On The Problem of Pain
When atheists ask “why did God make a world where sin is possible?”, what they’re really demanding is their own lack of agency.
by Rod D. Martin
February 18, 2024
For those who are missing church this morning: Some thoughts on the so-called “problem of pain”.
It is stated as “how can there be a God if bad things happen and/or bad people exist?”
This is nonsense.
People have agency. This is perhaps the central aspect of “made in God’s image.” We are not automatons. We are also not dumb animals.
We are capable of higher thought (though not as high as God), and of making choices through moral reasoning and not mere impulse or instinct.
When atheists ask “why did God make a world where sin is possible?”, what they’re really demanding is their own lack of agency: enslavement.
God will indeed eliminate sin in time, by purifying those who see and regret their bad choices, and removing and eternally punishing those who continue to embrace them. But He will not destroy our agency in the process.
The sad truth is, our bad choices create a lot of unintended suffering. This is both because we raise children like ourselves and because there are now billions of people, all sinning all the time. For example, who but God can know what combination of sins and sinners (and sometimes just foolishness, which God tolerates but hates) produced the environmental factors that made some dear loved one sick?
We’ve all faced this and we’ve all wondered why. But many things got us there, and though God will use it for good (Rom. 8:28), it all stems from the combination of countless sinful choices made since the dawn of man, most or possibly all of which took place before the person was even born.
We (collectively) broke the world. God is in the process of redeeming it.
He starts with redeeming the individual men and women. That redemption will spread outward like the growth of a mustard seed, or yeast in dough. It will eventually be all-encompassing for His people.
But all of it assumes agency.
The “problem of pain” is fundamentally an abandonment of responsibility, individual and collective. But it is also a demand to be infantilized, to be treated as a puppet on a string, the very thing the unbelievers claim God demands (and that their preferred governments would impose).
But God does not demand, or even permit, any such thing.
God created us free, like Himself.
And when we misused our freedom and broke His world, He let us feel only enough of our own consequences as a race to cry out for His loving redemption, and He shed His own blood in place of our punishment not just to set us free of our consequences but to adopt us as His literal children.
“For if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved.” And “as many as received Him, as believed on His name, to them He gave the right to become children of God.”
This is our state: created like Him in agency and reasoning, fallen not just individually but as a race by our own choices, redeemed and made more than we were before by His gracious agency and His fatherly love.
We have no one to blame but ourselves. We also have no deliverance from our own errors but Christ.
Really understanding this truth — the magnitude of my, and all of our, responsibility, and the degree of God’s absolutely undeserved grace — is not just life changing but life giving.
And it will produce more gratitude and humility than we ever knew was possible.
— This essay originally appeared on Facebook.