Why Doesn’t God Stop Evil?

It’s not often you hear a totally rational, powerfully true and complete thought in, of all things, a rap song. But tonight while listening to “Truth” from Lecrae’s Rebel album, the following lyrics, which answer the above question, caught my attention:

Look, man, some people say that God ain’t real ’cause they don’t see how a good God can exist with all this evil in the world. If God is real then He should stop all this evil, ’cause He’s all-powerful right? What is evil though man? It’s anything that’s against God. It’s anything morally bad or wrong. It’s murder, rape, stealing, lying, cheating. But if we want God to stop evil, do we want Him to stop it all or just a little bit of it? If He stops us from doing evil things, what about lying, or what about our evil thoughts? I mean, where do you stop, the murder level, the lying level, or the thinking level? If we want Him to stop evil, we gotta be consistent, we can’t just pick and choose. That means you and I would be eliminated right? Because we think evil stuff. If that’s true, we should be eliminated! But thanks be to God that Jesus stepped in to save us from our sin! Christ died for all evilness! Repent, turn to Jesus man!”

Most of the time when I hear someone ask why God doesn’t stop all the evil in the world, I assume that the person asking is just being argumentative and isn’t really looking for a real answer. But there are many people who genuinely don’t understand why God, who is all-powerful, doesn’t put an end to all the evil and suffering in the world.

The infection of liberalism that has invaded most schools (public and private) has suppressed the teaching of critical thought and basic logic, so some who ask the above question jump to the conclusion that just because God can do something means that He should. The twisted logic goes something like this: “If God is all-powerful, and He’s good, why doesn’t He stop all the evil in the world?” The assumption is that God is somehow not good because He doesn’t step in and stop all evil. This absurd assumption leads to an even more absurd conclusion: that God must stop all evil in order to be good. This would mean that God’s goodness is dependent upon His creation’s behavior. The natural human desire is to deflect blame from the guilty party and put it into an innocent party. Why? Because it makes it easier to make excuses for our own mistakes. Could God stop all evil in the world? Yes, but the only way He could stop all evil would be to make humans into robots who could not even think for themselves. Certainly God could do this, but would that be a good thing? Certainly not.