It was probably because I had just finished John Hick’s book Evil and the God of Love [1] that it struck me so. This week I watched the movie Exodus [2] and my mind just rebelled against the notion that the world got so out of control during this time period. The 20th century is so unbelievable in terms of the destruction of human life with World War I, World War 2, the Holocaust, Stalin, and Mao. That is just naming the major events and does not include all the other “minor” events around the world like Rwanda, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and all the other countries listed in Death by Government. [3]
Christianity teaches God controls all the events that occur in our world. If he does why did he permit the world getting so out of control? My mind simply cannot understand why. It is so easy in the comfortable life we enjoy to contemplate how God deals with this world but it would be another matter if we were a “guest” in one of Hitler’s concentration camps. The suffering that occurs each day on our world is cannot be comprehended. How can God look down on our world each day and not bring an end to this?
Why did God even create us when he knew the “hell” some of us would go through? Roy Weatherford notes that our experience of evil “is the most philosophically important evidence against the existence of an all-powerful, all-good divinity.” [4] Or at least that is the way it appears.
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[1] John Hick. Evil and the God of Love. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010.
[2] Otto Premiinger, Director. Exodus. With Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint. Metro Goldwyn Mayer, 1960.
[3] R. J. Rummel, R. J., Death by Government. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007.
[4] Roy Weatherford. The Implications of Determinism. New York: Routledge, 1991, p. 10.
