Who's Really Responsible?

When skeptics angrily ask "How can a good God allow so much evil and suffering?" you don't even have to be listening closely to hear the accusation behind the question. In other words, skeptics blame God for evil and suffering. But is God really responsible? 

We have a gross misunderstanding regarding who's really responsible for evil and suffering. And the misunderstanding comes from lack of information. Let me illustrate it this way. If you picked up watching a movie halfway through, could you make sense of what's happening without someone telling you what you've missed? And if you picked up a book and started reading at page 100, could you make sense of what's happening without someone telling you what you've missed? Of course not! To make sense of the story, you have to understand the beginning. 

Well, history is His-story (God's story). And history has a beginning, middle and end. We're in the middle and the middle is filled with evil and suffering, so many people naturally conclude that God is responsible because he must have made the world this way. But that would be a mistake, for in the book of Genesis (the book of beginnings) we read that the world God created was good and that God made man good, for man was created in God's image and likeness. God knew we'd be tempted to blame him for evil and suffering so he made a point to have it recorded seven times that when he made the world, it was good (see Genesis 1). 

If God made the world and man good, then we have to ask ourselves: What happened? Well, though God told Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:16-17), they did so anyway (Genesis 3:6-7). And when sin entered the world so did death for God had told Adam and Eve that disobedience would bring death. As Romans 5:12 teaches us, sin entered the world through Adam and death entered the world through sin. 

Friends - sickness, disease, suffering, pain, evil and death are all consequences of man's rebellion against God. So who's really to blame? God or man? God may have made evil possible, but it was man who made evil actual.