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5. How Can a Loving God Permit Evil?
By Kurt Simons | May 20, 2007
As noted in The First Coming of Jesus Christ, the existence of evil is a fundamental requirement for spiritual free will. You can’t make choices if you don’t have options to choose between. The question here is how Jesus can allow evil to affect innocent victims. For example, why are totalitarian dictators allowed to torture and slaughter innocent people? Or, why doesn’t Jesus prevent the widespread misuse and perversion of sexual relations? The question of evil is a profound subject, but four main themes from the teachings of the Second Coming can be briefly summarized:
1. In Jesus’ eyes, the suffering of innocent people is wrong and tragic. The fact that He allows this suffering, however, indicates just how essential spiritual free will is to human existence. In the same way we ask people to lay down their lives for their country, so all human beings are asked to endure suffering, if needed, to make our human freedom possible. Spiritual free will is that important. However:
2. Jesus only permits an evil event to occur if something good can come out of it. Most of us can recall a difficult experience that made us a better person. Something bad happened, but struggling through it helped us along our journey to becoming an angel. A step toward eternal happiness is a major return on our “investment” in suffering during the evil event. Keeping that eternal perspective in mind is key. For example, we typically view death as a tragedy. But for the person who died, if they were living by their principles, it is actually just the opposite. It is a rebirth into the surpassingly beautiful experience of heaven. Furthermore, those of us who are left behind have the assurance that we will see that person again one day when we too pass on to the spiritual world. So, seen from a spiritual perspective, death is not as great a tragedy as it may at first appear.
Still, it can be hard to see how Jesus can draw anything good out of the terrible experiences some people go through. But “hard to see” is the key phrase here. We can’t comprehend all the vast, uncountable workings of the universe, from the sub-atomic to the interstellar, mental, and spiritual levels, but we live every second of our lives on the assumption that Jesus can and will run all that. Surely, if He does all that, we can safely trust Him to guide the course of each of our lives toward the greatest eternal spiritual good and happiness - even if it is sometimes difficult for our very finite minds to understand how.
3. Christ taught, “Woe to the world because of offenses! For offenses must come, but woe to that man by whom the offense comes!” (Matthew 18:7). His point was that bad things happen in this world, but that we should focus on our individual responsibility, to be sure we don’t contribute to the “offense” of evil. Life is interactive at all levels, from physical environmental ecology to social and psychological function. “No man is an island.” The people who commit offenses, whether dictators, abusers or just someone who does small mean things, do not become who they are in a vacuum. Like all the rest of us, these people are responsible for their choices. However, we are all affected by the spiritual, social and psychological contexts in which we have lived, and when we see someone committing evil, it is wise to consider the environment that helped shape their evil behavior. In other words, the evil act we see may be, at least in part, the final product of many other peoples’ “offenses” that have influenced the evil-doer. The final decision to do evil remains the spiritual free will choice of the individual involved. However, if we are going to see the true picture, we need to think about what preceding evils done by other people contributed to a final evil “offense.” Most importantly, we need to reflect on our own responsibility in contributing to such evil, even - maybe especially - in what appear to be small and indirect ways that we are tempted to think of as harmless.
Another way to think about this is that evil is not just “out there” in the world. It is also “in here” in our own lives. As noted in Correspondences: The Great Lost Secret and How to Get Evil Out of Your Life, spiritual reality is not somewhere else. Our spirits are in the spiritual world right now and we have complex interactions with angels from heaven and evil spirits from hell at every moment of our lives, although we are normally not directly conscious of them. Our thoughts and motives determine which spirits are closest at any given instant. Thus, when we think or do something good, angels come spiritually near to us, and their influence affects the people around us and the world at large more powerfully than anything we could do by ourselves. Doing evil has the opposite effect, of keeping angels at a distance and bringing evil spirits around us, which reinforces the presence of such spirits with other people that our lives touch.
No one of us is strong enough to change all the sad and terrible “offenses” that come into this world, but we can all try to make our own lives, and the other lives we touch, as good as we can.
4. But what about people who appear to actually enjoy doing cruel and evil things? Is it fair for God to allow them to exercise that enjoyment? The teachings of the Second Coming emphasize that no one can or should try to make judgments about another person’s spiritual state, good or bad. Only Jesus can see into any person’s true motives. His command to “Judge not, that ye be not judged” (Matthew 7:1) referred to this kind of spiritual judgment. When we see someone doing evil, we cannot know for certain whether it arises from a real love of evil. We cannot know if that person is on the way to hell, or operating from a twisted outlook arising from his or her psychological history that conceals a better motive buried deep within. What we can and do know is that the evil actions that a person is doing are harmful, to themselves and to others, and it is our responsibility to judge those actions to maintain order in human society. Halting or preventing such evil actions is the purpose of disciplining a child, sending a criminal to jail, or going to war. However, we are only responsible for controlling evil behavior, and should not (and cannot) judge a perpetrator’s ultimate spiritual motives.
Yet the teachings of the Second Coming are clear that hell is real, and that people go there who deliberately and repeatedly choose to do evil because they have grown to love it. Jesus is always merciful and ready to help us out of any evil habit of thought or action we get ourselves into. But hell exists because people chose it, and still do, because they don’t want to be helped out of their spiritually poisoned outlook. Such a choice should stimulate compassion and regret in our hearts. The innocent victims of such people will only suffer during the brief span of their lives here on earth. After death, the innocent will spend eternity in heaven, where they forget the troubles of this world. “Weeping endures for a night, but joy comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5). But those responsible, if their actions are part of a choice on the way to life in hell into far reaches of eternity, act out a tragedy whose horror is too large for us to fully comprehend. The scale of that tragedy becomes even more stark when set against what might have been, the heavenly sunshine and fulfillment they give up. As Jesus so eloquently said, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, if he lose his own soul?” (Matthew 16:26)
For Further Reading
From the Books of the Second Coming
Angelic Wisdom Concerning The Divine Providence - Jesus runs the universe by a set of laws, on the spiritual level as well as on the physical level. Life does make sense, and He always has a plan for us, no matter what happens, even if we don’t always see or understand it
To Chapter 6: How to Get Evil Out of Your Life