“The longer someone is a Christian, the greater their propensity to diminish the Jesus of the Bible until he becomes a predictable little God who ceases to surprise them.” (Mark Driscoll, Radical Reformission)

That said, and at the risk of sounding petulant, I wouldn’t be doing this were it not that it never fails, when such tragedies score the earth, but someone points an accusing finger at the Christian church and thunders imperiously: “Which of these is true: either God is all-powerful but He doesn’t care about the people of Japan and therefore their suffering, or He does care about the people of Japan but He’s not all-powerful?” (We heard exactly this question when Martin Bashir channeled David Hume in a recent interview with Rob Bell – I should note that Bell’s “answer” was as fatuitous as anything I’ve ever heard.)

There’s no point in trying to answer such a question, because it’s knocking at the wrong door. Hard as it may be for an unbeliever to understand, we Christians aren’t sitting around trying to dream up a God who fits the clothes we make for Him, whose ways are readily found out, and who gives polite and tidy answers whenever we demand. We worship a God who has revealed Himself to us (His self-revelation is rather basic, actually, to our religion); we have no say in who or how He is. And He has told us unequivocally that He is absolutely sovereign (inclusive of omnipotence) and perfectly good. If Hume’s disciples wish to pound at the door of the Christian church, they need to revise their question: “Given your God is both sovereign and good, how do you respond to tragedies such as this one in Japan?” Now that’s a fair question.

It’s not a question, moreover, that the unbeliever has any business raising. If, as the atheist wants to believe, God doesn’t exist at all, then a powerful force in Japan (the tsunami) has encountered some weaker forces in the cosmos (human strength and ingenuity), and swept all before it. This stuff happens. It’s a harsh reality in the evolution of the cosmos, perhaps; it’s certainly not one to which any moral value can be assigned. So everyone needs to stop complaining and clean up. If, on the other hand, one wants to talk about some god other than the Christian God who is crying himself to sleep every night because of things that happen in his cosmos, well, too bad for him. We can hate him as we hate ourselves for our inability to stop tsunamis. Or we might think of a god who is strong enough to stop tsunamis but doesn’t want to: well, if this is “his” universe in any meaningful sense, then it’s not a good universe, and who are we to complain? On what basis are we going to make a case for “goodness” in what is most basically an “evil” universe? We need to catch up on our cosmology and get with the program. After all, do you really want to contend with a god who takes pleasure in tsunamis?

But these are childish questions, representing childish ideas. They have nothing whatever to do with the Christian religion. We Christians take our stand squarely within the bounds of our God’s revelation, and here two things comfort us. First, our God is sovereign. This means that tsunamis do not stalk the earth out of control (neither, thankfully, do rapists and thugs). We sleep at night knowing that nothing can happen that is not in the hands of our God; to live in any other cosmos would be a mind-warpingly terrifying experience. Evil, we know, is not simply “there” in some kind of dualistic competition with our God; He reigns over it, and will in time destroy it. Which brings us to the second thing: our God is good. He has told us what goodness and righteousness mean, and so we can look at the evils of the world and call them exactly that – evils. We can hate them because He does. How can it be that God sovereignly permits and ordains in His universe things that He declares He hates? That is a mystery of the Christian faith (it is not a mystery to which an atheist or deist has any access), but it is not an open-ended mystery. Our God has told us that one day He will judge the living and the dead. This hope of the final judgment assures us that evil will one day be vanquished, condemned, and eradicated from the earth. We do not know why God allows and ordains certain things, but we know He will judge them all in righteousness – and “shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just” (Gen 18:25)?

Put another way, the question of the “problem of evil” can be asked within the boundaries of the Christian faith, and we can give an answer of faith within those boundaries. The question really cannot be made intelligible outside the Christian faith in the gloomy marshes of atheism or deism. In these marshes there are only the imaginations of men; there is no one to whom such a question may be reverently addressed, nor anyone from whom an answer may be trustingly heard.

I say it again, Kyrie eleison.

“But do you know that the Eldar say of Men that they look at no thing for itself; that if they study it, it is to discover something else; that if they love it, it is only (so it seems) because it reminds them of some other dearer thing? Yet with what is this comparison? Where are these other things?” (Tolkien, “The Debate of Finrod and Andreth”)

“It is one of the difficult and delightful subtleties of life that we must deeply acknowledge certain things to be serious and yet retain the power and will to treat them often as lightly as a game.” (C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves)

“With all its wealth and power, [culture] only shows that the human heart, in which God has put eternity [Eccles. 3:11], is so huge that all the world is too small to satisfy it. Human beings are in search of another and better redemption than culture can give them. They are looking for lasting happiness, an enduring eternal good. They are thirsting for a redemption that saves them physically as well as spiritually, for time but also for eternity. And this only religion, and nothing else, can give them. God alone can give it to them, not science or art, civilization or culture.” (Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, p. 3.328)

“Time is the necessary form of the existence of the finite. It is not a separate creation but something automatically given with the world, cocreated with it like space. In a sense, therefore, the world has always existed, for as long as time has existed. All change, then, occurs in it, not in God. The world is subject to time, that is, to change. It is constantly becoming, in contrast with God, who is an eternal and unchangeable being. Now these two, God and the world, eternity and time, are related in such a way that the world is sustained in all its parts by God’s omnipresent power, and time in all its moments is pervaded by the eternal being of our God. Eternity and time are not two lines, the shorter of which for a time runs parallel to the infinitely extended one; the truth is that eternity is the immutable center that sends out its rays to the entire circumference of time. To the limited eye of the creature it successively unfolds its infinite content in the breadth of space and the length of time, so that creature might understand something of the unsearchable greatness of God. But for all that, eternity and time remain distinct.” (Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, p. 2.429)

“Comprehension excludes amazement and admiration. I comprehend or think I comprehend the things that are self-evident and perfectly natural. Often comprehension ceases to the degree a person digs deeper into a subject. That which seemed self-evident proves to be absolutely extraordinary and amazing. The farther a science penetrates its object, the more it approaches mystery. Even if on its journey it encountered no other object it would still always be faced with the mystery of being. Where comprehension ceases, however, there remains room for knowledge and wonder. And so things stand in theology.” (Bavinck, p. 1.619)