Human Evil and Wrong Perceptions of God

Copyright 2007 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

If we sometimes question God’s goodness perhaps the reason is that everyone we know here on earth, including ourselves, has the capacity for wickedness. It is sometimes hard for us to imagine that there is a sentient being that is incapable of such wickedness. Our problem is one of perspective.

Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation, once said that his greatest times of struggle in life were when he had trouble believing that God was both good and good to Him. One might be tempted to blame this on Luther’s pre-destinationalist tendencies, but his question is one that many Christians of every theological stripe have wrestled with at one time or another. We see evil and its effects in the world and in ourselves and we wonder why a perfectly good being would allow it in either place. C.S. Lewis called this conundrum “The Problem of Pain”.

I will not try to tackle the entire issue of the existence of evil; theologians of far greater stature than I have done so in greater length and moral sophistication than I could ever hope to achieve. What I want to focus on here is how the influence of human relationships affects how we see God.

Every one of us has known what it is to be hurt. We have also all known what it is to be the one doing the hurting. Men and women wound each other all the time. Whether it is between parent and child, husband and wife or among friends our pride, insecurity and wrong desires conspire to make us inflictors of unnecessary pain. We are dangerous to each other as well as to ourselves. Try looking for a “perfectly safe human relationship”. It does not exist. The very term is an oxymoron.

Some of us carry very deep wounds that have come from the most intimate human connections in our lives. It is, in fact, no cliché to say that those we are most intimate with are those who can do us the most harm, as well as those we can do the most harm to.

So when we come to God, the One with Whom we are to have the most intimate relationship with of all, we may well expect the same kind of experience we have known all our lives with everyone else. The idea that the Lord is intrinsically incapable of harming someone who has become His child is not easily accepted or believed. Experience, then, is in danger of trumping faith.

But God is patient with us. He knows what we have seen in the days before we met Him and He also knows that it will take both time and the progressive revelation of His favor in our lives to make us understand that He is different. It is this combination of time and loving grace which can open the eyes of our hearts and enable us to know God is the one Being in the universe who is utterly without evil, and also that He is the only One who can utterly remove the evil in each one of us.

As we come to know our Lord better our perspective starts to change. We come to realize that the perfect Lover of our souls really does exist, and His name is Jesus Christ.