The unrelenting advances of ISIS (an extreme muslim terrorist organization) in Northern Iraq combined with the shock of horrific images and videos has dominated headlines worldwide. Yesterday, ISIS posted another video of a gruesome murder. Just when we thought the war on terror was settling down, a new organization is upon us—one ironically even too cruel even for al-Qaeda and far more effective than it ever was. We are watching one of the biggest mass genocides since Rwanda and easily the most publicized genocide the world has ever witnessed. The rapid conquests of ISIS raise new questions about how secure our world really is, and who, if anyone, will be willing to do something about it.
But for many of us, the crisis also raises old questions—questions bigger than ISIS and the United States; bigger than the crisis itself. It’s hardly a new problem. Questions about the problem of evil appear every time there’s a major catastrophe. It’s hard enough to fathom mass killings of captured soldiers, but families tortured? Children ruthlessly murdered? Christians given the choice to convert to Islam or be beheaded? How can a good God allow it to happen? How can so much human suffering be concentrated so deeply in one time and place?
And now turn your mind to a different place. See before you the awe-inspiring majesty of the Himalayas scraping against the edges of the atmosphere. Or hear the tiny cry of a newborn infant lovingly held by new parents that just saw him enter the world. Feel the cool evening wind blow by as you walk outside on a quiet evening. This is the same planet. The very same place that bears so many sweet joys also harbors terrorists that spend their days destroying lives. And now the question is much deeper. How can one world, one reality, be the scene of so much joy and so much pain? The extremes are so sharp, the earth itself seems to groan underneath them.
And here the question becomes not a problem to Christianity—a soft spot in our worldview that we try to steer conversations away from. Rather the Christian story is the only one that can make sense of it all. The Christian story explains and even tells us to expect shocking juxtapositions of good and evil.
On the one hand, this is a beautiful world. In spite of all the pain and trouble we experience here, you want to go on living—that’s because God made it, put something of His own wisdom, power, and pleasure into it, and six different times He declared that it was good (Gen. 1). Life is beautiful, and every time you enjoy one of its rightful pleasures you ought to see it as an arrow, pointing straight at the One who made it and made you able to enjoy it richly.
But on the other hand, the rest of the story is, of course, much darker. The beauty of what God made had hardly existed when it was corrupted. “Sin entered the world and death by sin,” a poisonous infection that has only spread, festered, and mutated into increasingly perverse forms in the ages since. If the beauty of earth reminds us of our loving Maker, the death, the terror, the horror that has come about since ought to make us hate sin. Every tear, racking pain, and every death is a desperate cry against the ravages of sin. Only something so perverse as mutiny against a gracious Creator could make a beautiful creation so awful; only a loving and all-powerful God could ever restore it from what it has become. And there lies the history of the world. The galling mixture of beauty and decay, of joy and sorrow, of life and death, stretches through the story of mankind and points us to the true answer—our gracious God Who will restore it all again.
But the arrow also points another direction—this time to the place where goodness and evil appear together and at their greatest extremes. This cosmic paradox climaxed in the person of Jesus Christ. God Himself, demonstrating the supreme act of beauty and love, tasted the dregs of human suffering brought by sin.
The incomprehensible mixture of joy and pain that you encounter daily in this confused world ought to point you to that cross. Every sin, every depraved act of violence, every human being overcome by death—Jesus died for them. He died to set us free. Every joy, every sweet and pure pleasure as it ought to be—Jesus died to restore this earth back to the paradise it once was. In the beautiful and selfless suffering of the only fully righteous person that ever lived, we each find our hope.
