I was hunting through some old drafts, looking for something to post on a mostly empty blog (we have been away), when I came across this quote from Tim Keller's
Walking with God through pain and suffering. Such an encouragement!
Why could it not be that God allowed evil because it will bring us
all to a far greater glory and joy than we would have had otherwise?
Isn't it possible that the eventual glory and joy we will know will be
infinitely greater than it would have been had there been no evil?
What
if that future world will somehow be greater for having once been
broken and lost? If such is the case, that would truly mean the utter
defeat of evil. Evil would not just be an obstacle to our beauty and
bliss, but it will have only made it better. Evil would have
accomplished the very opposite of what it intended.
How
might that come about? At the simplest level, we know that only if
there is danger can there be courage. And apart from sin and evil we
would never have seen the courage of God, or the astonishing extent of
his love, or the glolry of a deity who lays aside his glory and goes to
the cross.
For us here in this life, the thought of
God's glory is rather remote and abstract. But we must realize that the
most rapturous delights you have ever had - in the beauty of a
landscape, or in the pleasure of food, or in the fulfillment of a loving
embrace - are like dewdrops compared to the bottomless ocean of joy
that it will be to see God face-to-face (1 John 3:1-3). That is what we
are in for, nothing less.
And according to the Bible,
that glorious beauty, and our enjoyment of it, has been immeasurable
enhanced by Christ's redemption of us from evil and death ... Because of
our fall and redemption, we will achieve a level of intimacy with God
that cannot be received any other way ...
And why could
it not be that our future glory will actually so "swallow" the evil of
the past that in some unimaginable way even the memory of the evil won't
darken our hearts but only make us happier? (117-118)
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