Evangelical Outpost linked today to this article, questioning the traditional understanding of the martyrdom of Lady Jane Grey. Even if all it says is true, for me it doesn’t diminish the pathos of her youthful martyrdom.

Then I read an article about Auschwitz in Smithsonian Magazine.

So I’ve been contemplating human suffering today.

Have you ever thought this thought? I’ve thought it many times: If I had been God, and had known that giving human beings free will would result in all the evil and horror that have in fact been produced, I wouldn’t have given them free will. And if the human project was unsatisfactory without free will, I’d have just skipped the whole business.

I have an answer that satisfies me intellectually. 1 Corinthians 2:9 says, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him.”

Apparently, in God’s economy, the good He is creating far outweighs all the innumerable evils perpetrated by man since the fall of Adam. From the viewpoint of eternity, we’ll look back and say, “Yes, it was well worth it.”

Now that answer raises a hundred questions in my mind. Questions for which I have no answer, and for which we have been given no plain answers.

This, I guess, calls for faith.

But it also argues, I think, for courage on God’s part. Granted, He saw the outcome from the beginning. But part of that outcome, I believe, was His own assumption of all that evil on the cross.

I read somewhere that, in the early years of the Superman comic strip, the writers came to a crisis when they’d made their character so powerful that they couldn’t come up with a challenging enough opponent for him anymore. That was when they invented Kryptonite. Something that took all that power away.

God did it in real life.

I can’t find the reference, but G. K. Chesterton wrote somewhere that all those scoffers, who call God evil for creating an evil world, are right in a sense, and that God acknowledged it (in a way) by explicitly accepting the punishment for creating all that evil.

Whatever else you think, I think you’ve got to admit it’s no cowardly strategy.

T4G Talk #8 from Together for the Gospel (T4G) on Vimeo.