He Did It Anyway

by Dan Jones

It’s the question all of the preachers you hear on Kinship Christian Radio have had to address at some point. Whether it’s Alistair Begg, James McDonald, Ron Hutchraft, Mike Fabarez, Chuck Swindoll, or Ravi Zacharias, they’ve all had to address “The Big Question.” 

It’s the atheist’s “nuclear option:” Why does God allow so much pain, misery, suffering and evil on this earth?”

The reasoning is that if God allows all this when He could stop it or prevent it, then He is a malicious and evil God. If He is incapable of preventing it or stopping it, then He is not an omnipotent God at all.

The short answer is that if God were to prevent all of this, then we would all be robots. With no free will, love is meaningless. 

But I wonder if any one of us realizes what an incredibly selfish and short-sighted question this really is.

The question is asked entirely from the human perspective. 

It’s all about how much we suffer. It’s all about human pain, human misery, and human evil.

But what about God?

Did we ever stop to think about how God must experience all the evil we perpetrate? 

If God is omniscient, and I certainly believe He is, then He not only knows about every evil act we engage in, but every evil act we even think about. And, it’s not just us. Because He is eternal, He would know about every instance of evil involving every human being who ever existed –or ever will exist. 

All of the pain and misery and suffering and death and hate and torture and prejudice and …

It’s beyond our ability to imagine.

Not only would He know all of this, He would have to have known all He would experience before He ever created us. And He would know that He would experience all of this as a Father whose children had rejected Him.

God would have known all the grief and all the sorrow we would cause Him before He ever spoke us into being –and yet He did it anyway.

He did it anyway.

The only logical conclusion is that God, being both omnipotent and omniscient, knew that it would all be worth it in the end.

How He could possible make all this worth it in the end is something no human being could have ever possibly came up with in a million or a billion years.

And that is why He came to earth as a tiny baby, born of a peasant girl, lying in an animal’s food trough.

He knew.

He had a plan. He laid it all out in advance before He created the first mote of dust that makes up this rock we live on. 

It meant that He would have to come and live among us, clothed in this flesh that fights against His righteousness.

It meant He would have to walk among us, teaching us what we could not and would not understand until He sent His very own Holy Spirit to explain it to us.

It meant He would have to endure our insults, our mocking, our sham justice, our dirty politics, our corruption of His Word, our desecration of His temple…

It meant that He would have to let us, His own children, kill Him.

Yes, if you really want God to be dead, He will let you kill Him.

And He will show you just who and what you are in the process.

But He will not stay dead.

No, God will not be mocked. And He will not share His glory with another. 

For He will rise again, just like He said He would. 

And in doing so, He will defeat and humble all who thought they had crushed Him and by the wounds we inflicted upon Him in our ignorance and hatred and vile evil, He will heal us.

And in the course of it all, He will get to say this:

“I, even I, am he who blots out

your transgressions, for my own sake,

and remembers your sins no more.

Isaiah 43:25 (NIV)

Today’s Praise

For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. 2 Corinthians 4:17-18 (ESV)