authoritative: We have the power of choice, we have free will, and he lets the process unfold. 

When Eve looked at the fruit, maybe she was tempted by it, but remember, Satan also added to the temptation by telling her she would end up like God, which perhaps explains why God cursed the snake first, before he cursed Adam and Eve. But the plan of salvation, the redemption, started in the Garden of Eden and later Jesus taught us through the Lord’s Prayer to ask God to deliver us from evil. 

God wants to help us so we don’t experience evil, but we tend to pray only when a problem arises. God teaches us pray for deliverance from evil long before it happens.

Robin: Several verses in the Old and New Testaments speak to the word that we call “omnipotence” of God:  

 All the inhabitants of the earth are of no account, But He does according to His will among the army of heaven And among the inhabitants of earth; And no one can fend off His hand Or say to Him, ‘What have You done?’ (Daniel 4:35)

 Even from eternity I am He, And there is no one who can rescue from My hand; I act, and who can reverse it?” (Isaiah 43:13)

 And looking at them, Jesus said to them, “With people this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:26)

 Is anything too difficult for the Lord? At the appointed time I will return to you, at this time next year, and Sarah will have a son.” (Genesis 18:14)

 Then Job answered the Lord and said,  2 “I know that You can do all things, And that no plan is impossible for You.” (Job 42:1-2 )

They may not use the word “omnipotent” but they serve as descriptions of omnipotence. 

I think the reason that difficulty, suffering, inequality—all the things that are unfair or painful—came about because of disobedience. God told the first parents they were to take care of one another. They were to take care of the earth. They were to take care of the animals. And he said they could have every fruit from every tree in the garden, but: “Don’t touch this one.” So there was disobedience. 

We can try to overthink and we can try to over-explain until the sin of disobedience doesn’t seem so great next to serial murders and so on. But it wasn’t the degree of the sin—it was that now sin existed because Eve made the choice to doubt God, to listen to the serpent; knowing that it was disobedient to touch what God said not to touch.

Don: We will discuss further the subject of evil, pain, and suffering. We will look at the theology of pain and see if we can wrap our heads around any more concepts. 

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