Where Is God in a World Filled with Evil? (Candid Ep. 286)

If God is good and all-powerful, why does evil persist? In this thought-provoking interview, Jonathan Youssef and special guest Collin Hansen, editor-in-chief of The Gospel Coalition and executive director of The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, tackle one of humanity’s age-old questions.

This conversation is condensed and adapted from episode 286 of Candid Conversations with Jonathan Youssef. Be sure to listen to Collin Hansen’s interview in its entirety. Subscribe today on your favorite podcast platform or listen online at LTW.org/Candid.

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Jonathan: You really engage with some of the different philosophical attempts to answer the question of suffering, so break down the argument for us.

Collin Hansen: The essential question is Can we sit in judgment of God for the evil He allows? Elie Wiesel, [author of Night], going through the absolutely horrific experience of the concentration camps, says you cannot reconcile the reality of God with what was happening. He said, “God seems silent. We are crying out, ‘This is not okay,’ but God is nowhere to be found.” So is God actually silent, or is He testifying to the injustice of this through people like Elie Wiesel, who’s made in the image of God, and the rest of us who cry out? Because after all, Jonathan, we’re the only created beings who have that sense of justice. This is part of what it means to be made in the image of God.

What does it mean for us to judge God morally? Does He have to account Himself to us? When you work through Isaiah 52-53, other prophecies, and the testimony of Christ Himself, the consistent theme is that God, Jesus specifically in this case, is silent before His killers, silent before His accusers, but what is He doing? He’s offering Himself as a sacrifice for sin and ultimately as a way of being able to reconcile us with His Father. So He may be silent, but He offers us something even better than an answer, which is Himself.

Jonathan: This is also the story of the exodus, right? “Where is our covenant God who made all these promises to our patriarchs?” And what did He do? He showed up, which is kind of the shadow of the Christ through Moses.

Collin Hansen: But He does show up in His timing, and that’s part of what’s so difficult for us to handle. We want Him to act on our terms. No matter where you are in human history, we’re still in the same basic mode of waiting on the Lord. You cope in this life by trusting in God and practicing patience knowing that in the end, because of who we know Him to be in His character from the exodus, the exile, the cross, and ultimately the resurrection, that He’s trustworthy even if He doesn’t work on our timeline.

Jonathan: You have written that morality shifted after World War II and Hitler became a new moral benchmark. Unpack that idea for us and how that has shaped our modern understanding of good and evil.

Collin Hansen: If you’re having an evangelistic conversation with somebody today, you might use the question, “Could you go to heaven today? Do you deserve to go to heaven today?” As Christians we want them to say, “I don’t deserve to go to heaven, but by the blood of Christ . . .” but that’s not how most people answer. Most people answer, “I would say that I was a pretty good person. I tried pretty hard. . . . I wasn’t as bad as Hitler.” That’s the way we’ve redefined evil, to be something that happens only in these tremendously terrible situations like the Holocaust, not something that’s inside each of our hearts.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn suffered as a Christian in the Gulag Archipelago, terrible death camps and work camps in the Soviet Union throughout the twentieth century. It was his observation that has been most salient: “The line of good and evil does not pass between me and you, but inside every one of our human hearts.” That is a very Christian impulse. That does not mean that inside of us is a madman who’s going to murder 6 million Jews, but it does mean that, as Jesus was saying in the Sermon on the Mount, we have all acted murderously through our thoughts toward other people that we hate. We have a sin nature that can only be dealt with by the blood of the cross, the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

One of the most predominant temptations for Christians is to believe our culture is the only evil thing that we fight against—that it’s not the thing that affects us and steers us away from Biblical obedience. All of us stand condemned apart from the grace of God—condemned by that moral standard laid out by Jesus [in His Sermon on the Mount].

Jonathan: What are some of the modern cultural narratives about justice and suffering that you think Christians need to be aware of as they engage with seekers and skeptics?

Collin Hansen: One of the most predominant related to suffering is especially afflicting younger people: If something is hard, it must be wrong. Generally speaking, it’s very hard to understand the human experience, the Biblical narrative, and discipleship if you see suffering as something that God always wants to deliver you from rather than deliver you through. Delivering you through suffering is certainly the method of the cross. It’s the method of the exodus. Christ is going to come back to judge and renew all things, but until then, it’s thorns and thistles—not in all ways at all times, but by the grace of God, the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, and He is, even now, renewing creation.

Jonathan: What do we do here? We’ve got the problem of evil; we’ve got people riddled with anxiety because they can’t control their environments.

Collin Hansen: Earlier generations did not ask as many questions about the problem of evil as we do. In the Bible they do, but generally speaking, we have a bigger problem with it in modernity because we believe we can control things technologically and that the self is at the center of all things. Therefore, [we think] we are more moral than God; we know more about how the world should work than God.

We have to recognize these things are not true. It’s a matter of learning to accept what it means to live in a fallen world and to not expect too much of this world—and yet to look forward more to the next. If you talk to Christians who are undergoing some of the worst suffering [around the world], they are often the most hopeful people. But in the West, we are conditioned to think that our circumstances dictate our satisfaction with life. And that is only true to a certain extent and not true to the most significant extent.

We can recognize that life is not going to magically get better when we get through [a particular circumstance]. When you get through something, another thing will happen, and then another thing. Because that’s just life. But what else happens? The Lord is with us.

Psalm 22 says, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” How amazing that those are the very words that Jesus speaks on the cross. And what happens? He’s not ultimately forsaken; He’s raised, and that’s our hope. If we live each day in light of the hope of the resurrection, then we can endure whatever suffering is in this life. We can endure whatever evil is inflicted upon us and even find forgiveness for the evil that we inflict on others.