Faith Well Grounded

"In the beginning, God…” Genesis 1:1, excerpt.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God…” John 1:1

I love these verses, great beginnings to the stories of beginnings. Both start with the utmost central subject of our existence: God. Both begin the Creation story, in which God creates with Word as deed. By Word alone, He creates from nothing. In Him is existence with such perfection that He can give existence as gift.

But the question is evil isn’t it? It’s pain. At its basest, the question is the “wrongness” of our existence. If a moral God created this existence, then why is it such a sorry one? Why do bad things happen to good people? What happened to paradise? These are the central questions.

And they’re important questions, because as mentioned in the intro-post on this subject, merely asking them brings us closer to God. Only in Him can they be asked. Perhaps more importantly, only in His Word can they be fully answered.

Without a proper image of God and His revelation, we will never fully understand our existence. We’ll never understand these big questions, much less form answers to them. Without Him, our view of our surroundings is skewed.

Here’s the Cliff-Notes. God created (Genesis 1) and called His creation “good”. He made it the way He would wish it to remain—in perfection. He warned humanity that disobedience to Him would ruin this creation, bring about the “fall”, death and curse upon the entirety of creation. After this warning, what happened? Disobedience, the fall, death and curse, of course.

So, Christianity says that it’s not God’s fault. It’s man’s. He tried to give us exactly what we needed, but we ruined it. He created. By seeking to be like Him (by "eating from the Tree"), we recreated. Now we’re stuck with the results.

But there’s a catch.

Those critical of this explanation push it back to God. If He’s all-powerful, all-knowing—well, if He’s God, then why did He create with the chance that this would happen? If He created an existence with the possibility of this “wrongness”, then He is responsible for this “wrongness”.

(After some time away, this is my second post on evil. I'd love some discussion on this, in hopes that the answers to these questions may be fleshed out. If not, I'll post part 3 and dole out the answers that I feel I have. Until then, happy commenting...)

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