God’s mitigating grace

So we live in a world where we are allowed free will and where we experience the consequences of our choices. Sometimes the choices we make are neither here nor there. At other times, the choices we make change our lives (for better or worse). Sometimes it is not easy to make good choices. Sometimes making a poor choice is the easier option. The consequences are nevertheless real. Sometimes we can’t see clearly what the best choice is and we feel we are forced to make our choices in the dark. Sometimes we don’t realise that we are making choices, especially when it comes to our attitudes and responses towards situations. Nevertheless, consequences follow the choices we make irrespective of the extenuating circumstances.

We also live in a world where other people are equally allowed free will and where we live in the wake of other people’s choices. We can see this all around us in our daily lives. Sometimes it isn’t a big deal. Sometimes living in the wake of other people’s choices is annoying and frustrating – someone’s bad parking for example. Sometimes we are forced to live in the wake of people’s choices against us, which make us angry, hurt us, even crush us. If God chooses to allow people their choices, he has to allow people their bad and evil choices as well.

But because God is Love, God gets involved in our lives in order to minimise the effect of evil. If invited to, he intervenes, mitigates and does not allow evil to wreak havoc unchecked. (I believe this is an important part of intercessory prayer – but that is for a different blog). At the end of the day, God is sovereign. Even though he will never betray his own character and act lovelessly, neither will be defeated by evil.

We can see God’s mitigating work, his grace, in the world today. When we look around, we see what a devastated place the world really is and how much evil and grief and pain and sadness and jealousy and struggle for power there is. But whilst there is a lot of evil at work, most of us would probably agree that there could be more. But God is at work, minimising, limiting, and mitigating the Evil One’s reign on earth.

Why does a God of Love allow so much suffering? How can a God of Love allow so much evil? There is no easy or glib answer for a question that has dogged humanity since the dawn of time. But perhaps it would help if we rephrased the question, if we started to look at it this way: if there were not a God of love, in a world full of sin, in a world full of death, in a world where the “Prince of this World” remains enthroned, how much more suffering would there be?