Is Evil ‘Normal’?

One of the most frequently asked ‘spiritual’ questions among all people through all of time, is “Why does God let that (death, illness, injury, evil, inhumanity, etc.) happen?”.

Firstly, such questions are usually inherently ‘selfish’ because it is usually asked about one-self or some-one close - ie. “I’m feeling sad/sorrowful/let-down/hurt! Why me?”, as if it doesn’t matter that everybody else in the world suffers the same feeling at some time or another.

But at the heart of such questions, is a wrong understanding of God and ‘nature’. Decay, pain and death are very much the ‘norm’ in the natural world. Scientists have a ‘law’ of thermodynamics that says that any system left to itself will ultimately decay chaotically, losing its ‘order’ or entropy. When the Bible says that sin entered the world and that nature has ‘fallen’, it is saying the same thing as the scientists, only 3-4000 years before them.

Now God’s nature is quite the opposite. His nature is of love, redemption, building up and putting right; instead of hate, putting down, decay and disharmony. And until the numbered days of this ‘natural’ world come to pass, spiritual warfare will exist between God and the ‘spirit of this world’. So until that day, we humans have to live in the midst of this ‘war’. But praise God, He has reached across ‘the gap’ to us, so that whilst our natural bodies still have to suffer sorrow and ills, we have access to His healing spirit, so that we, like Jesus can participate in ‘overcoming’ this present age.