The Struggle Is Real (The Flesh, The World, and the Devil) - A God of evil? [Ryan Ashley]

Daniel 10:1-14, Mark 9:14-29, Acts 10:38, Luke 13:10-16,

Romans 8:18-22, John 8:44; 10:10

Order of Slides:

Daniel 10:1-14

One Slide:

1. Sickness and Death

2. Natural Evil

3. Chaos

Mark 9:14-29

Acts 10:38

Luke 13:10-16

“God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go right or wrong. Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata – of creatures that worked like machines – would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which most rapturous love between an man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they’ve got to be free…”

“Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently, He thought it worth the risk… If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will, that is, for making a real world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings, then we may take it that it is worth paying.”

C.S. Lewis

Romans 8:18-22

“I am bewildered. I had not intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, and as I wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumon Wasp with the express intention of feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature!”

Charles Darwin

John 8:44

“When one possesses a vital awareness that in between God and humanity there exists a vast society of spiritual beings who are quite like humans in possessing intelligence and free will, there is simply no difficulty in reconciling the reality of evil with the goodness of a supreme God. It virtually sidesteps the problem of evil.”

Greg Boyd

“In the same way, Christ in principle defeated the powers with the unsurpassable love he unleashed through his incarnation, life, ministry, death and resurrection. D-day has been fought and won. But we are still waiting for V-day. In the meantime, there are many important battles to fight. Indeed, sometimes and enemy fights the hardest when they know their doom is certain.”

Greg Boyd

John 10:10

“If indeed there were a God whose true nature-whose justice and sovereignty- were revealed in the death of a child or in the dereliction of a soul or a predestined hell, then it would be no great transgression to think of him as a kind of malevolent or contemptible demiurge, and to hate him, and to deny him worship, and to seek a better God than he.”

David Bentley Hart

“The call of the gospel is for the church to implement the victory of God in the world through suffering love.” 
N.T. Wright