Evil
The Problem with God’s Righteousness
**Part of The Nature of God: A Quick and Dirty Guide.**
Four classic problems plague the nature of God’s righteousness: evil, vindication, corruption and ignorance.
Evil: Some claim that God can’t solve the problem of pain–if God is good, then why does evil still exist?
Vindictive: Other people claim that God is a ruthless tyrant who leans on wholesale massacre to punish the smallest slight.
Corruption: Still others see God’s righteousness–revealed in his use of infinite punishment for finite crimes–as a gross abuse of power.
Ignorance: And finally some simply don’t know what God’s righteousness is. Or how it is related to the theological principle of propitiation.
Let’s look at this attribute and discover the truth about God’s righteousness.
What Is God’s Righteousness?
Righteousness means purity of heart, just, agreeable to the law. Used in Scripture and theology, it’s nearly equivalent to holiness. Righteousness includes all we call justice, honesty and virtue.
Applied to people, it denotes someone who is holy and obedient to the laws of God. Applied to God, it means the perfection or holiness of his very nature.
The Perfect Index for Righteousness
The first thing to know about God’s righteousness is that he’s the ultimate standard for righteousness. God’s righteousness comes from within his self-existent being. It’s the reason he is exalted above us.
That’s why his laws, ordinances and decrees are righteous: whatever comes out of his mouth is holy and just.
This righteousness is anchored in God’s morality and immutability. That makes God morally consistent and perfect, meaning he can’t bear iniquity. This is seen in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 where God enumerates a long list of blessings and curses.
Calvin says in the threats we see God’s spotless purity. In the promises, his infinite love of righteousness. Charnock says in the threats “his irreversible justice manifested that all those that commit sin are worthy of death.” In the promises, “his purity did sparkle.”
Since he is infinite and eternal in essence he is also infinite and eternal in righteousness. His righteousness has no limits and shall endure forever:
But about the Son he says, “Your throne, O God, will last for ever and ever, and righteousness will be the scepter of your kingdom.” Hebrews 1:8
Thus, God does no injustice. His nature can do no wrong. He is simply acting like himself:
The LORD within her is righteous; he does no wrong. Morning by morning he dispenses his justice, and every new day he does not fail, yet the unrighteous know no shame. Zephaniah 3:5
Anything we consider good conforms to God. Anything we consider evil fails to do so. Without God’s righteousness we wouldn’t even understand what evil is.
Christ the Righteous Judge
He is just in his judgments. And Christ will one day be the judge–rewarding the good and punishing the wicked. Shall not the judge of the entire earth do right? Again, he simply acts like himself, immune to any outside influence. Theophilus said:
For he is a chastner of the godly, and the father of the righteous, but he is judge and punisher of the impious. (TA, 1.3)
He renders to all according to their deeds. This is what Theophilus meant when he said “Yes, He is angry with those who act wickedly, but he is good and kind to those who love and fear him.”
Don’t see this as a “plea for personal vengeance,” says A. W. Tozer, “but as a longing to see moral equity prevail in human society.” Retribution is the inescapable moral law of creation.
Retribution means that God will see that each person sooner or later receives what he deserves–if not here, then hereafter. That is righteousness–not vindication.
Therefore, anger is an appropriate reaction to wickedness. Would a God who did not react adversely to evil in his world be morally perfect? God is not God when he does not punish sin.
God’s Righteousness Means You Get What You Deserve
Think about this: Justice equals moral equity. Iniquity is the exact opposite. The only thing wicked men can expect from God is retributive judgment–if you are under divine rage then God doesn’t owe you anything accept punishment.
And no one has an excuse, because his righteousness is revealed in the law of God:
Moses describes in this way the righteousness that is by the law: “The man who does these things will live by them.” Romans 10:5
The point?
Instead of shunning him and disobeying his law and behaving like outlaws who fear his return, we should long for his return–because God stores crowns of righteousness to one day reward us.
Like Anselm concluded, “He who is good to the wicked by both punishing him and sparing them is better than he who is good to the wicked only by punishing them.” Anselm’s thought can be echoed 800 years later in the words of Martin Luther:
But whoever is a christian should attribute justice to God and injustice to himself, should consider God holy and himself unholy. (WLS, 555-556)
And what can’t be missed here is that goodness without justice is evil. God spares us because he is good, but he could not be good if he were not just. He punishes the wicked because they deserve it. He spares the wicked only because he is good. Thus, he is free from every ounce of corruption.
God’s Righteousness Climaxes in Christ’s Propitiation
Why would he spare the wicked? Any wicked? And how could he do so and still remain just? The answer is found in the theological term propitiation.
Propitiation means to appease wrath and gain the favor of someone you have offended. In Christianity, propitiation is the work of Jesus Christ on the cross.
The sacrifice of Jesus on the cross satisfied the demands of God’s holiness for the punishment of sin. Jesus satisfied God and obtained for his people forgiveness. It’s also a promise–because God is all powerful, demonstrated in Jesus’ resurrection–that evil will be defeated in the future.
In justice God abandons sinners to their wicked ways (the divine penalty for rejecting God). In mercy God withholds or modifies deserved judgment. In grace God freely gives undeserved benefits to whom he chooses.
In the end, the cross of Christ is the culmination of God’s righteousness. All three–justice, mercy and grace–are applied and satisfied.
How to Deflate the Problem of Evil Dilemma
Often atheists will approach you and throw out a challenge to your Christianity that sounds something like this:
“If God is so good, why is there evil in the world?”
This is the classical problem of evil. Or POE.
Indeed, it’s a thorny issue. But supported by sound biblical answers…yet, you don’t have to go there.
Why? An atheist has no business asking that question.
Remember: an atheist doesn’t believe in God. So they can’t use a component they don’t believe in to build a dilemma for you.
But there’s something else wrong with this question.
This question assumes the atheist knows what evil is. It assumes the atheist has a sense of a perfect standard. That’s what you want to get at.
So, cut the legs out from under the problem of evil by asking this simple question:
“Why does evil bother you?”
What you’re looking for is what they believe in.
If they tick off a litany of violence, don’t let them end there. Push them for why torture, rape, bloodshed bothers him.
Usually they’ll admit some sense of injustice. If that’s the case, ask them where they got that sense of injustice. Does the opposite of injustice–justice–exist in the world then? If so, where does that come from?
What you’re doing is leading them to see that perhaps evil presupposes a morally perfect standard.
The atheist has to answer that question. Especially if he wants to use POE to object to God’s existence.
Does Evil Point to God’s Perfection?
**Part of The Nature of God: A Quick and Dirty Guide series.**
Did you know that your recognition of evil suggests there’s an ultimate standard for evil?
In other words, you have to know what is imperfect to know what is perfect.
So then, what is perfect? And how do we define perfect?
More to the point–and a little harder–what is good? And how do we define good?
What Is Good?
Good as an adjective means kind, adequate, convenient, useful, valuable, suitable, competent and safe.
Goodness in human beings means something admirable, attractive, praiseworthy or generous.
Think acting in good conscience.
When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy. Oscar Wilde
Good as a noun means “to diminish or reduce pain or increase happiness or prosperity.” Reminds me of Bentham’s utilitarian view.
The Jeremy Bentham Guide to Morality
If there is no objective standard for good, then we have nothing to go on that would define good outside of man. We only have ourselves to go by.
Jeremy Bentham, who was a moral hedonist, said morality should be based on “the greatest happiness of the greatest good.” (Moral relativism is inevitable, by the way.)
To discover the degree or amount of pleasure any one action would cause, Bentham suggested a utility calculus. Variables consist of intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity and extent.
Here’s a couplet to help you remember:
Intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure–
Such marks in pleasure and in pains endure.
In the case of a car accident with multiple injuries, the utility calculus amounts to triage. In the case of pleasure, it amounts to something totally different.
The Parable of a Sex Affair
Imagine you are a married journalist visiting India. You take a swim in a nearby pool. You see a half-naked woman in the water moving toward you. It’s obvious she’s a prostitute. You have two possible solutions:
1. You have sex with the prostitute.
2. You avoid sex with the prostitute.
Sleeping with her would provide certain and immediate pleasure. But it’d be short-lived. Plus, you risk catching a venereal disease. Or getting the woman pregnant. Or getting caught. And if you get caught, your wife gets hurt.
The utility calculus might tell you not to have sex with her. But there’s a twist.
Not sleeping with her would provide certain, short term pain. But the pain would not last, nor would it haunt you. Yet, there still remains a value judgment: would you get caught?
Because you are in India and your wife is not, India provides the perfect scenario: you are a stranger in a remote land and the likelihood of punishment is low. It really just depends on how sensitive you are. And depends on motive.
That’s why we must dig deeper and seek a different standard–a standard outside of ourselves. We can’t determine what is good for ourselves, otherwise we have to allow Stalin or Hugh Hefner or child rapists to stand in our company. The child rapists says, “I raped her to increase my happiness.” If you are a relativist, can you argue with that?
See, we know outrageous moral degradation is wrong. It’s the subtle nuances that get overlooked.
Can We Know What Good Is Without Someone Telling Us?
We can’t use statistical outcomes to determine morality because at any point a society could still be dead wrong with their assumptions. Overwhelming majority vote doesn’t make child prostitution right. We must look for something outside of ourselves.
But how do we find it? And how do we know what it is once we’ve found it? How do we know it is good and not evil?
My argument is we can’t know what is good without the Law, that is, the Word of God. Paul said, “On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law.”
God planted consciences in us so that when we sin we sink into secrecy and shame. We are defensive and aggressive when in sin. So when we are not shameful and defensive, we must be doing good, right? Close.
The core issue comes down to “what is sin?” Because when we know what sin is, we can then know what good is: the opposite of sin.
Here’s How to Know What Sin Is
We all sense we know what is wrong with the world. We can sense child abuse is wrong. Genocide is appalling. Cyclone Nargis barreling through 250,000 people, bad.
We know that diseases that ravage the body into a corpse is wrong. An earthquake snatching a hundred thousand women and children and men, wrong. Terrorists butchering people alive for their faith, wrong.
We know all this is wrong.
But how do we know it’s wrong? We know what is imperfect…but not what is perfect. Why is that? Why do we have this sense of imperfection? Of something gone wrong?
Here’s why: We cannot know the imperfect unless we know the perfect. Thus, there must be a perfect standard. Could this perfect standard be the ultimate Moral Lawgiver?
Anselm argued that since we know things that are more or less perfect, there must be a most Perfect by which we know this.
In the Bible we learn God is morally impeccable:
The Rock! His work is perfect, For all His ways are just; A God of faithfulness and without injustice, Righteous and upright is He. Deuteronomy 32:4
His perfection follows from his infinity: he is an infinitely perfect Being. Flawless and excellent.
Now think of God as the just judge.
The Biblical judge is expected to love justice and fair play–and to loathe all ill treatment of one person by another.
On the other hand, an unjust judge is one who has no interest in seeing right triumph over wrong. This person is by biblical standards a monstrosity.
Evil That Offends God
We all agree what repulsive evil is. What we disagree on is the evil that offends God because it ends up being very subtle.
Let me show you what I mean.
God posses a holy jealousy and a morally perfect character. The former is what gives God zeal to protect and preserve his own holiness. The latter is the absolute moral perfection that pervades the character of God.
Thus, offending a holy God is not hard. We do not need to murder or rape to offend God. Merely ignoring him will do the trick. Sin–moral rejection of God–can happen easily.
Why should he not love us unconditionally–and just back off? Good question. But who said God has to love the way we love?
The Unchanging Standard of Goodness
Theism affirms that God is an unchanging Being. So, he must love in an unchanging way. That means God can be perfectly just and perfectly loving at the same time–provided it is not on the same person at the same time. In other words, his wrath rests on all unrepentant sinners and his love on all repentant sinners.
This does not mean there is a change in God.
In his Systematic Theology Norman Geisler says that God always manifests wrath on unrepentant sinners and always manifests love on the repentant. The only thing that changes is that the person–by repentance–moves from under one attribute to under another.
To say God changes, is a category mistake–comparing a changing thing with an unchanging being.
Besides, for God to change is to admit some imperfection in his being. And to admit that there is some imperfection in his being is to suggest a perfect standard to judge his imperfection by.
So then, what is that standard, if not God himself?
Conclusion
The unjust implies the Just. Evil implies good. We get our sense of evil because we have a sense of good. We can bring that sense of good into sharper focus by studying God, since he is the ultimate standard of good. And once we do this, we can learn two things:
1. Pleasing a holy and just God is a whole lot safer than alienating him.
2. God will one day defeat evil.
When we learn about the ultimate standard–the perfection of good–we discover that God can’t let evil prevail. He is both omnipotent and holy: he cares that evil exists and he has the power to do something about it.
And as hard as it sounds, we have to trust his reasons for not vanquishing it now. That is what it means to surrender.
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