The God Effect: Chapter 12 – The Most Basic Problem
It’s great to realize that I and everyone around me actually has the purposely created “image of God” built into us. But is that how everyone behaves, always making the right decisions or acting with totally pure motives? Does anyone we know always act as if they did everything in line with God’s character? We all know that people are not perfect and in a lot of cases are just plain corrupted.
If chapter 11 is true, there has to be an explanation for the world we actually live in. That’s what this chapter is about – figuring out what the problem is, what it looks like in real life, and how it started in the first place. I am predicting that a lot of what we talk about will not go over very well. But if it turns out that it fits reality, it should actually be a big help in understanding life.
I suppose that there must be hundreds of ways out there to try and explain the problem of evil in the world or how every single person on Earth has ended up with less than perfect records of clear thinking, pure motives, and stellar behavior. One way to go is to leave God out of the picture. That way of explaining wickedness is what modern psychology is based on. It really boils down to believing that the dark side of humanity comes out of things like a messed up society, traumatic experiences, or bad genetics. I will admit that all those things can help explain how we behave at times, but none of them explain the problem of evil.
It should be pretty obvious at this point that we can’t leave God out of this. We know too much about Him and too much about how He made us. To cut Him out at this point would make no sense. What makes a lot more sense is to use everything we have learned, including the character of the Bible, to look at the problem of evil from God’s perspective.
The Beginning
God has a lot to say about how the world got into the sorry shape it’s in. If we take the Bible at its word, the problems started in paradise! According to the historical record, and I know of no reason not to believe it is recorded history, it began with our first parents, Adam and Eve. We could get into a lot of discussion about Adam and Eve themselves, but for now let’s take the first book of the Bible at its word and see if in the end, it makes sense.
According to the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve gave in to Satan’s lies and temptations. He claimed to give them the chance to take over for themselves “the knowledge of good and evil” so that they could operate morally without God. Satan’s deception was crafty. He didn’t tell them to outright disobey God but instead offered them all the attractions of the world and put doubt in their minds about God’s integrity and His motives for the rules for living in Eden (paradise). But probably the biggest part of the whole temptation was Satan’s claim that if they took him up on his claim, they would “be like God” Himself. There could not have been a more horrific challenge to God’s holiness, and they fell for it. At that point, that act of rebellion, was the first of what the Bible calls sin.
The result of what they did was catastrophic, not only for them and everyone that would come after them, but also for the rest of creation. God had trusted them to take care of everything and they blew it and defied Him in the process.
The Fallout
The world we live in now, and all the weaknesses, ailments, and struggles we have to live with came out of that whole mess of sin. The effect of that “fall” hit every part the special ways that God made us (chapter 11). It is not hard to see it every day, if not in every hour of every day.
The best way to think about it is by looking at the results as being torn apart from God and everything He made us to be. For example, when we die, it is really a separation of our souls, the spiritual part of us, from our bodies, the one leaving the other. We are also obviously separated from God too. After we die, that separation is carried on into eternity with no way to reconnect again unless He steps in. After all, if we are unholy, why does it make any sense to think that death would just automatically fix the problem between Him and us? How would that even work? Finally, we are now forced to deal with living in the physical world with all of the good and bad that goes along with it. In a real way, even creation is spoiled and separated from how it was meant to be.
The fallout from all this gets personal too. The stresses and conflicts from unholy people trying to live with other unholy people create all kinds of problems. Even in the best families, spouses irritate each other, and siblings argue, sometimes, sadly, to the point of being alienated from each other. At work, conflicts and challenges show up everywhere, from the lowest people on the totem pole to the highest.
The bottom line is that the damage from the first rebellion infected everything and everyone from then on.
The Most Basic Problem
When evil invaded the universe through the actions of our first parents, the worst damage was to mankind’s conscience, his ability to make correct decisions between right and wrong. We lost the ability to be pure and that means that our minds and even our souls are spoiled. This is the most basic problem between us and God, between us and other people, and is one of the hardest things to accept. No one, including myself, likes to think that we are not mostly good, or are at least able to always think clearly and live righteously. But that’s just not real life and, if we are honest with ourselves, there is just no way we are that holy. The evil in the rest of the world proves the point even more.
It is easy to call out the sins of the rest of the world with its violence, perversions, injustices, and abuses. But what about things closer to home? What about the things we have personally seen or been a part of ourselves? As it turns out, the Bible has some pretty good lists – “strife, jealousy, angry tempers, selfishness, slander, gossip, arrogance, immorality, indecent behavior, strife, jealousy, rebelliousness, envy, drunkenness, carousing, blasphemies, and evil thoughts”. Jesus said that the most dangerous ones are hidden in our hearts and that no one else can see them but God. By the way, that includes anything that violates our own consciences. When we look at this list, it is much too easy to deceive ourselves into thinking that we have never been part of any of it or, for some of us, that we are still there.
The Cost
So, is there a cost from all those imperfections and, as the Bible calls them, sins? Here is another hard thing to understand; there has to be! Think back about God’s character again. Everything we know about Him leaves us with no choice. God’s faithfulness to His holiness, righteousness, truth, and goodness demand that the things on the “sins list” and more, must be reacted to. Remember, right now we are not talking about vague “out there somewhere” kinds of stuff, but about things in us that are offensive to God Himself and a lot of times to other people. We are talking about real people, including ourselves, that carry those darknesses and therefore have to face the alienation they cause, both between us and God. This is not just a matter of keeping or breaking rules, it is about being offensive to God because of who He is.
There are only two ways for God to deal with these assaults on His character and on His moral standards that are a part of His character. Both of them come out of His holiness; the need to have righteousness and do justice. God cannot just wait for us to show up after we die and say, “Oh well, I’ll just call Myself loving and ignore all the crimes against me”. That’s not how justice and righteousness work. Instead, in a legal kind of way, He has to judge us in some way or another. There simply has to be payment in order to set things right.
The two choices are pretty obvious. Either He has to condemn the offender forever since the offences are forever against an eternal God or the second way, He could pay an eternal payment Himself to cover the sin. It sounds unimaginable, but that means God Himself would have to be the payment! We will talk about this later on, but that is exactly why it is so important to understand who Jesus Christ is how He was that payment.
Justification and Healing
After all of this, a very bright future is possible, but it hinges on owning up to the sin we carry and willingly accepting God’s plan and payment so that things can be made right. The results of the fall of our first parents are devastating in the here and now and into eternity. How can it be anything else? Everything is based on accepting eternal principles from an eternal God. It makes perfect sense that God would, for the sake of righteousness, use judgement and justice against the sin and at the same time exercise His mercy, grace, and love to offer the payment, forgiveness, and new life to those of us who act on it.