The Problem of Evil: The Cross

Does God love us?  Does God care about us?  Where is God?  Has He abandoned us?  Why doesn’t He do something to help us?  These are questions that believers in God who experience deep suffering have been asking for centuries.  For example, the biblical book of Psalms contains many psalms written by ancient Israelites that ask these and similar questions.  For the skeptic, these sorts of questions may lead to abandonment of belief in God altogether.  For if a good God really does exist, it is hard to see why He would forsake us in our suffering; perhaps, then, the reason we feel forsaken by God is that He was never there in the first place.

In the first part of this series, I addressed the question of how evil could come to exist at all within the creation of a good God, offering the Christian doctrine of the Fall as an explanation.  In this entry, I will address the question, “How can we believe God loves us, in spite of the existence of so much evil in the world?”  While it is difficult to provide an answer to this question from the perspective of an abstract theism, Christian theology does have a ready answer to this question: the cross of Jesus Christ.

According to the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, Jesus of Nazareth truly is God made flesh.  Jesus is not just a human being in very close relationship with God.  Nor is Jesus just God pretending to be human, with the false facade human nature.  No, in Jesus Christ, God truly has become human.  In astounding fact, the infinite, eternal Creator of the universe humbled and humiliated Himself, becoming a finite creature.  God has come to be with us in the most intimate, personal manner possible, by actually taking upon Himself human existence and experiencing what it is like to be a human being.  Such is God’s desire to be with us and to show us His love.

In Jesus, God has not merely entered into human experience; he has entered into the very deepest depths of human suffering, death, and even godforsakenness, with us and for us.  When Jesus was tortured, crucified, and killed on the cross, God Himself, as a human being, experienced human suffering and death.  While hanging on the cross, Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34, Matt 27:46); yes, God Himself, as a human being, experienced what it is like to feel abandoned and forsaken by God.  Whatever evils, whatever suffering, godforsakenness, and death, we experience, we can know that God has experienced the same, in solidarity with us.  Such is God’s astounding and incredible love for us.

It is important to emphasize that God does not need us.  God does not need to have a relationship with us.  God did not need to create anything at all.  He is eternally perfect, not in need of anything or anyone else in order to be who He is.  God freely chose to create.  He freely chose to create us and give us our existence.  We have no claims upon Him.  Yet, even though humanity chose to rebel against Him, God remained faithful to His creation and was willing to do what was necessary in order to save us from sin, suffering, and death, even though it meant He Himself would experience suffering and death.  On the cross, though He was completely innocent, God took upon Himself the consequences of our sin so that we could be forgiven and reconciled to Him.  He did all this, not because He is in need of us, but for our sake, so that we could be freed from the powers of evil and be with Him forever. 

Thus, the age-old questions that believers in God who are suffering have asked are answered in the cross of Jesus Christ.  Yes, God loves us.  Yes, God cares about us.  He has acted to help us and save us.  He has not abandoned us.  God is with us, not in some vague, abstract, “spiritual” sense, but in actual concrete fact He is truly with us, as one of us.  Whatever suffering, godforsakenness, and death we experience, we can know that God is truly with us.  In the most dramatic way possible, He has demonstrated His love for us on the cross. This is what enables Christians to believe in a good and loving God, in spite of all of the evil we see in the world.  The primary Christian answer to the problem of evil is the cross of Jesus Christ.