We broke it.
In an earlier post we discussed how God made a good world and placed humans, made in His image, in His creation to enjoy it and exercise dominion over it. Yet, God's created order is broken. Though there is still beauty, love, provision, and other parts of life we can enjoy, evil is everywhere.
The existence of evil in a world created by God has troubled philosophers and theologians for centuries. If God is good, why does evil exist? If God is all powerful, why doesn't he eradicate evil? End suffering? Put a stop to all war, genocide, oppression, abuse, hunger, homelessness, sickness, poverty, and estrangement? Some outside the Christian faith see the problem of evil as Christianity's Achilles heel, an unanswerable question that debunks the entire concept of an all-powerful, all-knowing, ever-present God who created the world and loves his creatures.
Libraries could be filled with the books, essays, and articles that have been written on this subject, so for me to attempt to answer it in a few words might seem a bit ambitious. There will be much more that could be said, but the answer to this question is to be found humanity's creation in the image of God. This image of God in man and woman is not a physical likeness for God is not a physical being. Rather, bearing the image of God means possessing his attributes encapsulated (and thus limited) in a physical body. We can think, reason, will, imagine, create, build, relate intimately, and manage resources. These are attributes we share with God and are unique in his creation. These qualities are often cited when theologians and Christian anthropologists try to quantify the imago dei in man. However accurate the assessment may be, it does not quite answer the question of why there is evil in the world. For this we must turn to another quality of being made in God's image.
Like God, we are capable of making choices that have real moral consequences and do so through our use or misuse of the faculties enumerated above. We can give and another feels joy. We can speak encouraging words and others become courageous. We can touch and another feels loved. We can also pull a trigger and someone dies. We can hoard and others suffer. We can withhold love and another experiences the devastation of loneliness and isolation.
Since the Fall of Humanity, described in Genesis 3, we have developed and deeply embedded systems of oppressive power, endemic poverty, and every kind of abuse and injustice into our societies. Slavery in America, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge, the Trail of Tears, September 11, genocide in Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan, and Darfur, the Syrian government terrorizing and murdering its own people, the loss of millions of lives via abortion on demand; we could go on and on. These events are limited simply to the past 150 years or so, not during the Dark Ages, but during our Age of Reason and Enlightenment. In a previous post I referenced Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire." While Mr. Joel's recap of world history in the latter half of the twentieth century is stark and stirring, his theology isn't quite correct. We did start the fire. Human beings are responsible for the state of our world. We are both victim and perpetrator.
Seeing how we introduced sin into our world--we sin and are sinned against--how then can we see shalom restored?
What if there were someone to show us a better way? One who demonstrated real humanity according to the Creator's design? One who could break sin's slavish hold and empower humans to live in shalom? Would anything less have any chance of enabling us to reach the state of justice and peace we intrinsically know should be ours as creatures made in the image of the Divine?
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