The movie Forrest Gump addresses a lot of life’s issues including the problem of evil. Take a look (show Lt Dan against God; www.youtube.com/watch?v=jc374YQAjJg, stop at 48 second mark right before Lt. Dan starts using foul language).
Lieutenant Dan had lost both legs in Vietnam and was embittered toward life and God. So here he is shaking his fist at God during a hurricane.
That’s what suffering does to some people. They scream at God like Lieutenant Dan. Many more just decide to push God or his church aside.
It is an age-old conundrum. Either God wants to stop suffering but cannot—which means God is really not all powerful. Or else God could stop suffering but chooses not to—which means God can't really be all loving and good.
Randy Alcorn, in his book If God Is Good says, “More people point to the problem of evil and suffering as their reason for not believing in God than any other—it is not merely a problem, it is the problem.”
A Barna poll asked, “If you could ask God only one question and you knew he would give you an answer, what would you ask?” The most common response was, “Why is there pain and suffering in the world?”
You will not get far in a conversation with someone who rejects the Christian faith before the problem of evil is raised. Pulled out like the ultimate trump card, it's supposed to silence believers and prove that the all-good and all-powerful God of the Bible doesn't exist (Randy Alcorn, If God is Good, Multnomah Books, 2009, page 15; www.PreachingToday.com).
So, what do you say to such people? How do you address the problem of evil? Well, if you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn with me to the Gospel of Luke, the Gospel of Luke, chapter 13—where Jesus addresses the problem of evil.
Luke 13:1 There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices (ESV).
Jesus is on His way to Jerusalem to deal with the problem of evil on the cross. That’s when some people ask Him what He thinks about Pilate, who killed some Galileans while they were worshipping in the Temple in Jerusalem. He mingled their blood with the blood of their sacrifices.
Warren Wiersbe suggests that “the atrocity… may have taken place when Pilate ‘appropriated’ money from the temple treasury to help finance an aqueduct. A large crowd of angry Jews gathered in protest; so Pilate had soldiers in civilian clothes mingle with the mob. Using concealed weapons, the soldiers killed a number of innocent and unarmed Jews (Wiersbe, The Bible Exposition Commentary, Victor Books, 1996).
It was a horrible tragedy not unlike the recent shooting at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. There, a gunman shot through the windows of a church while the children were praying, killing two of them and injuring 20 others (Fox News, August 27, 2025).
What can you say about such senseless tragedy? What did Jesus say?
Luke 13:2-5 And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish” (ESV).
The assumption was that those who perished in these tragedies were worse sinners than the rest. That’s how most people in Bible days answered the question about the problem of evil—Evil exists because God is punishing people for their sins. That’s what Job’s friends said about him: “You’re suffering because you sinned,” even though God had declared him righteous. And that’s what the crowd said about the man born blind in John 9: “Either he or his parents sinned,” to which Jesus said neither had sinned. Even so, the people in Jesus’ day believed that suffering was the direct result of sin, every single time, period, full stop.
But Jesus has a very different answer to the problem of evil. Instead of asking yourself, “Why me? What have I done to deserve this?” Jesus forces his audience to ask, “Why NOT me,” because all of us are sinners deserving death. Or as He puts it, “Unless you repent, you will ALL likewise perish” (Luke 13:3,5).
Don’t forget the context of this account. Jesus is on His way to the cross to deal with the problem of evil in the world. There, He will bruise that old serpent on the head, fatally wounding him, and there, He will purchase our redemption from the evil in our own hearts.
It’s not that God cannot or would not do something about the evil in our world. He DID do something. He entered our evil world and suffered with us, paying the price for our sins, to ultimately deliver every believer from this sinful, evil world. So here, Jesus urges his audience to repent lest they too die for their sins. It’s not the answer to the problem of evil you might expect, but it’s the answer Jesus gives.
REPENT OR PERISH.
Change your attitude about your own sinfulness and turn to Jesus to save you from YOUR sins. Acknowledge the evil in your own heart, and trust Jesus to root it out as He works to remove it from the world.
Psychiatrist Scott Peck wrote of meeting with a depressed 15-year-old named Bobby, who was increasingly troubled after his 16-year-old brother killed himself with a .22 rifle.
Peck tried to probe Bobby's mind but got nowhere. Searching for ways to establish a bond, he asked what Bobby had received from his parents for Christmas.
“A gun,” Bobby said.
Peck was stunned. “What kind?”
“A .22.”
More stunned. “How did it make you feel, getting the same kind of gun your brother killed himself with?”
“It wasn't the same KIND of gun.” Peck felt better.
“It was the same gun.”
Bobby’s parents had given him, as a Christmas present, the gun his brother used to kill himself.
When Peck met with the parents, what was most striking was their deliberate refusal to acknowledge any wrongdoing on their part. They would not tolerate any concern for their son, or any attempt to look at moral reality.
Two decades later and after his conversion to Christ, Peck wrote about this encounter: One thing has changed in twenty years. I now know Bobby's parents were evil. I did not know it then. I felt their evil but had no vocabulary for it. My supervisors were not able to help me name what I was facing. The name did not exist in our professional vocabulary. As scientists rather than priests, we were not supposed to think in such terms.
Interestingly enough, although Peck often worked with convicted prisoners, he rarely found evil there. He finally decided, “The central defect of evil is not the sin but the refusal to acknowledge it” (John Ortberg, “Fighting the Good Fight,” Leadership Journal, Spring 2012; www.PreachingToday.com).
Oh, my dear friends, worse than any sin you have committed is the refusal to acknowledge it. Please, admit your own sinful condition first to yourself, then to a holy God. Confess your sin so He can release you from it. Concede your guilt and trust Jesus to set you free!
When King Frederick II, an eighteenth-century king of Prussia, was visiting a prison in Berlin, the inmates tried to prove to him how they had been unjustly imprisoned. All except one.
That one sat quietly in a corner, while all the rest protested their innocence. Seeing him sitting there oblivious to the commotion, the king asked him what he was there for.
“Armed robbery, Your Honor.”
The king asked, “Were you guilty?”
“Yes, Sir,” he answered. “I entirely deserve my punishment.”
The king then gave an order to the guard: “Release this guilty man. I don't want him corrupting all these innocent people” (Lloyd H. Steffen, The Christian Century; www.PreachingToday.com).
When you try to conceal your sin, you remain condemned before the King of the Universe. But when you confess your sins, He is faithful and just to forgive you your sins—literally to release you from your sins—and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9).
That’s Jesus’ answer to the problem of evil. Start with the evil in your own heart and turn from it. “Repent or perish,” Jesus says. Change your attitude or die. Then…
DEMONSTRATE THAT CHANGE IN YOUR LIFE.
Bear the fruit of repentance or be cut down. In dependance upon Christ, change your actions along with your attitude.
Luke 13:6-9 And he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came seeking fruit on it and found none. And he said to the vinedresser, ‘Look, for three years now I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and I find none. Cut it down. Why should it use up the ground?’ And he answered him, ‘Sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put on manure. Then if it should bear fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down’” (ESV).
According to Leviticus 19:23–25, a farmer could not eat fruit from his newly planted trees for the first three years. In the 4th year, he had to give any fruit he harvested to the Lord. Finally, in the fifth year and beyond that the farmer could enjoy the fruit himself.
That means this farmer waited seven years looking for fruit. In the 1st three years, there was no fruit. In the 4th year, the nonexistent fruit belonged to the Lord. Then for 3 more years there was still no fruit! No wonder he wanted to cut down the fruitless tree after waiting seven long years!
But the manager of the vineyard urged the farmer to wait one more year. He told the farmer, “I’ll give the fig tree extra care this year. I’ll aerate the soil around the tree, and I’ll fertilize it with manure. If it still doesn’t bear fruit after an extra year of care, then cut it down.”
Now, Jesus’ original Jewish audience would have understood him to be talking about the nation of Israel here, because throughout the Old Testament, God describes Israel as a fig tree (Jeremiah 8:13; Hosea 9:10; and Joel 1:7). He also calls Israel His vineyard (Isaiah 5:3-7; Jeremiah 12:10; and Ezekiel 19:10). So this fig tree in a vineyard is a clear reference to the nation of Israel itself.
Jesus is warning the nation, along with its citizens, “God’s patience will soon run out. Bear the fruit of repentance or else risk the destruction of your nation.” He promises to take extra care of Israel so they might bear fruit, and indeed that’s what He does. He goes to the cross to die for their sins. Then he rises from the grave and sends his disciples to preach the Gospel to them. They preach for 40 years, but still the nation as a whole refused to repent. Finally, in A.D. 70, God sent the Roman army into Jerusalem to destroy it and to scatter the Jews all over the world.
God was patient, but His patience eventually ran out. It was a lesson not only for Israel, but for anyone who hesitates to change their ways. It’s a lesson for anyone who is slow to turn from their sins and trust Christ with their life.
God will patiently wait for you to turn to Him. He will put His people in your life, who will minister to you and urge you to give your life to Christ. But eventually, His patience will run out and you will perish forever.
Please, before it is eternally too late, trust Christ with your life. Call upon Him and ask Him to save you from YOUR sins. Then you never have to worry about God’s patience running out on you.
Sometimes, I wonder why God did not eradicate all the evil in this world right away. Why, after all these years, does he still allow the evil to fester?
J. P. Moreland, in his book The God Conversation, asks a similar question. What if God took the radical step of setting a deadline for ridding the world of evil? Suppose God announces that next Monday at midnight he will step in and stop all suffering caused by evil people. How would he do that? Let's say God decides to use a tool carried by many police officers—a Taser gun.
A Taser gun shoots an individual with a temporary high-voltage current of electricity. The makers of Taser guns claim that a shock lasting half a second will cause intense pain and muscle contraction. Two to three seconds will cause a person to become dazed and drop to the ground. Anything longer than three seconds will drop an attacker for up to fifteen minutes. The makers of Taser guns boast of a 95 percent compliance rate. In other words, hit a person with enough electricity and you can get him to do anything.
When the deadline for stopping evil comes, God gets us to comply with his wishes by shocking us. Start to tell a lie, and you are hit with a half-second zap. Try to rob a person, and you get two seconds of shock. A would-be murderer would be incapacitated. However, knowing that evil thoughts often lead to evil actions, God also zaps us for sinister thoughts. But God's still not finished. Since it's evil to fail to do good when given the opportunity, God zaps us for failing to show mercy, kindness and justice. As a result, people are zapped for doing evil acts, thinking evil thoughts, and failing to do what is right.
What would be the result? A world of twitchy people, who obey God like cowering, beaten dogs (J. P. Moreland & Tim Muehlhoff, The God Conversation, IVP Books, 2007, p. 26; www.PreachingToday.com).
Thankfully, God is NOT like that. He is patient, but one day His patience will run out. One day God will completely eradicate the evil.
2 Peter 3 says, “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed” (2 Peter 3:9-10).
God will completely eradicate all the evil in this world and all the evil people in it. But God is waiting for YOU to repent just like He waited for the nation of Israel. God is patient toward you, but His patience will run out. Please, turn from your sin to Him before it is eternally too late.
In May of 2009, on the Haizhu bridge in Guangzhou, China, a disturbed man in deep financial debt was poised on the edge of the bridge contemplating suicide. Because of him police had closed the bridge, disrupting traffic for five hours. People stood watching at police cordons to see what he would do. Suddenly a 66-year-old man pushed his way through the police cordons and walked up to the man considering suicide. He reached out and shook the hand of the troubled man. Then he pushed him off the bridge.
Later he explained why: “I pushed him off because jumpers like [him] are very selfish. Their action violates a lot of public interest. They do not really dare to kill themselves. Instead, they just want to raise the relevant government authorities' attention to their appeals.”
Fortunately, the police had spread an inflatable emergency cushion beneath the bridge. As a result, the suicidal man was injured but not killed (“Passer-by pushes suicide jumper in south China,” Associated Press, www.news.yahoo.com, 5-24-09; www. PreachingToday.com).
My dear friends, in your despair, Jesus will not push you off the bridge. Instead, He patiently waits for you to turn to Him.
Michael B. Brown writes in Men of Integrity:
A friend told me about a boy who was the apple of his parents' eyes. Tragically, in his mid-teens, the boy's life went awry. He dropped out of school and began associating with a bad crowd.
One night he staggered into his house at 3:00 a.m., completely drunk. His mother slipped out of bed and left her room. The father followed, assuming that his wife was in the kitchen, perhaps crying. Instead, he found her at her son's bedside, softly stroking his matted hair as he lay passed out drunk on the covers.
“What are you doing?” the father asked.
The mother answered, “He won't let me love him when he's awake.”
The mother stepped into her son's darkness with a love that existed even though he did not yet love her back. So it is with God and you (Michael B. Brown, “God's Man,” Men of Integrity, May/June 2002; www.PreachingToday.com).
He stepped into your darkness and demonstrated His love even when you did not love Him back. The Bible says, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Please, stop spurning God’s love for you. Even if you don’t understand His ways, trust in His love for you.
That’s Jesus’ answer to the problem of evil—Repent or perish. Then demonstrate that repentance in your own life before God’s patience runs out. God will eradicate all the evil someday, but He waits for you to let Him take the evil out of your own heart.
In the movie, The Horse Whisperer, Tom Booker, played by actor Robert Redford, employs his special gift of “gentling” horses.
A tense, New York magazine editor can't believe her eyes as she witnesses the gradual transformation of her daughter's horse from traumatized to tamed. In one telling scene, the horse, frightened by the editor's ringing cell phone, gallops off into the far end of a large pasture. Booker walks into the pasture and sits down, where he waits for what appears to be hours. The horse, drawn by its curiosity, inches closer and closer. Finally, it cautiously approaches close enough to touch the "whisperer," and allows itself to be led back to the safety of its stall (Clark Cothern, author and pastor, Tecumseh, Michigan; www.PreachingToday.com).
In the same way, God waits for you. He “gentles” the untamed or traumatized, who run from Him. Please, don’t stay away from Him any longer. Instead, draw closer to Him and let Him lead you through life to the safety of His home.
