Take and Read

In the aftermath of September 11, Christians have been asked, once again, to address the problem of evil. While acknowledging evil’s mysteriousness, part of my response to those requests has included a question for the questioner, namely, ‘How do you explain the problem of good?’ In other words, while some of us are less likely than others to become terrorists, in the mirror of God’s law we are all wicked. We all fail to love God and our neighbor in countless ways every day. So the real question is, ‘Why does the world include any good?’ Apart from God’s providence, September 11 would have been a normal day. Yet we all know that it was, in fact, abnormal. Even though such terrorism is an ever present threat, God’s common grace usually restrains it from happening. Because of the depravity of the human heart and the corruption of institutions in which sinful habits have become deeply embedded, things are often bad, but they are never as bad as they could be, thanks to God’s common grace (p. 96).