Ready, willing, and able

I saw this quote recently on Facebook. 

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”

― Epicurus

Like everything, I over thought this one and came up with 3 things to say, because I can't pick just one. 

1. The first thought was at what cost? What are the consequences of making evil just disappear?
2. Then I realized that God HAS solved the problem of evil. IS solving the problem of evil. We're just not experiencing the full effects of it yet.
3. And finally I see that the questions themselves have an unspoken, underlying assumption - God should just snap His fingers and make evil disappear.

Things in common

In order to address Epicurus' questions, I considered the nature of evil. Evil is like darkness. Darkness is not a thing. Light is a thing. Darkness is our word for the absence of light. Evil is not a thing. Righteousness is a thing. Evil is the absence of righteousness. God doesn't prevent evil. God fills us with righteousness.

Evil comes from our will, our desire. We drive out God so that we can sit in His place. Like a shadow, we block light, making darkness. We block His righteousness, making evil. To "make evil disappear" means taking away our will. We are no longer us, like computers or machines that blindly follow what someone else builds them to do. Not by choice, but simply by nature. A very heavy price, indeed.

A different way

Instead, God made a way to re-enter our lives, to bring back the light. More importantly, His way only costs Him, not us. We remain who we are. We accept Him in His place. And the shadows disappear. Evil goes away because there is only righteousness.

No, that does not describe today. Darkness still exists today. Sometimes it seems like the shadows are deeper than the light is bright. He laid the groundwork, let everyone know what He's done, and our hope is that this time is coming.

Oh, snap!

The entire basis of Epicurus' questions was that God should act in the way we want, in the time we want. I don't want that. My perspective is much too limited. I can barely handle the small amount of reality that I perceive every day. Being responsible for all of time, over all of space, is unthinkable.

From my mortal viewpoint, limited to maybe 70 or 80 years, in this little dust ball in a cosmos so big we can't measure it yet, it sure looks like God takes His sweet time curing evil.

From His viewpoint, where the next TRILLION years is less than one second of one minute in one day of my life, He is snapping His fingers. This is all moving very fast. And the brief time that evil existed will be nothing more than a single digit of Pi plucked from the middle of this unrepeating, never ending decimal. Long forgotten and crowded out by the sheer volume of forever.

Willing. Able. And did it. Because He is God.