Who’s to Blame for the World’s Mess?
It has become common in today’s atmosphere of spiritual unbelief to blame God for all of the bad things that happen. People assume that if God is all powerful and all knowing and because He has complete sovereignty over the world He is to blame for all the evils that take place.
A man blames God for the death of his wife to cancer. A young baby dies and the parents blame God. Why couldn’t God have kept the accident from happening that killed a whole family? Why would God make a person homosexual if it is not His will? Why couldn’t God have prevented a divorce if He hates divorce? Why did God allow the holocaust and other evils of war? On and on the accusations come. If God is sovereign why is there evil?
Others reject the Bible and God because of events recorded in scripture. How could a loving God destroy every human being except Noah’s family In the flood? How could God command the Israelites to go into Canaan and destroy everyone including women and children? Why does God allow these evils if He is able to prevent them?
Let’s start by understanding that God’s sovereignty includes the free will of humans. Some people see God’s sovereignty as excluding free will because they can’t understand how God would relinquish any of His control to the will of men. They see the free will of men as a challenge to the perfect sovereignty of God. They believe that God’s foreknowledge and God’s decrees are the same. Just because God knows something in the future does not mean He has decreed it to happen. Much is left to man’s free moral choice because freedom is part of God’s purpose for humans.
God created the first humans with a free will because He wanted children created in His image who choose to obey Him and live by His life (Gen 1:26–28). He did not want mere mindless robots who had no choice but to obey Him but children who obeyed Him out of their love for Him. Free will is seen in the choice that God put before them:
Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die. ( Gen 2:16, 17).
He gave them a choice proving that they possessed a free moral will, the personal ability to choose. They were also held accountable because of their free will. To say that God purposed this rebellion is ridiculous to say the least. He wanted and still desires children who bear His image and live by His life. But His ultimatum was if you eat of this tree “you will surely die.” And die they did when they were disobedient. Death is separation from God and the divine life He provides. They were instantly dead in spirit but their bodies over time began to experience the results of being separated from the life of God.
Satan was the tempter who convinced them to believe that their way was better than God’s way. He is the one who is to blame for the sin, death and destruction that resulted from this first sin and spread to mankind. Paul summarized this point this way: “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned” (Rom 5:12). The human race was infected by death caused by sin. As a just God He held them accountable for their actions.
God’s ultimate purpose for mankind is seen in this statement by God: “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth” (Gen 1:26; NKJV). We see in this statement that God was granting to all mankind, His children, dominion over every living thing on earth. Clearly, God was sharing His sovereignty with humanity and later we see that this involved free will, the ability to make moral choices.
One of the creeping things on earth was Satan appearing in the form of a serpent. God’s children were to exercise dominion over all the creatures of earth including Satan himself. Earth belongs to the Lord and he was granting His dominion to His children over the planet beginning in the garden and then beyond.
Of course Adam and Eve sinned and thus forfeited their dominion to Satan. From that time forward Satan began to gather his forces and execute his plan to be the god of this world by blinding the minds of its inhabitants(2 Cor 4:4). Notice that part of his strategy in the Garden of Eden was to lie about God: “You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3: 4, 5).
Since that illegal takeover of earth, Satan has been creating havoc through death, sin, war, disease, corruption, violence and much more and then blaming God from the mouths of people who think God is sovereign over even the free will of those He has created.
Who then is to blame for the mess we are in? It is the one who has come to “steal, kill and destroy” not the One who said “I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). People want to blame God for what His enemy is doing and that is part of the enemy’s plan because he is and has been a liar from the beginning.
Jesus said of Him:
He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his resources, for he is a liar and the father of it. (John 8:44).
He is the father of lies since he spoke the first devastating lie to the first humans in the Garden and He has been successfully blaming God ever since because people do not understand the nature of the sovereignty of God or believe the Bible that reveals it. If you are one of those who doesn’t believe in Satan or the Bible, then of course you will blame God and I can’t help you. The existence of evil proves the existence of the evil one.
Even creation itself with its many groanings has been negatively affected by the failure of humanity:
For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now (Rom 8: 20–22).
Earthquakes, storms, tsunamis, volcanoes are not part of God’s plan for the earth. They are the result of man’s disobedient, sinful rebellion against the God of love and mercy. The flood was caused by peoples’ disobedience and the Nephilim invasion we see in Genesis 6:1–8. The destruction of Canaan under the Israelites was necessary to rid the land of worshipers of Moleck who sacrificed their children and the giant Nephilim who ruthlessly ruled there. It is human rebellion that has kindled God’s wrath against His divine purpose.
Many known teachers are insisting that God’s sovereignty demands that man has no free will, that we are so depraved that free will is impossible. Some even say that to believe otherwise is heresy.
This strange doctrine violates the just nature of God and should be rejected. It leads to a wrong understanding of the cause of evil.
