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[Apache Master]

Hi, I'm not looking to argue or debate, but I do have questions that have stuck me up quite badly. I can't seem to figure them out.

1) How can God be all powerful and all knowing but not be responsible for everything in the universe, including evil? Especially if he knows how this will and would pan out.

2) Why is God considered unconditional love by some, but his love and favor seems condition based? How can hell exist in a universe created and run by unconditional love?

3) In Isaiah 54:11 God claims all the good things he will do for Jerusalem, but it's still in an awful state. It makes me doubt other inspirational promises in the Bible.

I hope I can get some answers, I will post more if this subreddit seems eager to help.

Things are going a bit rough for me now, and I've turned to my dad's old Bible for some kind of comfort. I want to believe in a loving God but things seem so bad here. Not to mention both my parents were Christians their whole lives, and then my dad died a slow, horrible death to cancer, and my mom has been in near constant pain since his death with a rare form of arthritis. I'm pretty confused and scared.

[jimwalton]

I'll try to answer briefly so as not to write a wall.

1. Knowledge is not causative; only power is causative. What I know changes nothing and causes nothing to happen. What I do is what makes things happen. Because God knows all doesn't mean he's responsible for everything that happens. Evil is not his doing. You may know something bad is going to happen, but that doesn't mean you caused it.

2. The Bible never uses the word "unconditional" for the love of God. Unconditional love is a misnomer, and while we use the term to explain what we think we see in the Bible, it's at times helpful and at times detrimental to our understanding. First of all, we should establish that love is an incredibly multi-faceted word, not easily defined, and undeniably contingent on context for accurate apprehension. Loving pizza, loving friends, loving a spouse, loving enemies, and loving life all mean different things, and we all recognize that. Secondly, "unconditional", in this context, is also multi-faceted. Putting the two together, then, is not a simple matter of linguistics, but is part of communication theory subject to contextual interpretation. Thirdly, as I said, the phrase doesn't appear in the Bible, but is an epithet we use to describe a characteristic.

When the Bible says (John 3.16), "God so loved the world," it means that love is one of his attributes—part of his nature and inexorable character. His attitude towards the world is one of love: concerned for their well-being and willing to sacrifice to bring about goodness. Now look at John 13.1: "...Having loved his own who were in the world..." This is a different definition. This describes a personal love for those who follow him. It's undeniably a different sense than Jn. 3.16. But it's not just that he loved his friends. Matthew 9.36, describing the crowds who were not following him, says, "When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd." He loved them, but we get a different feel than the word that was used in John 13.1. And of course we all know the text in Matt. 5.43-46 about love your enemies. "If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that?" This is obviously yet another definition of love, because we don't love our enemies as we love our spouses, or as we love God.

We are remiss to read the Bible as if it's uniplanar. It's multi-dimensionsal and contextual, and we have to read it with both intelligence and interpretation.

When Christians talk about God as "loving unconditionally," what they mean is that he is not a respecter of persons, with his favorites, and filled with prejudice and bias toward others. We mean love is inexorably a part of his nature, and he approaches all humans with compassion, a desire for a relationship with them, a willingness to forgive, an interest in their well-being, and with a will to join with them in a unified relationship. It doesn't mean that love becomes a flat plane of ambiguous definition, equality of expression, and, frankly, quite stupid. There is a world of difference between loving a terrorist and loving one's parents. Because love is multi-faceted doesn't mean it's either arbitrary or useless. Your love for your parents and your love for pizza aren't the same, and you can live with those distinct definitions without rendering them useless. We do the same thing with many words.

3. Isaiah 54.11. You have to also read the rest of Isaiah 54. The people have been rebellious and evil. They have deserted God and the covenant. God would be remiss to ignore that and pretend nothing happened. Any judge worth his salt punishes evil and doesn't turn a blind eye. So he punishes them, but he knows there are some godly people in the middle of it all. Those he will preserve, though they get caught up in the slurry of punishment the others have brought upon them. But he assures them of his love for them and their ultimate salvation, joy, and rebuilding. God's punishment of the evil ones is not to be misconstrued as a lack of love for the good ones. He is still taking care of them through all the grief. We are to see his love in the long term. Being a God-follower doesn't mean everything will be rosy for you, but that God will hold you through all the goods and bads that life brings our way.

I'm sorry to hear about your dad and mom. My dad died of cancer last year also. Cancer is a terrible thing. God never promises that he will protect us from the common sufferings of life. We all get sunshine, we all get rain. The difference is in the relationship we have with God that helps us see it all differently, strength to endure it differently, and a knowledge of God's purposes so we can understand how life works.

I would refer you to 2 Cor. 1.3-11 and 2 Cor. 4.7-17.