Video Transcript: Lesson 23

Dr. Clouser - This brings us up to the Free Will defense. And I think that there's  an element of truth in this, but that it ultimately fails also. And here's why, it's true that God gave people free will. It's true that they can choose to do evil as well as good, but it's also true that it's possible to prevent others from suffering from the  evil choices that people make. So as I said, if, if you get an automatic rifle and  go to a shopping mall determined to kill as many people as you can that  afternoon, God could certainly stop you without taking away your free will, the  gun could jam. You could just faint when you went to shoot. They're all short, so  you think about that, you say, Well, look, you know, somebody like Hitler had  free will. He caused the death of 60 million people World War II. God could have had Hitler trip and fall on the stairs and break his neck. Yeah, he could have had Stalin choke on a fish bone.  

Bob Zomermaand - And there's times when I wish that it happened.  

Dr. Clouser - Yes, sure, yeah, so without in, without infringing on anyone's free  will. I mean, killing him doesn't take doesn't revoke free will. They still are free to  choose this or that you just protect the people that are would otherwise have  suffered from the evil Free Will undeservedly, yes. Undeservedly, yeah, yeah.  So I, ultimately, I don't think the Free Will defense works either. And there's  something else, and this really complicates it, if you take seriously what the  prophet Isaiah has to say. He quotes God as saying, I the LORD, create light, I  create darkness, I create blessing, I create disaster, I the Lord, do all these  things. So God takes the responsibility for the undeserved suffering. He says,  yes, that comes from me, and that,  

Bob Zomermaand - and then, and then we could go on say, but that's the Old  Testament.  

Dr. Clouser - Well, it's the same God, yeah, and the same God that said that is  the is the God who's sustaining the world at the time of the New Testament, who comes incarnate in Christ and shares our suffering. But the suffering still  happens in  

Bob Zomermaand - the suffering of Jesus could be the ultimate example of  undeserved  

Dr. Clouser - Oh, absolutely, yes. But you remember that there's this incident  where the disciples say to Jesus over in a town of Siloam, last week, a building  collapsed and killed all these people. Were they more wicked than everybody  else? And Jesus says, No, you can't say that. And he doesn't give any excuses  why it happened. And disciples don't say, Well, why did God let that happen? 

And maybe they're a little intimidated, I don't know but, but Jesus clearly rules  that out that, no, the disasters don't all befall people because they deserve it. It's not true. You can't draw that conclusion. And so that tightens our scope on this  net.  

Bob Zomermaand - Now this, this question gets too far out of that way. When  there's the man born blind, and the disciples say, Who sinned, that's right, his  man or his father, that's right, or is that they're assuming the same thing? Yeah,  he's suffering. Who caused it?  

Dr. Clouser - That's right. And the assumption behind it is that God could only do this if somebody deserved it. That's the assumption God has all perfections and  only perfections, and he can only allow someone to suffer if they deserve it. So  somehow they have to deserve it. And the great counterbalance that is the  denial of that assumption is the book of Job. Yeah. Okay, so I briefly want to  explain sure what the book of Job has to say about this. If you read it, this will be familiar to you. If you haven't read it. Here's a little summary. Job is a rich man  because he's been very good. He treats other his workers well. He doesn't cheat anybody. He doesn't plot behind people's backs. He's become so wealthy that,  as each of his children marry, he gives them a ranch as a wedding. He's pretty  wealthy, yeah, okay, and, and now he's tested. His faith is tested. He's a faithful  believer. He loves God. And now things begin to go wrong, and they go really  wrong. I mean, his children are killed, some of them by a tornado. His his his  finances collapse. He loses his ranch, his wife leaves him, and finally, he breaks  out of a terrible disease, and he has to go live in the valley of the lepers. And it.  Just about everything is going wrong, that can go wrong. And his three friends  from the country club come and try to cheer him up. And that what they have to  say is, well, now you must have done something. If you just fess up, you admit  what you did, God, God will take restore you. And he says, No, I didn't do  anything. Deserve this? And they say, well, that's slander against God. God can't do something unjust, okay?  

Bob Zomermaand - And so they proceed, as I was taught it, they proceed to  give page after page of sound theology, but it's wrong. So okay, yeah, yeah,  wrong, but yeah, that's right.  

Dr. Clouser - And here's, here's some of the things they say. First of all, Job  says, I wish I had never been born. That's okay, but, but he adds, it would have  been better if I had never been born. Now that says more than I wish that says  God made a mistake, and God's going to take him up on that one. For that one,  God appears at the end of the story, after the he, Job and his friends go back  and forth, and they keep saying, you must have done it. God's just he couldn't. 

He couldn't let this happen to you. And Job says, but he does. He the righteous  he let suffer while the wicked prosper. Okay, at the end, then God appears, and  he says to Job, you think you know better than I do what should have  happened?  

Bob Zomermaand - What is a very difficult thing for any of us to hear?  

Dr. Clouser - Yeah, yeah, it is. God says, If you're so smart, tell me how to make  stars. Job says, Well, I made a mistake. I repent. I'm sorry I ever said that. I  spoke out of ignorance. He says, I ask you to instruct me I take back what I said  and I repent. That's preliminary to the real point, though, here's what happens.  God turns to Job's friends and says, I'm furious with you for not telling me, telling the truth about me as Job did. Yeah, what Job says Is he lets the wicked, the  righteous suffer, the wicked prosper, and God says you guys lied about me  because you've denied that. God takes it on, just as in Isaiah, he says, Yes, I do  do this. And he orders Job's friends out of his sight, go away, offer sacrifice, ask  to be forgiven, and even then I won't forgive you till Job prays for you.  

Bob Zomermaand - So Job has to pray for them. Is read who've been telling  him, Well, what a terrible guy he is, right?  

Dr. Clouser - So what is it that Job had said that was right that the friends had  been denying? Well, it's exactly this. They assumed that because God is  righteous, he was obliged to prevent anything unrighteous. That means God is  just, nothing unjust can happen to those who believe in God. God's going to  prevent that. That would be part of being just. In other words, they have this  view of God. I think that's the problem here. That's premise one that's not true.  That's not a biblical view of God. The biblical view of God is that he's the one  who has created the laws of justice and morality so they wouldn't have to bind  him at all. Now he has freely bound himself to some of them in making  covenantal promises to human beings, and we have every right to hold him for  what he's promised and no right to condemn Him for what He hasn't promised. I  think that's the point. We can't say wholesale. He's perfect in such a way that it  requires him to be as good as possible to as many people as possible. He does  not promise that anywhere, ever. He doesn't even promise those who believe in  Him and love Him and serve Him will therefore never suffer evil.  

Bob Zomermaand - Just going with the book of Job. In the opening chapters, we have Hasatan, the accuser That's right, coming to before the Lord, and he'd  been wandering to and fro in the earth, and the Lord says, Have you considered my servant Job? Nobody like him. But does Job serve God for nothing? Yeah,  and, and I think as I read through the book of Job, the answer God wants us to 

come to is that Job serves God for the sake of serving God. Yes, Job not  because he's gotten rich, because that's right, and so on.  

Dr. Clouser - That's right, but and Job would doesn't hesitate about that, even in  the middle of all these disasters that befall him. He knows God's still in charge of the world, but he's just puzzled, why you do this. Why are you doing it? But the  problem here with what Job's friends advised? It is precisely this. They insisted  that if God himself is just in all his dealings with humans, then we may conclude  that he is obliged to see to it that no injustice can befall them from any other  source. But what I said about these other excuses that could have prevented it,  yeah, they saw God as compelled by ideal justice, rather than his justice being a gracious promise he had been under no compulsion to make, and he sets the  limits to to the respects in which he treats his his own people.  

Bob Zomermaand - You know that the word compelled in there? I think, yeah,  the key one God has to function this way, because we say  

Dr. Clouser - That's right. They saw His justice as a perfection, that he is  compelled to conform to a part of his own nature, rather than he created the  laws of logic. He created the laws of morality, created laws of justice, all the  things that he has built into the universe, and he isn't subject to them, except as  he freely takes on being subject to them, as when he makes a covenant or  promise that it's wrong for him to break it. It's wrong for God to as much as it is  for us, but God never promised no undeserved suffering to those who love me.  And so I think it's premise one, that's the fault here. It's the idea of God which is  at fault in the argument, and is the followers of friends of Job who try to cheer  him up by saying, God's perfect and you're not, are at fault, for they have the  same faulty fear with God. God has to conform the laws of if it's unjust for us to  do something, it must be for him unjust not to prevent the reverse of it. And, and  that's not true.  

Bob Zomermaand - And one of the things that that I guess I in my study of Job  and, and things what I can come to the point of is where we're shown, in chapter one and two, that there is this alien being that is the accuser.  

Dr. Clouser - Yeah, it is the Yes. That's right, in the prologue.

Bob Zomermaand - All too often, what how we experience undeserved suffering  is that God is our accuser, and we think God is accusing us of having done  something wrong, because otherwise, why would this matter? And that's to  disabuse us of that mistake. Yeah, but then we really take up the position of the  friend, yes, that's right. It's easy to fall in. And then you start looking through 

your life trying to feel, what did I do wrong? What did I do wrong?  

Dr. Clouser - The answer may be, in this respect, nothing, not this time. So this  goes back to an older view of God that combines the being of God with Plato's  perfections. It comes from the City of God Book Three, Augustine says that  Platonists had it right. There are these perfections. And Plato calls the highest  perfection the God and Father of all things, and that's our God. He puts the two  together. Scripture never speaks of God's having perfections. And the earlier  theology, the Greek Orthodox theology of the Cappadocians, for example, Basil  of Caesarea says, if there are perfections, God created them, whereas this view  is saying, no, that's just what God is. So he can't help it, and he's bound by them to be behaved the way he is. Job may have free will, but God doesn't on this  too. That has to do with nature, compels him to do, and then we get to tell God if he's acting the way he's supposed to. That's right, yeah, that's the bigger  mistake that follows. So I think that this book does give us the answer, the reply,  to the problem of evil, and it does not show that God is wicked or evil. It doesn't  show that God isn't good. It doesn't show that God isn't powerful. God's  goodness and His power are exactly whatever he wishes them to be. And he  promises, he makes promises to us that we may hold him to he is good to us in  the sense that He offers us redemption and everlasting life, not in the sense that nothing bad will ever happen. As I said before, if one little girl, one time fell and  skinned her knee, if this argument's correct, there's no God. That's not what  God's promising. And no no ancient Jew who lived in Israel ever would have  thought that they would have fallen on the ground laughing at laughing at some  if you suffer at all, then there's no God. We do nothing but suffer. Are you kidding me? It's a wholly mistaken argument from beginning to end. It has the wrong  god, and it says he can't do this when. And in Isaiah, God says, I create disaster. So the New Testament, I think, adds something to this, because in the New  Testament, the God of the Old Testament comes incarnate and lives among us  and suffers with us. And the New Testament contains the statements about our  suffering. And it goes like this. I've written down, can't trust my memory. You  know, when you get old, you can't do that. Yeah, I know. Here is, for example,  Paul says in Colossians 1 our sufferings supplement the sufferings of Christ. We were to think of them as carrying on. There's nothing lacking in the sufferings of  Christ to have reconciled the human race to God, but we carry on in that same  in that same vein. And again, Peter says that there's no suffering. It's even  worthy to be compared to the glory that will be revealed to us. That's the only,  only way it deals with the problem. So if you want to say, Well, wait a minute,  then there's a kind of problem of evil that still remains. Yes, God wasn't under  obligations. This doesn't show God that he didn't take on, that he didn't break  any promises he had made. He still took care of Job and Job is still his people.  But why does God let that happen? He does let undeserved suffering happen. 

So we still haven't answered. Why does he do that? Maybe he's not wicked for  having done it. But here's another way to put it, if God's going to make heaven  at the end and bring everyone in where there's no sin, sickness, sorrow, death,  why didn't you start with that? Why ask that question? Why do we have to  

suffer? It seems to me, once again, Eastern Church has the right sort of reply to  that, and the answer to that is, there is no answer. We don't know. It's this is  what the Eastern theologians called mystery. They invented that. They invented  that word. We used to mean something that puzzles us, and if we're smart  enough, we can figure it out. In theology, it meant it makes sense to ask, but to  which there is no answer. It's not if we were smart enough, we could find it.  There isn't any there's no answer. Calvin puts it, whenever anybody asks for a  reason beyond that, it's the will of God. They insult God. There is no nothing  beyond that. That's the ultimate limit to any explanation. It's the will of God. Then that's the end. You can't go beyond that. And that's that's the same as the  Eastern reply. It's just we don't know. We just don't know. But it's the way things  are. Yeah, so I guess that leaves somebody with a with two options. I wish you  had made this world different from what you did, and so I'm mad. Or, well, this is your world. You promised take care of me and then help me to serve you while I  live in it. Yeah, right. There's a hymn we have in our hymnal and the words of  our William Cooper, English hymnist, Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, but  trust Him for His grace. Behind a frowning Providence, he hides a smiling face,  blind unbelief is sure to error and scan his work in vain. God is his own  interpreter, and he will make it plain. And he was an individual who struggled,  yes, deeply, yes. So it was suffering. That's right, that's right. So my conclusion  from all of this is that this objection to belief in God fails too. God admits that he  lets the undeserved suffering occur, and that he causes disaster at times, and  we don't know why, and that doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with the  goodness that he offers us. Yeah, which is rock firm and will and says and you'll  never be disappointed. Yeah, yeah, so that's my reply to the problem of evil.