What is the problem of good?

It declares that God is love. Creation presents Him as infinite in wisdom and power, but we see evil rampant around us, and man beneath its merciless hoof. There are traces of His goodness everywhere; and in the midst of its unutterable woes, gladness of heart visits the most unfortunate. But the fact that the griefs of the human race are so freely interspersed with innumerable joys, only makes the puzzle of man’s existence all the more intricate and difficult of solution. If it were all evil one would be in measure justified in attributing the creation to the caprice of a demon, and were it all good the aspersion of the true character of God would be unpardonable, but to find these two principles everywhere, and mixed together in a struggling and hopeless mêlée, with evil ever apparently triumphant, is bewildering to the finite mind.

It declares that God is love. Creation presents Him as infinite in wisdom and power, but we see evil rampant around us, and man beneath its merciless hoof. There are traces of His goodness everywhere; and in the midst of its unutterable woes, gladness of heart visits the most unfortunate. But the fact that the griefs of the human race are so freely interspersed with innumerable joys, only makes the puzzle of man's existence all the more intricate and difficult of solution. If it were all evil one would be in measure justified in attributing the creation to the caprice of a demon, and were it all good the aspersion of the true character of God would be unpardonable; but to find these two principles everywhere, and mixed together in a struggling and hopeless mêlée, with evil ever apparently triumphant, is bewildering to the finite mind.

The problem handled in the book is the moral government of God: how to conciliate His righteousness with the sufferings, and even extreme sufferings, of a just and godly man? how to understand the permission of evil, in its worst form of malignant persecution, with His own good, and this before and apart from His revelation in Christ and by redemption? The books of Moses prepare the way for His government of a people, His own elect Israel, where all was to be manifest and a testimony before the world. Here it is His dealings with a soul before the true light shone, and the veil was rent, and sin condemned in the cross, along with the expression of exercises of heart and conscience under God's dealings. Now that we are reconciled to God by Christ's death and know ourselves to be in Christ before God, there is or ought to be a wholly new experience. But it is of the deepest interest and profit to see how the believer was enabled, not merely to walk uprightly when things were prosperous in an evil world but to confide in God spite of adversity and crushing affliction, and not only to submit to His will as chastening but to measure and abhor himself in dust and ashes before God. The beginning teaches that not Satan but God is the source of the action, the middle that He only and effectually carries forward the true lesson for the soul, the end that He is exceeding pitiful and of tender mercy. A whole long book devoted to the exercises of a soul in suffering, and he a Gentile, and this in the canon of the Jewish scriptures from the first! But it is not yet what some call the "mystery of the cross:" this was reserved for Christ.

In this we see not only the wisdom of God but His mercy also. Directly sin entered the world a baffling problem presented itself in the slaying of righteous Abel. Why should the godly suffer? If a man's life really pleases God, why should that pleasure not be indicated by special good being his in this life? There is, of course, the alternative problem Why should the ungodly prosper) — and this is dealt with in Psalm 73. But long before the days of the Psalmists God saw fit in His mercy to solve the enigma for us by permitting extreme disaster to come upon Job, and then causing the story to be recorded and preserved in an inspired writing. The solution was given as soon as "the oracles of God" began to appear.

145 First see the blessed character in which the Lord visits the world. Certain truths may be learned elsewhere, such as creation and providence, but not judgment in righteousness, at least not until the end, and then it will be learned in the destruction of the wicked. This was what Job found so hard to understand — how those who did evil prospered, whilst the righteous were persecuted. This is just because the time of judgment is not come; the time of mercy is now going on, and we cannot have mercy and judgment at once. So all is a riddle now. There is too much of badness for man to be able to think that things are of God; and too much of goodness, even amidst all the ruin and wretchedness, for him to see how it is not of God. Men try to get over it, and to be indifferent to it; but there is too much even for selfishness itself not to see it. However favourable exterior circumstances may, for a few, partially remedy things, we must see that, taken as a whole, there is but ruin and wretchedness in the world.

But when Christ comes, I find perfect goodness in the midst of this scene of confusion, where there is the power of evil and suffering and sorrow. It is quite another thing from all that went before, though prophets and the like testified of it; but what I see in Christ is God Himself manifesting goodness — of course manifesting men's hearts too — in the midst of evil and sorrow, and profiting by them to do it, and that in order to win men's hearts back to Himself. Government there is, and judgment there will be: that is the necessity of God's nature, for God cannot allow evil to go on for ever; but Christ's coming was to get back man's confidence in God by the presentation of goodness.

We see this instinctive sense, if one may so call it, of God's interest in human concerns clouded over for the time being in a very remarkable scripture, Ps. 73. The great problem of history, the apparent dominance of evil, its seeming success in the world, and its counterpart — the subservience, and to all appearance the adversity attaching to a righteous course — is there come up for solution. "I was envious at the foolish when I saw the prosperity of the wicked," proceeds the Psalmist, recounting his experience. It is a common experience. We all know it well. Hard thoughts and perplexing doubts chase one another through the despondent mind. Sin, pride, and violence are so apparently successful, His own people so poor, oppressed, despised, tried. These on the one hand "are not in trouble as other men, neither are they plagued like other men. Therefore pride compasseth them about as a chain; violence covereth them as a garment. Their eyes stand out with fatness; they have more than heart could wish."

But there was something still more perplexing, for there were times in the lives of the most honoured servants and saints, when they were suffering, and being made to pass through the deepest trials when the wicked were prospering, and at their ease. This was, to the righteous, most baffling. The patriarch Job, who was perhaps the greatest sufferer in the Old Testament — but there were many others (James 5:10-11) — had to say: "Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power? Their seed is established in their sight with them, and their offspring before their eyes. Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of God upon them. …" (See Job 21:7-13). So also with David "I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree" (Psalm 37:35). Such things these men could not reconcile with the justice of God's moral government. In His revealed will, the order seemed to be joy and happiness for the good, but sorrow and suffering for the evil. The law had laid this down very fully and clearly, and it had been said, "He that will love life and see good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil, and do good; let him seek peace, and ensue it" (1 Peter 3:10-11; also Psalm 34:12). Yet those who sought to live according to this were kept in suffering. Think of a man like Job of whom Jehovah could say to Satan, "Hast thou considered My servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth," yet his suffering were prodigious. It is just at this point that we may learn the wonders of God's wisdom, and see the richest and choicest of His dealings with His children in the world. The wicked may prosper for a brief season, as we have seen, but in a moment their candle goes out, and then for them it is the blackness of darkness for eternity. The righteous may suffer in a world where sin and death are permitted, but, this, in the hand of a Father, is educative in view of forming the character, and making them morally Christ like in view of future glory.

The secret of God, in the knowledge of which faith finds a solution of the perplexing and distressful riddle of human affairs, is not to be unravelled by a study of facts, nor evolved from an extended experience of God's apparent dealings as the Governor of the world. He is, indeed, the Judge and Ruler of all. But although power is His alone, and He is the only and the righteous God, yet to the mind of one who judges the progress of events, and estimates the actual condition of human society by the light of Divine truth, nothing is more abidingly manifest than the apparent inversion of the known and eternal principles of Divine government which the world everywhere presents. "The tabernacles of robbers prosper, and they that provoke God are secure" (Job 12:6). The present impunity of evil-doers, and the continual depression and frequent persecution of truth in the persons of its servants, have at all times served to exercise the faith and patience of God's saints (Jer. 12:1; Hab. 1:1-4).

Zophar had spoken of the wicked being cut off, but Job has questions now that Zophar does not even attempt to answer. Sometimes wicked men are cut off, but some wicked men live and become old and become mighty in power above others (v.7). Why? Their children often get along well with hardly a setback (v.8). They seem to have nothing to fear and the discipline of God's government seems not to apply to them (v.9). "Their bull breeds without failure; their cow calves without miscarriage" (v.10), while often the righteous find just the opposite experience. Their children enjoy life with its music and dancing, spending their days in wealth, "and in a moment go down to the grave" (vv.11-12). In other words, they know nothing of the painful experiences of Job all through their life, then die without suffering. Asaph observed this also, as he records in Psalm 73:3-9, and added in verses 16-17, "It was too painful for me - until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I understood their end." He learned that God's accounts are not settled in this life: there is a future to be considered.

Job said, as many persons in the world today are saying, Why is it that so many terrible things are allowed to happen to some men? Why is there so much suffering and misery? and why is it that the best people are often the greatest sufferers? Not merely the "down-and-outs," who have squandered their very lives in riot and pleasure, but good persons, pious people, servants of God, are full of afflictions. Many do not know even a day's freedom from anxiety and pain.