There Is A God Ch 7

In our era of permissiveness, the justice of God seems to be an offense to the rationalist. Perhaps the problem is one of communication, which can be shown in the simple illustration of an argument. All of us at some time have been engaged in an argument in which we really never objectively listened to the other party. We were too busy thinking up our answers to hear their logic. Similarly, the rationalist is carrying on a debate with God. If he would only stop and listen to what God has explained in the historic account of Eden (Genesis 3), he would catch a glimpse of the wisdom and justice of God that guarantees man’s eternal happiness in due time.

Is God’s Justice Severe?

Some question the severity of God’s justice in the death penalty. Could not a penalty other than death have been a just recompense for Adam’s disobedience? No doubt another penalty would have been just; however, God chose this penalty because it best suited His overall plan for mankind. Once Adam was informed that death was the penalty for disobedience, then the penalty was fair.

A basic fact to always remember is that God in His foreknowledge knew Adam would disobey. Therefore, long before the creation of Adam, God’s wisdom devised a plan of recovery and ultimate happiness for the human race that would require the death of His only begotten Son. Thus, I Peter 1:19,20 and Ephesians 1:4-7 speak of the blood of Christ as foreordained before the world began for the redemption of mankind. The Creator used man’s experience in Eden to demonstrate the dependability of His justice. It is vital for man to know that “justice and judgment [just decisions] are the habitation of thy [God’s] throne” (Psalms 89:14). Justice is the foundation of the government of the universe, the basis of all God’s dealings. Judgment is also spoken of as part of this foundation. The Hebrew here means “a just decision.” We can take comfort in the realization that throughout eternity all of God’s decisions will be just.

Man was placed in the Edenic paradise to thoroughly enjoy the love of God. Suppose that after Adam and Eve had lived obediently for a while, God changed His mind and expelled them from the garden condition into the thorns and thistles of the unfinished earth. His love would be worthless, whimsical, because it was not based on justice. It would be changeable.

Another hypothetical situation: If when Adam disobeyed, God said, “Oh, I will overlook your disobedience this time, I will not punish you as I promised to do.” Adam might say, “Wonderful! I am surely glad God is more loving than just.”

Wonderful? No! This, too, would have been whimsical, capricious, arbitrary. The Creator and Ruler of the whole universe could never be trusted throughout eternity. At any time, in any place, with any order of intelligent creatures, God might at the slightest whim change His mind and turn on His creatures. Eden proved the unchangeableness of God’s justice. Thus, God declares in Malachi 3:6, “I am Jehovah, I change not.” And James 1:17 states, “The Father of lights in whom there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.”

How unchangeable is God’s justice? It is so unyielding that God’s court of justice required the payment of the costliest fine ever stipulated in a court of law. What judge has been willing to give up his own innocent son to death in order to cancel the criminal debt of the defendant?

Another Problem of Communication

Our Creator wants us to know the depths of His love, that He is the most loving Being in the universe, but how can God communicate this to our finite minds? In human relationships words of love can be quite meaningless. Actions speak louder than words. How did God show His love? With tender fatherly emotions of sorrow, God took the dearest treasure of His heart, His only begotten Son, and sent him to earth to suffer and die at the hands of man. At great cost to Himself the wisdom of God formulated a plan which reveals that He is both just (unyielding justice) and the justifier (benefactor) of mankind (Rom. 3:25,26).

The simple events of Eden and Calvary tell so much about our God. Calvary is the greatest manifestation of love and mercy in the history of the universe. The combination of Eden and Calvary stand as a pledge throughout eternity that there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning in God’s justice (James 1:17).

Natural Calamities

Many natural calamities are not a question of “Where is God?” or “What’s wrong with God?”— rather, “What’s wrong with man?” Many feel the train of catastrophies around the world is caused by global warming that they believe, in turn, is caused by pollution. Whether pollution is the cause of global warming or not, certainly pollution is a disaster in itself that bodes nothing but ill for mankind. From whence came pollution? It came from diverse sources that are all rooted in man’s greed for profit.

The extreme toll of human life accompanying other natural catastrophes have often been aggravated by man’s selfishness. Over 4,500 lives were devoured in the 1988 Armenian earthquake. Such high casualties were due largely to shoddy construction of high-rise apartments over a well-known fault area, again illustrating human callousness. Californians dwelling over a huge fault area are hoping it won’t happen in their lifetime. When the “BIG ONE” does strike, you will hear the cry, “Where is God?”, but it will be man’s gamble and loss, not God’s.

Man has long observed and recorded the patterns of natural calamities such as floods, monsoons, hurricanes, etc., yet frequently he chooses not to respect the danger of these killer patterns. It is well documented that certain rivers will periodically—every 10, 15, 25 or 50 years—swell over their banks into an ocean of destruction. Yet thousands continue to rebuild in the path of the inevitable ruin. Hurricane paths have temporarily obliterated shorelines and coastal isles. Yet the vanity quest for the ultimate in ocean front luxury and prestige continues to provide a path of future victims.

Some disasters could have been eliminated or minimized if the recommendations of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had been followed. Yes, the killer force of natural catastrophes spirals numerically, thanks to human selfishness and greed. This is one of the many lessons man is learning from the permission of evil.

Another observation must be made on the destructive forces of nature. Since the days of Voltaire (1790s), atheists and agnostics always seized on nature’s catastrophes to loud-mouth, “Where is God?” What a distortion of proportions. Numerically, the victims of natural disasters pale into insignificance compared to man’s inhumanity to man. Actually these atheists and agnostics need the lessons of the permission of evil to explode their naive view of evil. At the end of the 19th Century they were predicting that Darwinism and social evolution would usher in a 20th Century utopia. What has happened?

It Is Horrific

In his book Out of Control, written in 1993, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor and professor of American Foreign Policy at John Hopkins University, notes that the 20th Century began amid great hope and promise, but it became the century of insanity. In elaborating on his observation of 175 million slaughtered in the name of the “politics of organized insanity,” he says:

Contrary to its promise, the 20th Century became mankind’s most bloody and hateful century of hallucinatory politics and of monstrous killings. Cruelty was institutionalized to an unprecedented degree, lethality was organized on a mass production basis. The contrast between the scientific potential for good and the political evil that was actually unleashed is shocking. Never before in history was killing so globally pervasive, never before did it consume so many lives, never before was human annihilation pursued with such concentration of sustained effort on behalf of such arrogantly irrational goals.

It is horrific — “175 million slaughtered” because of mankind’s most bloody and hateful century. Total all the deaths from natural disasters in the 20th Century and what do you have? It is a drop in the bucket compared to man’s killing machine of our insane century. This is what the schooling of the permission of evil is all about.

God permits evil to prove that man’s existence without God can only result in man’s inhumanity to man.