I am presently in the East African country of Rwanda, Le Pays aux Mille Collines (The Country of a Thousand Hills). For decades following World War II, animosity between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes cast a dark shadow over this land of hills, lakes, and laughing children. By 1994, this dark shadow became a storm cloud of gratuitous evil delivering a torrent of unimaginable suffering and death. The horror of mass genocide in this country rivaled—and in some cases surpassed—that of the Nazi death camps. Women and children were often the direct target of the sadistic killers. Women were beaten and ultimately murdered, often in the sight of their families. Some were systematically raped and sexually mutilated as a weapon of genocide, often intentionally by known HIV-infected males. Children often looked on helplessly before being hacked to death with machetes. Others were forced to participate in the massacre by killing their friends or neighbors. Though many ran to churches for refuge, these places of worship became mass graves. The devastating frenzy of violence, bloodshed, and merciless killing left the streets littered with rotting corpses that were eventually devoured by roaming dogs. Entire families were annihilated simply because they belonged to a particular tribe. Even today, bodies are still being uncovered where they had been ruthlessly buried in mass graves. Erected on many of these sites are small memorials declaring, “Never Again!” Others have simply passed into oblivion and will never be found. Those who survived continue to carry the deep physical and emotional scars of a tragedy the world must never forget.
The memory of my visit to the National Genocide Memorial in Kigali,
Rwanda, in 2007 is deeply imbedded in my soul. I was accompanied by a Rwandan colleague from the church I pastored at the time, who himself had lost some thirty members of his extended family in the senseless, atrocious massacre. While I had lost a son due to accidental manslaughter, my colleague had lost an entire family due to barbarous, cold-blooded murder. In one hundred days, nearly one million people throughout the country were viciously murdered—one by one, day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute; ten thousand people a day, four hundred people each hour, seven people each minute. Motivated by revenge and hatred in response to years of racial discrimination promulgated by colonial powers, the killers called their victims, “cockroaches.” And what do you do with a cockroach? You stomp it, crush it, and extinguish its life. In the meantime, the world withdrew and watched as a million people were mercilessly murdered. Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire, in charge of the United Nations peacekeeping troops at the time and whose authority had been usurped due to political maneuvering, “watched as the devil took control of paradise on earth and fed on the blood of the people.”[i]
Confronted with such examples of horrific evil and needless suffering, many conclude that God does not exist. How could he? For if he were all powerful, he could intervene and put an end to such evil. And if he were all good, he would intervene to protect the innocent. But in Rwanda he did not . . . and throughout the world often does not even now. Rather paradoxically, Dallaire came to a different conclusion. In his own words: “I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know the devil exists, and therefore I know there is a God.”[ii]
The Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 B.C.) once asked, “Whence evil—if there be a God?” Many theologians—especially since the time of Augustine in the fourth century—have attempted to explain evil and suffering as a human phenomenon without taking sufficiently into account supernatural evil. It’s almost as if the opening phrase of Genesis 3, “Now the serpent. . .” was exorcised from the text. This negligence, combined with a blueprint view of God’s sovereignty emphasizing meticulous, exhaustive control over the details of life, has inevitably led to the quest for a divine reason for the evil and suffering that enters our lives. Some go so far as to say, as does John Piper, “. . . it is not inappropriate to take God to be the creator, the sender, the permitter, and sometimes even the instigator of evil.”[iii]
The Bible, however, points us in a different direction.
Since the Fall, all human suffering can ultimately be traced to these three causes: Satan, sin, and sinners . . . and in that order. The Bible never minimizes the influence of supernatural evil all around us. In fact, we cannot understand the message of the Bible apart from recognizing the theme of spiritual warfare that is found from Genesis to Revelation. As J. R. R. Tolkien wrote, “It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.”[iv] And we do live near him. The Apostle John writes: “We know that we are children of God and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one” (1 John 5:19–20). Furthermore, the “world” of which John speaks is the same as that of which Jesus speaks in the parable of the weeds and the wheat (Matthew 13:24-20; 36–43), an account that gives us perceptive insight into the ultimate source of evil in human experience:
The Kingdom of Heaven is like a farmer who planted good seed in his field. But that night as the workers slept, his enemy came and planted weeds among the wheat, then slipped away. When the crop began to grow and produce grain, the weeds also grew. The farmer’s workers went to him and said, "Sir, the field where you planted that good seed is full of weeds! Where did they come from?" "An enemy has done this!" the farmer exclaimed. "Should we pull out the weeds?" they asked. "No," he replied, "you’ll uproot the wheat if you do. Let both grow together until the harvest. Then I will tell the harvesters to sort out the weeds, tie them into bundles, and burn them, and to put the wheat in the barn.” (Matthew 13:24-30, NLT)
What is explicitly clear in this parable of the wheat and the weeds is that the mystery of evil is not to be found in some unfathomable blueprint decreed by God and by which evil becomes God’s ordained means of accomplishing good. Nor is evil viewed as a mere discolored thread that ultimately lends stunning beauty to the great tapestry of God’s plan of the ages. It is rather a subversive countermovement to the kingdom of God. As to the details, Jesus’ explanation is straightforward:
Then, leaving the crowds outside, Jesus went into the house. His disciples said, “Please explain to us the story of the weeds in the field.” Jesus replied, “The Son of Man is the farmer who plants the good seed. The field is the world, and the good seed represents the people of the Kingdom. The weeds are the people who belong to the evil one. The enemy who planted the weeds among the wheat is the devil. The harvest is the end of the world, and the harvesters are the angels. Just as the weeds are sorted out and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the world. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will remove from his Kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. And the angels will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in their Father’s Kingdom. Anyone with ears to hear should listen and understand!” (Matthew 13:36-43, NLT)
The disciples may have been silently asking the same question posed by the farmer’s workers: “Sir, the field where you planted the good seed is full of weeds! Where did they come from?” In other words, “God, are you the source of this evil? Are you to blame?” Such questions reflect the moral outrage that is to be expected when confronted with evil and all of its horrendous consequences. Nowhere does Jesus rebuke his disciples for this question of protest. Nowhere does he say, “You should not ask such questions!” He simply answers their question (and ours), unequivocally attributing evil, not to the inscrutable plan of God, but to the work of the devil: “An enemy has done this!” (v. 25). It is not the envoy of the owner who introduced evil, but rather the enemy of the owner. The owner of the field is in no way depicted as cooperating with the enemy, but as opposing the enemy! The landowner is not to blame. To the contrary, he plants good seed, not bad seed.
Is not Jesus’ statement insightful with respect to the various theodicies that attempt to solve the question of how a good God can allow bad things? Are the weeds of life merely the cause-and-effect relationship of sin to sorrow? Or are the weeds intentionally sown as part of God’s meticulous, mysterious plan designed to bring about a higher good? Or are they simply inexplicable as part of the mysterious providence of God who must have a good reason for everything? Like the weaving of a beautiful tapestry of which we only see the underside at present, will the weeds one day be seen in their proper light as threads carefully chosen by the Weaver? In response to all of these questions and many more like them, the parable shouts out a resounding, “No!” For “God is light and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). Furthermore, “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and as such he is not responsible for the weeds of evil and all its consequent suffering. Who then is responsible? The enemy! The weeds of the Rwandan genocide, of Germany’s Holocaust, of ravaging world wars, of child abuse, of human trafficking, of world pandemics, and of every evil imaginable are ultimately sown by the seed of the serpent who has been striking at the heel of the seed of the woman since the Fall of humanity (Genesis 3:15). Only when this is understood can we embrace a biblical worldview in which evil and suffering are not about God’s mysterious plan, nor do they present an unsolvable intellectual problem.
Notice that in this parable, the farmer is unable to take steps to remedy the situation. Why? His inability doesn’t stem from ignorance or from impotence. To the contrary, the farmer understands and controls (in his way) the situation. His inability stems from the fact that rooting up the weeds also would require rooting up the wheat. The time of judgment must wait. The disciples mistakenly wanted Jesus to come into the field of this world with a machete and slash away at evil and uproot it definitively. But if God were to do this today, who could stand? As D. A. Carson appropriately asks, “Do you really want nothing but totally effective, instantaneous justice? Then go to hell.”[v]
God’s purpose in the present age is not judgment, but salvation. The question is no longer, “What is the source of evil and suffering?” but rather “What is the solution to evil and suffering?” Today, the cross is God’s way of dealing with evil. Jesus did not come into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved (John 3:17). God is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9). His purpose today is not rooting out the evil, but restraining it by planting the good. After all, there is deep truth in the charitable saying of Augustine, “Those who are weeds today, may be wheat tomorrow.” It is only at the final judgment that all will be made right and the field of this world will experience freedom from the power of the evil one (Daniel 7:14; Revelation 11:15). Then “the righteous will shine like the sun in their Father’s Kingdom” (Daniel 12:3). Ultimately, the Kingdom of God will prevail over the powers of darkness (Matthew 16:18).
“Whoever has ears, let them hear” (Matthew 13:43).
[i] Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004). Citation from book jacket.
[ii] Ibid. xviii (preface).
[iii] See John Piper and Justin Taylor, eds. Suffering and the Sovereignty of God (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2006), eBook. Emphasis mine.
[iv] J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (New York: Random House, 1982), 217.
[v] D. A. Carson, How Long, O Lord? (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 161.
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