What is theodicy?

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.

C.C. — After all, there is the existence of sin, and we must justify God in permitting sin to come in.

What a vindication of the Eternal Majesty from the reproach that the allowed existence of evil would otherwise be.

Our third passage is Psalm 144:3-6: "Lord, what is man, that Thou takest knowledge of him? Or the son of man, that Thou makest account of him? Man is like to vanity: his days are as a shadow that passes away. Bow Thy heavens, O Lord, and come down; touch the mountains, and they shall smoke. Cast forth lightning, and scatter them: shoot out Thine arrows and destroy them." In these verses David has his enemies before his mind. He was God's Anointed, known and owned as such years before he sat on Israel's throne (2 Sam. 23:17; 2 Sam. 24:20); yet there were never wanting enemies, both before and after his accession, who did their best to frustrate the purposes of God concerning him. He speaks of these in Psalm 144. Filled with thoughts of the resistless power of God, he marvels that He should permit man who is like to vanity to so constantly fling himself across His path, and seek to obstruct Him in the accomplishment of His counsels. He follows this up with the fervent appeal: "Bow Thy heavens, O Lord, and come down … Cast forth lightning, and scatter them." It is the old problem of God's permission of evil. This has perplexed the godly in every age. The wicked triumph, and the righteous suffer; the plans and purposes of the one are carried through to a successful issue, while those of the other too often meet with disappointment and discomfiture. God could so easily order it all otherwise, yet He does not act! Heaven is silent. Who has not felt the strain and trial of this!

Here let us turn to Rev. 10. A mighty angel is seen coming down out of heaven, clothed with a cloud, having a rainbow upon his head, his face as the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire. Surely this is God's Christ. With one foot upon the sea and the other upon the earth, he lifts up his hand to heaven, and swears by Him that lives for ever and ever, that there shall be no longer delay, " but in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God shall be finished, according to the good tidings which He has declared to His servants the prophets" (R.V.) "The mystery of God," i.e., the mystery of His non-intervention, of His permission of evil, will then be cleared up. The heavens will no longer be silent, but opened. The rightful Lord of all will come forth, and take His rights; evil shall be dethroned, and righteousness will be exalted in peace. Every riddle will then be explained; every difficult problem will be solved; and we shall see that, spite of all appearances, no purpose of God has really been hindered by the enemy; but that, on the contrary, God has been silently working out to a completion all His counsels of grace, for His own glory, and for the blessing of men. In the midst of wreck and ruin all around us, this thought is full of comfort and hope to the exercised soul.

Behind all this there lay the question of man's spirit-being, which constituted him a responsible moral agent. As such, he comes immediately under obligation and fails. In that act he touched the question of good and evil already raging in the creation, and, becoming a sinner, brought himself immediately amenable to the holy government of God. The rights of God are attacked, and His supreme majesty trampled in the dust by the presence of sin. For its presence one of two reasons may be given. It is either permitted for some wise purpose on the part of God, or it is there at His expense, and in defiance of His authority. The latter is unthinkable, as it would dethrone God and bring in eternal chaos. It is inconceivable that God could be frustrated in His creation; hence we may see that sin is permitted for His own wise ends. It serves God; all things must indeed serve Him, as all scripture entitles us to say. Satan, sin, death and hell must obey Him. The Almighty One is supreme and there cannot be two supremes. All nature, history, experience, our life, existence upon the earth, the interventions of God in the race, — and above all the incarnation, death, resurrection and ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ, — all prove the supremacy, the glorious and eternal supremacy, of our God.

There is only one answer to be given. God is not the author of evil, but He has allowed sin for His own glory. He did not create creatures who were incapable of choosing between good and evil, else He would have created mere machines—infinitely more wonderful than motor cars and aeroplanes, but yet on the same level.

But again we ask, Why did God leave moral evil a possibility? Or, in other words, why permit the entrance of sin? Could He not have created a being, which could not fall? One who could only do what was good and right?

The answer is plain. Because, if He would create a glorious creature — man, after His own image, and in His likeness, free to choose either good or evil, and not a creature governed by a mere chain of instinct, as the birds and beasts around him — He must leave the entrance to him of evil, a possibility, though not a necessity.

When God made man, He did not make him as he is, any more than the world as it is. He made everything good, but He was not pleased to put forth His power to keep everything good. He was pleased to put the creature to the proof. He tried the creature in two great spheres — above and below. The angels fell before man; and the chief of those that fell above is the great tempter. No man can account for sin, for the ruin of the world, in any other way than Scripture reveals. Many a man has essayed to do so. The brightest wits and the greatest minds have attempted it; but they have never conceived anything that was not rubbish when they have not followed the word of God. Some have endeavoured to account for sin by supposing that there are two Gods — a good one and a bad one; because there are evidences of goodness all around us, and there are too plainly the evidences of badness. This hypothesis, I need not stay to show, is sheer folly. There is but one who is Almighty; and man cannot get rid of the consciousness of One — not merely one thing but One Being — One who has power and will and purpose, One who has affections no less than mind, but who, nevertheless, subjects the creatures that He made to a moral probation. If He kept everything from falling, there could be no such trial at all. All would be mechanical or chemical; and the wonderful scene of the conflict of good and evil — of good wrought by His grace in the heart of man, and rising above Satan's power and wiles of evil — would be quite lost. What is still more important, the active display of love and righteousness on God's part, of moral qualities reproduced in repentant believing man, would be completely destroyed, if it were merely divine power so keeping the creature that there could be no failure.

But evil never came from God — only from the creature once innocent, now fallen, that kept not his first estate, but chose to do his own will and have his own way. An angel did this first. Man was misled by him who, straying and exalting himself, beguiled others both in heaven and on earth. That creature is called Satan — the Devil. All efforts to get rid of this fact have proved utterly vain, so much so that the boasted lights of antiquity fell consequently into one or other of these notions: either that God is everything, which denies sin; or, secondly, that there is no such being as God at all; while both cases led to worshipping ever so many false gods. Witness now the two greatest philosophers of Greece who have exercised perhaps the largest and most enduring influence over civilised men outside the Bible — the one the head of Pantheism, the other of Atheism. There is what man's thought ends in when it is logically carried out. Man in his fallen estate may reason God away; yet he excludes God, not from his conscience, but in his reason; for at the bottom of the man's heart who does so there is the uneasy feeling that what he sees around him did not grow like a potato — least of all, he himself and his fellows. He feels that, though fallen, he is a moral being who will have to give an account of his action; and to whom but to God — the One who made him and all things?

God did not make man in the condition in which he is now; He did not throw the world into its moral confusion, not to speak of its physical misery. He that can conceive a divine being to have made man as he is, and the world as it is, must have the notion of a demon, an Ahriman, instead of the true God. That infinite power should create man to be the victim of such sorrow, to have his heart distracted with varied, intense, and ceaseless misery — to have, according to the word of God itself, evil inbred in his very nature (a doctrine enforced by the facts of every day), he that could conceive God to have so made man in such a world has the least worthy notion of God that even Rationalism could conceive. The word of God alone supplies the key, and explains this otherwise inscrutable riddle. According to that word He made man upright; the world and every creature in it He formed good; but man departed from God, and lost Him morally. No wonder, if foundations are out of course — God left and man fallen through self-exalting rebellion, that there should be misery; for the only possible spring of happiness is in the communion of God with His creatures. Sin necessarily destroys it; and man having lost Him becomes a prey to all the evil that the enemy of God can bring into the world, more deeply and if possible irreparably, to sever man from God. This is the account of the Scriptures, and there is none other that can compete with it or explain all, so as either to justify God or to clear up the state of man. To make God Himself the author of man's moral evil is heinous wickedness, and man's conscience knows it, even when he might wish it to excuse himself. Here then at the outset the immense and singular value of God's word comes in; and upon this too a remark of general import may be seasonable.

There is ample light as to the origin and entrance of evil into this world, and with that we have been dealing. Scripture also indicates that it was through pride that sin found a place originally with the devil (1 Tim. 3:6), and under the title "King of Tyre" we appear to get a description of Satan's original glory and irremediable fall in Ezekiel 28:11-19. But as to why God, knowing all that would ultimately be involved, ever created Satan or man, and why He permitted evil to ever invade any part of His fair creation, Scripture is silent, and we know nothing.

After all, these are matters which lie beyond the reach of finite minds. Is it likely that God would reveal to us such secrets of His high and eternal counsels as must lie on the plane of infinity? If He did, should we be any the wiser? No! It is well for us to call a halt here and say with the Psalmist, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me: it is high, I cannot attain to it" (Ps. 139:6).