Answer:
You ask a hard question that has been asked by many. Almost any answer will seem glib for the person who is swamped in the middle of suffering. But this may help: this question comes down to a logical problem with holding three ideas simultaneously: 1. God is All Loving 2. God is ALL Powerful 3. Evil things happen. How can all these three things be true? People say the only logical options are: either God CAN stop evil but doesn’t want to because he is not all loving, OR God WANTS to stop evil but can`t because he’s not all powerful OR maybe evil is just an illusion. We quickly can eliminate the third option - we know bad things happen every day. So does God not want to stop it, or can`t he?
The answer lies in how we define God`s love and God`s power.
The logical problem above is created by a deficient view of love. IE Love = the desire to have no one experience any pain whatsoever. But we know that this is far too simple a view of love. Good Parents routinely discipline their children for preciously the reason that they love them. This inflicts pain on them. So the idea that our pain or hurt automatically means God doesn`t love is false.
Of course, there seems to be too much pain in the world to be accounted for solely by the idea that real love must at times be tough. There must be more to it, and there is. For again, if we look at love, we realize that it is completely incompatible with this one thing: coercion. Many things you can make me do, but love isn`t one of them. Love is the spontaneous and – here`s the key word – FREELY offered devotion from one object to another. Force or compulsion automatically disqualifies any response as love. It could be called duty, burden, obligation, forced labor - but under coercion it can NEVER be called love.
If God is All Loving (and the Bible says, "God IS love", 1 John 4:16) then a defining characteristic of ANY relationship that God values highly will be FREEDOM – for freedom and love go hand in hand. Thus, if God wants to create a world where creatures can learn and know love, there must also be true moral freedom given to them to choose love, or not.
So far so good. God makes humans with freedom so that we can choose to love. This is the story of Eden. But as you can see, FREEDOM – if it is truly free – has a high cost. Freedom means I am able to choose to NOT love. And if I choose not to love, then it stands to reason that my not-loving choices will bring unnecessary and (from God`s point of view) unwanted painful consequences. This is also the story of Eden.
Most suffering of the human race can be traced to the abuse of free will. And you ask why God would allow it? The answer is, because of love. You can try to work this out another way, to imagine a world where there could be love without freedom, or freedom without pain and you just can`t do it. A world where there`s freedom is a world where I can hurt you. God could have shut down the freedom experiment, but then he would have had to shut down the love too. He could have made creatures who played out their lives in a perfect world where they were never allowed (by his power) to ever abuse their free will - but then, they`re not really free are they? Of course not. And we have to wonder what value a God of love would see in a host of creatures that just run programs. There is no love in a robot. And though a robot cannot turn on me if I program it not to, a robot can also never love me.
So love is the great answer to the problem of pain. Love requires freedom and pain is the cost that God apparently thot worth paying to get this most incredible of things: love. What an amazing thing love is that for want of it, and for the value of it, God would risk the creation of Hitler and Stalin and Mao and Hussein. For want of love God would risk MY sins that have hurt my friends, my wife and my children. See, we need to make this personal. We want God to stop THAT PERSON`S free will when it infringes on my happiness, but if God did that each time our free choices were going to hurt someone, then God would stop US too! If God eliminates all evil, he eliminates me. Or he makes a world of robots.
No, instead of that play/pretend/false world, God has instead created this real, risky, raw world where a hammer works to build a house OR to murder a neighbor. It`s a high stakes world where our choices MATTER. That`s why Christians talk about eternity as a life or death deal. We are literally making ourselves with our choices, this isn`t a game, the stakes are incredibly high, for others we touch and for our own souls... our freedom is very real. This isn`t a dress rehearsal.
So as far as God`s power goes, God has all power, but he DELEGATES part of his controlling power to us (and other spiritual beings, angels, both good and bad). He has all power in the sense that it all comes from him and goes back to him, but he chooses to be bound by his own covenant of non-coercion... He chooses to limit his power, by sharing it with us. And power, once delegated is in some sense irrevocable (again if He values freedom). Freedom is God`s compliment to us - just was we honor someone by promoting them to a position of accountability and responsibility. Our power is ours to use for good or bad.
Now this doesn`t mean that God is "out of control". He remains "sovereign". That means that he can USE the freely chosen actions of people to bring about some good. We have free wills, but so does God. It`s not incongruent with us having free will for God to confront or overwhelm our wills at times or to manipulate circumstances in the aftermath of some freely chosen evil to achieve some good purpose of his own. That`s just how powerful he is – and this gives us hope in the midst of suffering.
God gets the last word. As a rule, the Bible says, God lets people go their own way, giving us over to our own desires (Rom 1:28). Freedom. However, God being sovereign also means there will come a day, when God will call back all his "power loans". He will gather all power back to himself and settle accounts. Justice will prevail and the wrongs will be righted, good rewarded, evil punished. But we see this only from an eternal perspective, not always an earthly one. Here and now, bad things will happen and it seems like a person "gets away with it". But the Bible assures us that justice will roll someday. This side of eternity, freedom is allowing us a choice to make our souls how we want: going our own way (and hurting others, ourselves and our planet), OR surrendering to God`s grace and leadership. Hereafter, justice will reign.
The eternal perspective gives the answer to your question about Job. Harshness is relative to the purposes involved. What seems unnecessarily harsh may seem less harsh if we understand there’s a heavenly/eternal purpose. That’s the point of the whole book of Job. He complains in part because Job doesn’t see or know about the drama playing out in the heavenly realm. But we, the reader, understand some things that make it less harsh:
A) that Satan has done this to him, not God.
B) God is at work restraining this evil. Satan has freedom to wreak havoc with Job, but by God`s mercy not TOTAL freedom.
C) While God does test us sometimes, this wasn`t really a test for Job. The Bible is clear, this was a test for Satan! Satan bragged that Job`s devotion was paper thin... God, who knows all things, knew it was not so he proves it. We might ask, WHY would he feel the need to prove it to his Adversary? We don`t know but what’s going on in that heavenly confrontation is bigger than one man’s life on earth.
God gave Job life, and as the author of life, he has jurisdiction over his life. So Job responded rightly - "the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord." The rest of the book is a complaint that he doesn`t deserve this. Yes, God has the right, but Job feels God can`t say this is justified for something he did. And he was right. To give you an example: Let`s say I build my own car. I have the right to dismantle it. Now I could dismantle it for all sorts of reasons. One of them could be because the car was malfunctioning. Or, I might have other reasons, like I need a part for a different car etc. If the car could talk, and the car was like Job, it would say - you have the right to take me apart, but I have not been malfunctioning!
All through the book his friends try to tell him he IS malfunctioning. But they are wrong. God has decided to allow Job to be dismantled and he can because he`s the owner of Job. But his REASON has nothing to do with Job`s sin. Job of course knows nothing of the ACTUAL reasons, the heavenly wager or the eternal interests God has in showing off for the heavenly host, his plans with humans on earth. If Job had known that part he would see a greater purpose and would have rejoiced to be God`s servant – it would not have seemed so harsh.
So when God finally confronts Job, Job realizes that he doesn`t understand the half of it (chp 38-42). Message: there`s more going on, there`s reasons you don’t see. God is too big for us to put him in a box and to think that we know better than He what is right (or too harsh) in light of so many things beyond our knowledge. After that, Job surrenders and God restores him. Again showing us that in the end, sometimes on earth and sometimes only in heaven, God who is always good, makes things right. That`s the confidence Job has through it all (job 13:15): that God is good and that he will trust him and his goodness even when he doesn`t understand and even if his life is taken from him.
That`s the bottom line. Do we believe, based on Creation and on Christ that God is good? And that everything he does is right and ultimately loving - even if temporarily it seems to our limited eyes that evil rules or that God has been too loose in his tolerance of it? That`s always the final issue in suffering: Faith. Will we hold onto our God in faith that he is good and knows best and can always be trusted?
Good reads: “Problem of Pain" CS Lewis and "Satan and the Problem of Evil" Gregory Boyd.
