Here is the reality confronted in this chapter - that evil exists. We all know it does, so that’s not a secret or a revelation. The struggle is to understand the tension between evil in this world and an all-knowing, all-loving, life-creating God. But there are a couple of bedrock ideas from this chapter that I think really stood out to me, and that I want to reiterate here in my journaling.
First is the reality that without God, and I mean a god of some kind here, then there is no good or evil...morality isn’t a social construct, it is a theological one. Or think of it this way, there is no ultimate good or evil unless it is termed that from a being outside of this life...because, otherwise, your good is yours, your evil is yours, and mine is mine. At best, if good and evil aren’t arranged from a being outside of this life, then good or evil is simply a product of ‘might makes right’. And think about this...if we all do what we want, when we want, with whom we want, we all ultimately destroy this world. Order and peace can’t exist without submission to a truth that we should serve the greater good...that we should love others. Without God, evil and good are opinions. Just look at nature...nature operates purely in this fashion, and it is held in balance by this very reality. You would have to admit, in your heart of hearts, that you have something in there that is different, that you have a vision for your future, a sense of ought and ought not, and a yearning to and longing for ‘more’ from life...the existence of that very sense (which is often what we term ‘the spirit’) is a fantastic argument for God, and by extension for moral order under God’s rule of what is good and evil.
Second, Brooks makes this argument that I think is really awesome, that what God did in the beginning was to create love. And God created love by giving us a choice...a choice to love or not to love. Because, think about this, you can’t be forced to love someone, or to be loving...you can DO loving things, but to love experientially, we have to have freedom to choose NOT to love. What is ‘not loving’? Well, not loving could simply be termed - evil. Evil is the antithesis of love. So one way to think about all of this is that God didn’t create evil so much as he named it. But the bottom line is that we all are benefited by love and we desire love...it is a human thing to want to experience love. And, I am not talking about just romantic love here, but love in general. Joy, happiness, satisfaction, and all of those good things can all generally be rolled up under the term ‘love’. Love is the thing that makes all positive emotions possible. And love can’t exist without the opposite, just as light can’t exist without darkness. So it is short-sighted and one-sided to say that God created evil...God created choice, which is the characteristic unique to human kind, and in doing so He created the opportunity for us to choose love or evil. The evil in the world around us is our own doing. And God is working a plan to redeem the world from this evil. That’s what history and Jesus and the Bible all teach us.
And that brings us back around to the idea that you and I can complain that God isn’t redeeming the world quickly enough or in the right way, but that’s like telling Leonardo de Vinci that he improperly painted the Mona Lisa. It just stands to reason that the God that created the universe would probably understand how best to redeem it...and your opinion, my opinion, about that topic likely isn’t highly useful.
What a great chapter this morning...my head hurts!