Facebook is a strange animal. As I prepared to hit the hay last night, I came across a Facebook alert mentioning that two of my good friends had replied to a status update from a gentleman whose name I’ve heard from time to time yet have no recollection of meeting. These two friends, aside from being upstanding men of God, are known for their sense of humor…so I clicked the link that Facebook offered and checked out the thread. What I found was an attack on my faith that started as a relatively harmless comment about funeral officiates making it sound like everyone who dies is in heaven, but quickly devolved into some tasteless and offensive swipes at Christians as a whole and a mocking, derogatory view of the Bible and Christian belief in general.
I don’t know if that sort of cancerous misrepresentation of God and His Church was what the original gentleman intended, so I won’t comment on that. Instead, I wanted to respond to a quote that someone threw out—undoubtedly thinking it a clever way to add fuel to the fire while simultaneously stroking her own ego by tossing out a quote from a Greek philosopher—as a means of putting all of us uneducated, backward-thinking Christians in our place. Instead, it only proved two things: first, that she has apparently confused the Greek philosopher Epicurus with the recipe website, Epicurious…to whom she mistakenly credited her quote. Second, she proved that she doesn’t understand scripture and its intent any better than she knows how to spell Epicurus.
Here’s what she posted, though I’ve removed her name for the sake of being gracious:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”-Epicurious
It’s clear that, no matter how intelligent the woman who posted this quote may consider herself, this is just a borrowed philosophy from good ol’ Epicurus, so it’s really him and his double-talk I’m taking to task. I guess the gentleman from Greece just couldn’t be bothered with trying to understand the Torah (if he even read it)…and since he lived before Christ, he didn’t really get the bigger picture. The woman trying to pass off his quotation as her own answer, however, doesn’t really have that excuse.
I’ll address the quote line-by-line, so it’s a bit easier to follow.
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent.”
God is most certainly omnipotent, but He is also just…which is what rubs the world the wrong way. Would you prefer that He had not given us free will? That we should be automatons? It was because of His just nature that He gave us the ability to choose or reject Him. Because of free will, people can commit great evil, and that evil, of course, brings dire consequences. We all have that nature within us. But it was God’s goodness that gave us a way out while also upholding justice. The law of the Old Testament was a diagnostic…a means by which humanity could see it would never measure up to the righteousness of God. It’s very purpose was to show us that, apart from an intervention from God, we could never be holy or righteous. We could never save ourselves from the punishment we are due.
Justice demands a consequence for sin, so His Son (the only One to ever actually fulfill the Law) took our sin (past, present and future) upon Himself, paying the ultimate cost so that justice could be met. Christ traded your sin debt for His own justification so that, when you receive the gift He offers, God will no longer see you in the mire of your sin, but see you as His child. In your free will, however, you can choose to receive that gift or reject it. But in your rejection, you’re choosing to reclaim a debt He already paid…and thus, the consequences of that sin can be expected.
“Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent.”
No. He’s just. He is willing and able, and has already provided for your freedom through His Son. From there, the choice is ours. We either accept or reject Him. That’s really the ultimate choice. People often ask “Why would a loving God send people to hell?” The answer is simple. He doesn’t. People choose hell by rejecting God. His judgment is only about whether or not He knows you. (That’s KNOW, as in, has an intimate relationship with.) To be absent His presence IS hell. To be absent His 
mercy IS torment. To be absent His Living Water IS unquenchable fire. It's your rejection of Him that's the issue. You are, by far, your own worst enemy.
Let me try to give you a good example.
Imagine you are floating in the ocean, tired of fighting to keep your head above water. How long you’ve been adrift, you can’t seem to recall. You spot something in the water and swim toward it. It’s a crate of some kind. It’s taking on water, but it may have something valuable inside…maybe treasure. So you hang onto it. Before long, you’ve amassed a lot of cool stuff that was just left there in the water. You imagine that, should you ever get home, you’ll be rich from everything you’ve found. Swimming, though, is getting nearly impossible from the weight of your “treasure,” and a few times the weight of it pulls you under. You manage to stay alive, but you won’t last long.
Then, you see a boat with a man inside, calling for you to come aboard. “I’m headed to my little village. I’ll take you there,” he offers. “But the crates have to stay behind. They’re from a ship that carried disease. I can’t take that stuff back to my village.” You’re adamant that he relent…that he load your “treasure” and then pull you aboard. He tells you that he cannot allow the disease into his village, but he wants to rescue you. “Just let go of it,” he says, “and climb aboard. You don’t know what’s in the boxes, but I promise they aren’t worth your life.” You curse at him and try to bribe him—promising anything under the sun if he’ll just do what you want—but he will not relent. Ultimately, you choose to stay in the water and hold onto the treasure. He waits. He pleads. You show him just how stubborn you can be, all while trying to appeal to his good nature. Eventually, he has to go. And you let him. You want to be rich. You want what you want and who is he to make you give it up?
When you drown, is it the boatman’s fault? Was it malevolent of him to be unwilling to bring death back to his village? Was it malevolent to offer you a way out? Was it malevolent for the one who owns the boat to be its captain? Or did you want the salvation of the boat without having to let go of the diseased baggage you wanted to bring along?
You see, things like evil and sorrow have nothing to do with God’s willingness and everything to do with yours. Does receiving His gift of salvation eradicate sorrow from your life? No. Does evil grind to a halt? No. Does your sinful nature just disappear when you give up everything and climb in the boat? No. But there’s freedom from the eternal consequences of your own self-destruction. You only have to die to yourself and let Him do the living through you.
You see, if God is Truth, then everything that isn't Him or of Him is a lie. If He is Life, then every road not leading to Him is leading to death. If He is Love, nothing but His love is strong enough to last. So, by rejecting God, we become separated from truth, from real love and, ultimately, from real life. Everything else is just something we’ve settled for—a cheap facsimile we try and take some comfort in so that we don’t have to relent—so we don’t have to answer to anyone else.
So God is able and willing, but people don’t want to let go of what they’re clinging to in spite of the fact that it’s killing them. He didn’t reject you. The Bible tells us that it’s His desire that none should perish…but the choice has been left to you and you’re holding fast to creation instead of the Creator, not realizing that only in Him does it all come together and make sense. That’s what He wants for you.
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Is He both able and willing? The whence cometh evil?
This we covered. If God is, by His very nature, the ultimate good then everything that is not of Him is evil. We are born broken because of sin. We rebel. We want what we want and damn the consequences. But He woos us like a lover to draw near to Him…to give up our brokenness for His perfection—to die to ourselves and be reborn a new creation. So evil is just His absence. The more we close our ears to His call, the more deaf we become to Truth. The more we turn from Him, the more wicked the world becomes.
Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?
Scripture assures us that God is both willing and able to prevent evil. But the more we choose to reject Him, the less room we allow Him to work in our lives. “But He’s God. If He wanted to prevent evil, He should just do it,” you say? Well, then that brings us back to my original question: what becomes of free will? The only way to truly prevent evil would be to either prevent humanity from existing at all or to enslave us to His will and leave us no choice in the matter. Is a man who is forced to do the right thing a righteous man?
Because He is God, He has justly given us the right to choose Him or reject Him. If you want to lay blame for all the evil in the world, you don’t have to go very far. Set that blame at your own feet. We’re all guilty. We’ve all failed. But your failure can be replaced by His grace and sanctification if you’re willing to let go of who you were to become who He’s calling you to be. Once you know that love—once you’ve accepted that you are your own worst enemy—your perspective will change, not because you have some new set of rules to live by…but because the closer you draw to Him the less this broken place holds for you.
The Christian faith is not a philosophy to live your life by or a set of obligations and observances you have to meet to get a ticket to heaven. It is a living connection and Way to a Creator whose word can reveal to you how creation really works, leading you to the Truth of all that is and all that will ever be and the Life that is stronger than the death we’re walking in.
J
