…you know the argument: "After Auschwitz there can be no God." But as Victor Frankel points out, the person who wrote that declaration had never been to Auschwitz. In fact, more people deepened or discovered faith while in Auschwitz than lost it.

In the long run, the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell is... a question: "What are you asking God to do?" To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that that is what He does.

The attempt to make God just in the eyes of sinful men will always lead to error.

The very strength and facility of the pessimists' case at once poses us a problem. If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator? Men are fools, perhaps; but hardly so foolish as that. The direct inference from black to white, from evil flower to virtuous root, from senseless work to a workman infinitely wise, staggers belief. The spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can never have been the ground of religion: it must have always been something in spite of which religion, acquired from a different source, was held.

When Jesus taught His disciples how to pray, His last petition was, "Deliver us from evil." In a time when wars and rumors of wars abound, His sentiment is echoed countless times. Yet we tend to view evil as the characters of the X-Files view truth: it is "out there." The problem, friend, is that evil is not just "out there." It is also "in here." A universal epidemic exists, and it is one of evil in the heart. Almost just as universal is the human tendency to deny this. I have never defended the existence of God at a university campus without being asked about the question of evil in the world, yet only on one occasion have I been asked how to cope with the evil within. And this is where the real issue lies.

How God Uses Problems In Our Lives God uses problems to DIRECT you: Proverbs 20.30 God uses problems to INSPECT you: James 1.2-3 God uses problems to CORRECT you: Psalm 119.71-72 God uses problems to PROTECT you: Genesis 50.20 God uses problems to PERFECT you: Romans 5.3-4

On my door there's a cartoon of two turtles. One says, "Sometimes I'd like to ask why he allows poverty, famine, and injustice when he could do something about it." The other turtle says, "I'm afraid God might ask me the same question."

No man can estimate what is really happening at the present. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labours with vast power and perpetual success—in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in.

Missionary Gracia Burnham, who was held captive by terrorists in the Philippines for more than a year and whose husband was killed during the rescue, writes: Sometimes I wonder, Why did Martin die when everyone was praying he wouldn't? Why does Scripture lead you to believe that if you pray a certain way, you'll get what you pray for? People all over the world were praying that we'd both get out alive, but we didn't. Her questions made her realize it isn't always easy to comprehend God's nature: I used to have this concept of what God is like, and how life's supposed to be because of that. But in the jungle, I learned I don't know as much about God as I thought I did. I don't have him in a theological box anymore. What I do know is that God is God—and I'm not. The world's in a mess because of sin, not God. Some awful things may happen to me, but God does what is right. And he makes good out of bad situations:

Author Richard Exley writes: I know one minister who returned to his pulpit ten days after his son committed suicide. Under duress he read his text: "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." Visibly struggling, he said, "I cannot make my son's suicide fit into this passage. It's impossible for me to see how anything good can come out of it. Yet I realize that I only see in part. I only know in part. "It's like the miracle of the shipyard. Almost every part of our great oceangoing vessels are made of steel. If you take any single part—be it a steel plate out of the hull or the huge rudder—and throw it into the ocean, it will sink. Steel doesn't float! But when the shipbuilders are finished, when the last plate has been riveted in place, then that massive steel ship is virtually unsinkable. "Taken by itself, my son's suicide is senseless. Throw it into the sea of Romans 8:28, and it sinks. Still, I believe that when the Eternal Shipbuilder has finally finished, when God has worked out his perfect design, even this senseless tragedy will somehow work to our eternal good." Citation: Richard Exley, "Decent Exposure," Leadership (Fall 1992) p. 118

If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.

There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite. No being could attain a "perfect badness" opposite to the perfect goodness of God; for when you have taken away every kind of good thing (intelligence, will, memory, energy, and existence itself) there would be none of him left.

Jesus Played It Fair

The Church’s answer is categorical and uncompromising and it is this: That Jesus Bar-Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth, was in fact and in truth, and in the most exact and literal sense of the words, the God “by whom all things were made.” His body and brain were those of a common man; his personality was the personality of God, so far as that personality could be expressed in human terms. He was not a kind of demon pretending to be human; he was in every respect a genuine living man. He was not merely a man so good as to be “like God”; he was God. Now, this is not just a pious commonplace; it is not commonplace at all. For what it means is this, among other things: that, for whatever reason, God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—he [God] had the honesty and the courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace, and thought it was worthwhile.