Oxford professor emeritus John Lennox (pictured above) was asked how we can believe in a God of love when there is so much suffering in the world?
Well, that’s the hardest question. My first response is to say I have no simplistic answer. I don’t even like to talk in terms of an answer, but I think there’s a way of thinking about it that can bring peace to many people.
First of all, there are two sources for pain and evil: there’s what we call moral evil, the bad things people do to each other, and then there’s what we sometimes call natural evil – things like coronavirus, tsunamis, earthquakes and cancers – where as far as we know human beings aren’t directly involved, and that can be the more difficult problem.
Secondly, and this is where my heart goes out to people, there are two viewpoints: it’s one thing to be an oncologist treating a patient, and it’s another thing to be a 24-year-old mother who’s just been told she’s got an inoperable tumour. There’s the inner perspective of the sufferer and the outward perception of the observer.
Now the observers will ask the intellectual questions: how can you possibly reconcile this with the good God? Many people have told me straight: “I’ve given up on God when I heard these things.” And I said, “It’s evil, isn’t it?” “Yes,” they say, “it’s absolutely evil.”
But where do you get your concept of evil from? Because one of your fellow atheists is a man called Richard Dawkins, and he follows the atheism down and comes to the conclusion that this universe is just as you’d expect it to be if, at the bottom, there’s no good, no evil and no justice. And I said, “Look, I’m puzzled. If there is no good or evil, why are you talking about problems of evil?”
Now that bothers me because I find myself to be a moral being. I find my heart crying for justice. Are you really telling me there’s no justice? It seems to me it’s no solution getting rid of the very concept that you’re using to judge the problem. But you have got rid of something – you’ve got rid of all hope. Atheism is a hopeless faith.
Now I’m a Christian, and at the heart of Christianity there’s a cross of suffering and extreme pain. And the Christian claim is that the person on the cross was God incarnate. So if that is true, then God does not remain distant from the problem of suffering, but himself became part of it.
But the next big Christian claim is that God’s power raised Jesus from the dead, so that death is not the end. That changes my whole universe. If that’s true, it means that there is hope beyond the grave.
My sister had a 22-year-old daughter, just married to a youth pastor, and she got a brain tumour that killed her. And she held on to her faith in Christ. It was a traumatic period for my sister, but she hasn’t lost her faith either. Why not? Because Jesus brings hope. He doesn’t guarantee a release from the physical process of death but what he does guarantee is a salvation that transcends brain tumours and transcends death. Atheism can’t offer anything like that.
So I don’t give an answer, but I like to point people towards a person I believe is the answer – the Lord Jesus Christ.
