Our church is going through a series called “Wondering Why” where we are considering the question of, “If God is all knowing, all loving, and all powerful, why is there evil in the world?” The classic Biblical story that deals with this problem in depth is the Book of Job. If you haven’t read it, I would encourage you to give it a read. I want to look at a story in the in the Old Testament from the book of 1 Kings, which I think mimics the structure of Job but just in a very condensed way. This story doesn’t totally resolve the problem for us, but invites us to think about this problem more, and encourages us to continue to engage with God and scripture to respond to evil in the world. The passage I want to look at is 1 Kings 17:17-24.
What you need to understand for this passage to make sense is that there currently is a famine happening in the land. Elijah was previously helped by the woman in this story and so is staying with her and her son. In response to the help Elijah received, he performed a miracle so they wouldn’t run out of food during the famine. Here’s what the passage says.
After this the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, became ill; his illness was so severe that there was no breath left in him. 18 She then said to Elijah, “What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance and to cause the death of my son!” 19 But he said to her, “Give me your son.” He took him from her bosom, carried him up into the upper chamber where he was lodging, and laid him on his own bed. 20 He cried out to the Lord, “O Lord my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am staying, by killing her son?” 21 Then he stretched himself upon the child three times and cried out to the Lord, “O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again.” 22 The Lord listened to the voice of Elijah; the life of the child came into him again, and he revived. 23 Elijah took the child, brought him down from the upper chamber into the house, and gave him to his mother; then Elijah said, “See, your son is alive.” 24 So the woman said to Elijah, “Now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.”
In this passage, a tragic and frankly evil thing has occurred, an innocent child has died from an illness. In response, the mother and the prophet Elijah are desperately looking for an answer, a reason for the illness and death, someone or something to blame for this atrocity. The death of the child was too great for it to be random, to morally offensive for there to be nobody at fault or responsible. The mother, in despair and grief and potentially even guilt, starts to question if she is to blame. She wonders if she is essentially being punished by God because of a sin she has committed. To her, the punishment she is receiving is the death of her child.
Elijah the prophet has a similar, though slightly different response. See, the woman questioned whether God brought about her son’s death, motivated by some sin she had committed. Elijah also questioned whether God was the one who brought about the death of the child, although Elijah doesn’t speculate too much on the reason for why God would kill the child. Elijah has this interesting phrase where he says, “have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am staying”.
Elijah is indicating that he believes God is the reason, the cause behind the famine. This is interesting because the Bible doesn’t explicitly say that God has caused the famine or actively brought about the drought that led to the famine. God told Elijah to prophecy that there would be a famine, but never explicitly claimed God to be the cause of the drought and famine. However, Elijah seems to believe, whether rightly or wrongly (and we will consider this later), that God is the cause of the drought and so it’s either possible or likely that God is also the cause of the death of the child.
This story is getting us to grapple with the idea of natural evil. How do we deal with the death and suffering that comes from nature, things like natural disasters and illnesses? Natural evil is an odd term because how could nature be evil? Nature or the natural world doesn’t have any agency. It doesn’t make decisions or deliberations about what to do, it just does what it does. Bacteria and viruses don’t think about whether to infect someone or not, they just do what they do.
This is important because it seems strange to call something evil which has no agency. If there is no agency, then there’s no way for something to be a moral agent. Without being a moral agent, then something shouldn’t be thought of in a moral frame. If something isn’t thought of in a moral frame, how could we call it evil?
To answer this question, let’s think a little bit more about this concept of evil. In our current culture, we tend to think of the central moral conflict as a battle between good and evil. When we look at the Bible, and especially early Christian theology, the cosmic battle isn’t so much between good and evil, as much as it’s a battle between life and death. To get even more abstract, it’s a battle between being or existence and non-being or non-existence. This is because God is the source of life, the source of being itself. Anything that is counter to God is a force for death or non-existence. If you turn away from the source of life and existence, the inevitable consequence is death or non-existence
In fact, early Christian theologians, like St. Augustine, said that evil itself doesn’t have any existence. He argued that evil is just the privation or parasitizing of good. Metaphysically speaking, evil doesn’t exist. In the structure of reality, there isn’t any “thing” we can point to as the “substance” of evil. Evil is the corruption, distortion, and absence of good.
A common analogy people use to explain this idea is to look at light and darkness. Darkness doesn’t exist metaphysically. There is no “thing” out there that is darkness, darkness doesn’t have a “substance”. In contrast, light does exist metaphysically. There is a “thing” out there we can call light, light does have a “substance”. Darkness is only the absence of light.
In this framing, the fundamental enemy of God is death, and evil is just a way things or beings enter into death, or non-being, or non-existence. The more something moves towards non-being, the more evil something gets. This is why evil is so destructive, because it literally is the destroying of “being” or existence itself. The fullest culmination of evil is thus non-existence or non-being. This is why Jesus resurrecting from the grave was a cosmic event, not just a human event. The resurrection was a proclamation that God has overcome not just evil but non-being itself, and any force that leads us away from the source of existence. This is why 1 Corinthians 15 doesn’t tell us that it is evil that is swallowed up, but that it is death that is swallowed up in victory.
So, what does all this have to do with the idea of natural evil? Well, if natural disasters and diseases do anything, they bring destruction and death. If they bring death, then surely, they must be a form of evil. When we think about this in context of this passage, even if there is no agent acting behind the illness of the child (which our passage is quite ambivalent about), it is still an evil thing for the child to get a sickness. Evil brings things into death. This illness is bringing this boy into death, therefor this illness is evil.
Well to complicate matters, we see multiple times in the Bible and especially in the Old Testament, where God is responsible for bringing about death. It is precisely for this reason that many reject God and claim that God, if he exists, isn’t good but actually evil. I don’t want to get side-tracked by Old Testament violence and get into a discussion of whether God’s behavior in the Old Testament is moral or not.
For the sake of this essay, let’s just agree that although we do see God bring about death, we still are committed to the belief that God is Good. His nature and being are the standard and definition of goodness. Well, if the enemy of God is death, and God sometimes brings about death, then how is God good? At this point, I think we would do well to appeal to God’s sovereignty.
If God is the creator of all and is utterly in charge of everything, even death, then God gets to decide when and where and how death is visited upon His creation and when it is not. This makes it sound like God is then responsible for the death that occurs in our world. Well, I want to clarify a couple things at this point.
First off, when I talked about death being the enemy of God, I was meaning something bigger than the process of death that living creatures experience when their bodies quit working. I think a better way of thinking about it is non-being. As a Christian, although I believe death is a sort of evil and is a tragic reality of our experience, I don’t believe death ushers living things into a state of non-being. In short, I believe in an afterlife where beings who died in this world continue to exist. I don’t want to get too bogged down in the details of what this afterlife looks like. I will reiterate that Jesus’ resurrection from the grave is the proclamation that God has overcome not just death in the bodily sense, but that he has conquered Non-Being itself.
Just because God has conquered Non-Being, this doesn’t mean that things don’t enter into Non-Being, but that God is in control of what enters into Non-Being. So, although our bodies may die, our souls or spirits or whatever you want to call it, continue to exist, we don’t just exit existence at our bodily death. We now need to move on and consider how bodily or physical death fits in with the idea of a good God.
This is such a hard and complicated idea to think through because if God is the source of life, the source of existence itself, why would he create a world where things don’t last forever but do pass away into non-being? Well, if we look back at 1 Corinthians 15 again, we see that scripture tells us that creation is not all that it is meant to be and that creation itself is waiting and longing to be restored. Now what on earth could this mean? Truthfully, I’m not really sure, but let me just share what I think I may be onto.
When we think about the fall of Adam and Eve as being the moment sin entered the world, what if sin didn’t just corrupt humans but all of existence itself? What could this possibly mean? I’m not totally sure. If Adam and Eve were historical beings and if the fall was a historical event in some respect, shouldn’t there be some evidence of a world that existed before sin that we could compare to our world now that exists after the introduction of sin? I’m not totally sure. So, did God create a world where death was built into the fabric of existence, or did this reality of death only become real after sin entered the picture? I’m not totally sure.
What I do know is that God created a good world, and yet we live in a fallen world. Whether this creation was originally intended to be everlasting but was corrupted or was never meant to be everlasting, this world is not everlasting. The fact that our world decays, deteriorates, and breaks down forces us to consider the specter of Non-Being and its “evil” henchman that ushers things and beings into the oblivion of Non-Being.
Even if you don’t think the creation story is historical in any sense and you don’t like to speculate about the origin of sin and evil, you must contend with the reality of death in our world. You must consider how responsible or culpable God is for death having a role in existence. How is death possible if the creator of everything is the source of life? Why would life itself generate a reality that included its antithesis, death?
The death we witness, and experience is an evil no one escapes or evades, not even God himself. All I know is that God is so amazing that he can take even evil itself and direct it towards producing good. What I am sure of is that God and his creation can take death itself and use it for the purposes of new life.
As I negotiate this tension of death/Non-Being having a role in God’s creation, I can’t escape the idea that God bears some sort of responsibility for it. What sort of responsibility does God have for natural evil? Well, I resist the idea that God intervenes into the world to bring about hurricanes, earthquakes, illnesses, etc. I don’t think God’s responsibility is that direct.
I will point out that if God created the world to function in a certain way, but then it was corrupted by sin which has brought about the natural evil we see, then I think we can distance God a bit from the responsibility of natural evil. This leads us back to trying to discover what could be the source of sin entering the world which brings with it a whole host of questions we won’t chase down in this essay. If creation wasn’t corrupted though, but it was originally a part of God’s creation for the world to operate with these natural evils like disease and natural disasters, then I think God is much closer to taking responsibility for natural evil.
I think I need to point out that in either scenario, God is a being powerful enough to stop all natural evil, but chooses not to, and so that’s a level of responsibility that I don’t think God can escape from. There’s a variety of explanations that we could give for why God would allow natural evil, whether originally intended or not, and I don’t want to consider all of them. A question we should consider though, could it be the case that in order for humans to be the type of beings that God wanted us to be, it meant that we needed to live in the type of world we are in with natural evil like disease and natural disasters? I will come back to this thought when we consider the illness of the child.
So, after all of this, let’s bring this back to our passage and try to get a sense of what is going on here, so we can notice the way scripture addresses this problem of natural evil. Like I stated in the beginning, both the woman and Elijah think God is somehow involved in the illness of the child. The woman thinks she is being punished for a sin, and Elijah doesn’t give a reason but questions whether God is responsible for this suffering.
If we are honest, the woman has a lot of Biblical precedent to think that God would punish her for sin by killing her son. This is precisely what happens to David and his first child with Bathsheba. We also see this get played out multiple times in 1 Kings where the consequence for evil kings is that their entire family dies. Even Deuteronomy 5:9 talks about God visiting the iniquity of the father on his descendants for up to three generations.
As always, the Bible complicates this because Ezekiel 18:20 tells us that God will not require a child to bear the burden of guilt for the sin committed by their parent and vice versa. Here’s how I make sense of this. Any action we do, good or bad, has consequences for others outside of ourselves. I think what we are seeing happen in 1 Kings and even Deuteronomy 5:9 is God displaying that the consequences of our actions sometimes end up harming the people closest to us, even for multiple generations.
Ezekiel 18:20 then tells us that no one receives punishment or discipline or guilt for sin that one didn’t commit. So, could God have been killing this woman’s child as a punishment to this woman because of a sin she committed? Well I suppose so, as long as the child wasn’t being punished and found guilty because of the sin of his mother. If this child is dying of an illness because of the sin of the mother, it sure feels like the child is being punished for the sins of the mother. This doesn’t feel like the child is suffering just some consequence of her actions. If death isn’t a punishment, then what is? Again, the story of David would seem to give precedent for God killing the child of a parent as a form of punishment to the parent for a sin they have committed.
Well, for our passage at hand, this woman has been nothing but hospitable and helpful to Elijah. Plus, Elijah has performed a miracle to help them survive the famine. There is absolutely no reason to think that God is punishing this woman for a sin she has committed. Not to mention that although we have the peculiar story of David, I do not think the rest of the Bible paints a picture of God as killing babies as a form of punishment for parents’ sins. Also, this passage says the woman is a widow. Do we think that God is going to punish a widow, a standard example of vulnerable people who are to be cared for, by killing her son? That seems unlikely.
If we think about the book of Job, the book is an exploration of this very theological problem. Do bad things happen to people because they did something bad? Ecclesiastes is another book of the Bible that explores this concept in depth. The conclusion we see from these two books is that there is not a direct correlation or causation between how we live morally and whether we experience tragedy and suffering and evil. I would admit that the general sense of the Bible is that if you live a sinful life, this will reap destructive and negative fruits in your life. However, doing good isn’t a guarantee to protect yourself against bad things happening to you.
So, is it true that sometimes we see in the Bible people experiencing destructive and negative consequences for sinful behavior? Yes. Is this a guaranteed pattern we should expect to see in the world? No. I think it’s more of a loose understanding of how this world works rather than a strict law of nature that sin is followed by devastation and destruction.
When someone experiences bad things because of a sin, is that God actively intervening in the world to punish them? Not anymore, but in the Old Testament, sometimes. With the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus, I believe God has made a fundamental change in how we relate to sin since Jesus has suffered the fullest consequences of sin for us so that we don’t have to experience them. However, in the Old Testament, before Jesus, there seems to be a sense that people had to bear the burden of their sin in a more direct way than what we do now after the cross.
Even if this is the case, it’s not the case that in every instance of people bearing the cost of their sin, is God actively administering the consequences for their sin. Sometimes it does seem that God is actively bringing about the consequences or punishment for sin, but other times it seems like the consequences are just the natural consequences of sin. Again, in this story, I think there is no indication that this woman is experiencing this tragedy because of any sin. If it’s not because of her sin, then why does this woman’s child get sick and die?
This brings us to Elijah’s response. If this woman didn’t do anything that could be responsible for the death of her child, then why has her child gotten sick with an illness and died? Is God somehow behind this? Elijah’s response is interesting because I think it tells us something about human nature. We don’t want our world to be random or senseless. Especially when it comes to evil, we don’t want evil to be needless and random. The thought that this boy would just randomly get sick is a thought Elijah never entertains. Could it be the case that random and senseless evil is a more horrifying thought than God somehow being responsible for evil and suffering?
Well, I must admit, I would find it utterly intolerable if we lived in a world of sheer random and senseless evil. I think modern science can help us discern the physical reasons for things like illness, and sometimes that’s all the understanding we get. To be even more forceful, sometimes that’s all there is to understand. Sometimes, natural evil only has a physical or mechanical cause, but there is no moral cause. There is no moral reason for why the child in our passage got sick, beyond the physical conditions that led to his illness.
What does this mean about God’s responsibility if this is the case? If God permitted this to happen, doesn’t God still bear some responsibility for the illness and death of the child if he was able to prevent this but chose not to? I think to some extent, yes. God permitting or allowing the child to get sick doesn’t make God the cause of the child’s illness, but it does place some responsibility, dare I say blame, on God for the boy’s sickness and death. Why would God allow this? I’m not sure, but I do know that God does seem to give deference to the natural order of the world.
God does intervene in the world from time to time, we often call these interventions miracles. The problem is I don’t think there’s a credible way to give reasons for why God intervenes in some instances over others and provides a miracle for some and not others. To know why God does one miracle and not another would require you to be God to know the fullness of all his reasons for acting or not acting. So, why doesn’t God save this child? We don’t know. I think we can say that God was not the cause of the illness and did not kill this boy, but for some reason, God seemed content to allow the illness to work out its natural process in the boy and to bring the boy to death.
Could this also be the reality for the famine that hit the land that Elijah prophesied about? Could it be the case that there wasn’t a moral cause for the famine but only physical and mechanical causes? Could God giving Elijah the prophetic foresight of the famine be just that, foresight that the natural world was going to naturally bring about a famine? I will admit that the Bible seems to imply that God is the cause of the famine, but it doesn’t explicitly say that God is the cause. I wonder how much of my sense that the Bible implies that God is the cause of the famine says more about me and my desire for there to be a moral cause for events in the world, than it does about God and how God interacts in the world.
What I find fascinating about his passage though is how God responds. In all of this, God never gets upset or annoyed that he is being accused of killing a child. All that God does is listen to Elijah and then allow Elijah to heal the boy. I think this is the important thing scripture wants us to take from this passage. The origins of evil will always in some way be elusive and evasive. Whether God is responsible or to what extent God is responsible for the natural evil we experience is something that may be beyond our grasp.
What is within our grasp though is to see how God responds to us experiencing natural evil. God responds by being there with us. Like the food he provided to Elijah and the woman in right before this passage, God will give us what we need to be sustained through any adversity. Like Elijah crying out to God in this passage, God listens to us when we cry up to him in anguish and suffering. Like Elijah, God responds by acting to show us his presence, even if it doesn’t result in the miracle we are praying for.
I think what this passage wants us to understand is that God is more powerful than the evil in this world. Let me describe the symbolism in this passage that I believe expresses this message. The child represents innocence, maybe even goodness. Illness represents evil. When the child gets sick, we see evil destroying and devouring innocence/goodness so thoroughly that it dies. What could be more evil than innocence itself getting taken out of existence? Yet, God response is to restore the boy back to life, to bring innocence/goodness back into existence, undoing the work of evil and overpowering death itself.
When God heals the boy, the woman recognizes Elijah as a “man of God”. The Bible is affirming the life-giving nature of God in this passage and that people who partake in the process of giving life to this world are doing the work of God. I think this passage also wants us to be careful of drawing too tight of a connection between our moral acts in this world and evil and suffering we experience. If you can’t trace the causality of your sin or an evil act you have done in this world to the evil or suffering you are experiencing, then there probably isn’t a connection.
God does have the power to reverse or overturn the destruction brought by evil and death, as we see in this passage. Unfortunately, God doesn’t do this all the time, and we never will comprehensively understand why God allows some evils but not others, why he provides some miracles but not others. Whether we receive a miracle or not though, God wants us to know that he is with us through it all, and if God is with us, then who or what can stand against us?
Power of Words 