Devil's Advocate | The Problem of Evil

A major opposition today for belief is what is sometimes called 'the problem of evil', which asks this question: "If God is good and all powerful, why is there evil and suffering in the world?" In this sermon, Pastor Joel unpacks in what way Jesus reframes our view of God and his purpose in evil when we find ourselves asking this question.

We must first challenge our assumptions, and ask why Christianity thrived in the past when people faced arguably greater suffering than they do today. We find three things have changed: (1) Our view of God has changed, (2) Our view of pain has changed, and (3) we have divorced the story of the Bible from suffering we face. Jesus brings these three things back together again.

When we look at the Bible and the gospel story, we see the whole narrative is God's answer to the problem of evil. As the gospel recreates us into new creation, God works good from evil. We see that God is indeed all powerful, showcasing a power that is greater than just stopping bad things from happening in the first place by putting broken things back together together into something better than they were before. And we see God is indeed good, because he doesn't just throw things that have been broken by evil into the trash, but lovingly takes them and makes them more beautiful than they were before.