How Can I Believe God Loves Me When I’ve Experienced So Much Evil? | Dr. Vince Vitale

[Music] yeah this is a question uh that like always brings back memories for me because it's one of the first questions that i ever got asked maybe not word for word but but this theme when i when i became a christian and it was my aunt regina and she talked to me about uh the suffering in her son's life my cousin charles which was quite severe he had a lot of disabilities and as this kind of zealous kind of eager new christian i began to sort of spout some of my new philosophical arguments for why god might allow evil and suffering like my my cousin charles is and my aunt regina she listened really graciously and then she turned to me and she said but vince that doesn't speak to me as a mother i've always remembered those words and as i reflected on it more you know i realized that jesus understood that a lot better than i did you know when his good friend lazarus died jesus had waited a couple of days before he went to see him and by the time he got there lazarus was already dead and mary and martha lazarus's sisters they don't seem too impressed and they said they come out one one at a time if you had been here our brother would still be alive in a sense saying you know what what do you have to say for yourself what's your response what's your reasoning what's your apologetic and i'm sure jesus could have told them well here's why i waited two days i had good reason and i can explain it to you it was justified and instead we get the shortest verse in the bible jesus wept so before he tried to respond to this type of question there was genuine emotion there from jesus he never jumped to the philosophical but he wept first and so look even in this room they're going to be people who are suffering pretty significantly at the moment even in a room you know this size so the first thing i want to say is just that that's not right that's not the way things are supposed to be i'm sorry and i don't want anything that i say theologically or philosophically to undermine the significance of that and yet i do think that there may be some helpful things that we can say in response to this question my my sort of training is in academic philosophy and interestingly in in that area there's a lot of talk of natural evil it's like a phrase that's used to talk about things like earthquakes and tornadoes and pandemics and i've always thought it's like a funny phrase because if it's genuinely natural like if it's just the universe doing its thing if it's just a random atheistic universe it's just time plus matter plus chance then in what sense is it evil like maybe we don't like it maybe we got unlucky but it's just the universe doing what the universe does it doesn't seem like there's any sort of deeper reality that's evil and then on the other hand if it is genuinely evil these things that cause suffering then then is it natural or is it actually unnatural the very fact that we call something evil does that point to the fact that actually this is not the way it's supposed to be there's like an intentionality and a purposefulness in the universe a direction it's supposed to head in and this is contrary to that so i really appreciate the way this this question was phrased that in the question it recognizes evil as a category and not every worldview does but i think it's significant that the christian worldview does let me add another perspective to this one of the the most significant forms of suffering that jonah i have experienced as a couple is going through a miscarriage and we were completely unprepared for how deeply that affected us and when we first heard from from the doctor you have this this baby that's growing inside and you go to the doctor and you can't wait to hear the heartbeat you know of your baby and then there's just this deafening silence and when we got back to the car after they had told us it was very likely that the baby would be miscarried we decided that we would we would name the baby uh lucca um and then we didn't we didn't really feel like going home we started like going home and cooking and we uh we just sort of googled like top pizza place in the in the vicinity in that town and we we then drove to the to the pizza place and and we looked up we hadn't looked at the name we just hit you know number one click directions and then we look up and uh it was luca lucas pizza was the name of the pizza place and it felt like just this kindness of god to saying that that he was present even though we didn't fully understand um joe got pregnant soon thereafter again and we now have a son named jonathan lucian vitale and we named him lucian as his middle name as a way of remembering and honoring luca if we realized at some point that if luca had not been miscarried joe still would have been pregnant with luca at the time that she conceived jonathan we literally could not have jonathan as our son had this suffering and this death not occurred it was literally life that came out of death and and it just made us realize that so often we don't realize how things are interconnected so often we want to just wish a certain piece of suffering out of this world and we don't think how it's connected to other things that we love and that we value and in this case we feel like we have a family that includes luca and jonathan and our son raphael and that one day we could actually be together as a family of five rather than as a family of four and that never could have been the case afterwards although otherwise and so oftentimes i think we we picture this world with all of its suffering in it then we picture a very different world with far less suffering or no suffering and we think to ourselves surely god should have made me in this very different world the world with no suffering and the question that we never think to ask ourselves is would it still be you and me and all of the people that we love who would exist in that very different world and that's a really complicated question you know if i'm if i was mad at my dad at some point i might get frustrated with my mom that she married my dad and think mom you should have you should have married somebody else like i could have been better looking more athletic taller stronger like maybe they would have it would have been british british royalty like the queen right and i could have lived in a castle but i don't stop to think if my mom married someone else it wouldn't have been me who came to exist it would have been someone else and i think oftentimes when we imagine we wish god had made and sustained a different world we're doing the same thing we're actually unwittingly wishing ourselves and all the people that we love out of existence actually an interesting analogy here between divine creation and human procreation because having a child and i just spoke about it it's actually a much more sobering choice than we often think about we we want to think about the positive aspects of having a child right all the good that's going to happen in that child's life but as a human parent if you choose to try to have a child you're doing something that you know full well will cause serious suffering in the life of the child that you have because any life even the most fortunate of lives in this world include serious suffering and even beyond that at some point that child is going to suffer death and that's a really sobering thought but it makes me realize that if we think it would be evil to create someone into a world that will include serious suffering in their lives like if that's our position and that might at first seem pretty reasonable but if you agree with that statement you will not only need to call god evil you'll also need to call evil anyone who decides to have a child and it's so interesting how often we don't hold ourselves to a standard that we hold god to we look up and blame god for our suffering same god who when he suffered at our at our hands he looked down and he said father forgive them a few thoughts on on this on this question there's so much more to say the last thing i'll say is just we shouldn't expect to have all the answers god's ways are higher than our ways his thoughts are higher than our thoughts our son raphael has a bicuspid valve that's not dangerous to him at the moment but it's an anomaly in his heart and so i remember when he was very young having to take him for those first tests and that you know they put these these sticky things all over his chest and he's having to get needles and and he's just shrieking in horror i mean it's like the worst thing possible to him and and actually it's good for him like this needs to happen like this is how we're diagnosing what he has this is actually the process of healing but that's not how he experienced it and i couldn't communicate to him why right in his being he was screaming why and it's not that i wasn't intelligent enough i knew why i could talk to joe about why but i couldn't communicate that to him because my my ways are higher than his ways how much higher are god's ways than our ways and i remember in that moment the the only thing i could do was i just i just drew as close as i could to him i just i just went down really close to him and i just kept saying i'm here i'm here i'm here and it just makes me think that that's exactly what jesus has done we're not always going to understand all of his ways and why we go through what we go through but the christian faith is the one worldview where we can say that the one who does knows does know he came and he said i'm here jesus is god saying i'm here i'm here he says here i am i stand at the door and knock anyone who hears my voice and opens the door i will come in and eat with him and he with me so i don't think that evil and suffering i don't think it's how it was intended to be at the beginning but i do think that god intended you and if you can begin to get your head around the idea that god wanted you with all of your idiosyncrasies and all of your flaws then you can begin to get your head around the idea that maybe god would value a world that would allow for you to come to exist even if that was a world that for a time would include a lot of evil and suffering but just for a time because at some point god is going to wipe away all the tears the beautiful detail in that verse it doesn't just say the tears are going to be gone it says that jesus himself physically resurrected in his body is going to wipe away every tear from our eyes

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Length: 10min 28sec (628 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 22 2022