Men Always Protest

How can a Good God and an Evil World co-exist?

Man has been given by God, the power of freedom, the power of choice, and enjoys himself so thoroughly in all that freedom offers, and conceives his life to such a degree even thinking he is separated from God, that with every approach of God, even every positive work of God in Man's behalf, that it appears to him as an unacceptable disturbance and finally an attack against him.

Man does not at all perceive that he is in bondage to the things adored, the objects of his affection, things which are actually chains keeping him in prison. When God comes to deliver him, he protests against his own liberation; the breaking of those objects, his chains, the doors of his prison. This is clearly the situation of Man.

We must take account of the fact that every work of liberation (the process of freeing us) is in fact destructive to the evil environment all around us. The very thing which assures his liberty is felt by Man as a personal offense.

"How can God who is good permit …?"

In uttering this phrase so frequently, Man does not envision for a minute, first of all, that the evil deed is most often the result of the liberty that God allows Man and the independence and freedom that man has seized against God. Man is responsible for what is done (and he has wished for it), but he protests against God for what is done.

In short, by asking this question … ("How can God"…?); man would demand that God take this liberty from him, which he enjoys.

Next, there are natural evils that take place by the spiritual powers (both of darkness and of light) that interact in the world and in society. Finally, that which does "evil to Man" can very well be the act of God that liberates him. But this liberation causes suffering.

I do not know anything better to compare this to than to a medical operation. The surgeon who takes out a cancer destroys the power of death … to the profit of the living body. But he removes something of this body, part of his flesh; he amputates something which had become the body itself. The patient who does not know what has been done, from what he has been saved, could perfectly well interpret that same medical operation as an evil torture, as an illegitimate extraction, being aware only of the pain that remains after the operation is finished.

And so it is with Man's thoughts toward God after He operates … we seldom fully understand.


Jacques Ellul … (edited for clarity)