One of the great things about God being all powerful is that nothing can stop Him from fulfilling His purposes and promises. He is not willing but unable to save us. He is both willing and able to save us. In Romans 8:38-39 Paul writes: “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Why can nothing separate us from God’s love in Christ? Because God’s love in Christ is stronger than all the things that could separate us from Him: sin, Satan, and death. Jesus is more than powerful enough to pay for our sin, defeat Satan, and overcome death. But, it is often asked: if God is this powerful, then why didn’t he just make a world in which Adam and Eve did not sin in the first place? Then He wouldn’t have had to save us; and we wouldn’t have had to suffer.
Omnipotence, The Fall, and Suffering
The answer to this question isn’t as difficult as you might suspect: a world in which Adam and Eve did not sin is a logically possible world, but it is not a logically feasible world [2]. As Alvin Plantinga has argued, it is possible that humans have something called transworld depravity: in any world in which God gave humans free-will, they not only could have sinned (or not) but would have sinned [3]. Therefore, if God is going to create any world with free-creatures, He must choose from among worlds with a fall, which He did. God could not give Adam and Eve free-will and determine what they do with it—that would be to take with one hand what He gave with another. God is sovereign over our choices without making them.
The real question is this: if God loves us and is all-powerful, why doesn’t He go ahead and put an end to all suffering and evil now, the way He promises He will at the end of history? Or, why doesn’t he at least put an end to all the suffering in my life? I believe this is the existential question underneath people’s questions about evil and suffering. And I believe the answer is readily available in Scripture. Peter writes: “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).
In other words, God practices spiritual triage. He prioritizes people’s potential eternal suffering over your and my temporal suffering. Apparently there are more people who will be saved; people who are not yet saved; people who might not even be born yet; and God is patiently waiting for them to reach repentance. So, if God were to end history now and bring about the eternal state, those people wouldn’t make it to the New Heavens and New Earth. Unbelievers’ sufferings wouldn’t be alleviated but intensified by the eternal state (because they would go to hell).
Here’s the point: God is all powerful, but it is not logically possible for the world to be fallen and glorified at the same time. God can alleviate some suffering now [4], but He cannot answer our prayer to alleviate all suffering without enacting the eternal state, which as we have seen, would mean the alleviation of suffering for some people (believers), but not all people (unbelievers).
God will glorify the world and us with it at the appointed time. But that time has not yet come. And in meantime, God is asking some of us to wait patiently in the waiting room [5]; and He is asking the rest of us to “scrub in” and help with the most serious of all spiritual ailments: unbelief.
No comments have been added.