Last week in this Blog I mentioned the horrible atrocity perpetrated by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7th.  I also stated that many of us find it distressing to watch video images of such real violence.  Allow me to make a bold and daring claim: our distress, for example, at Hitler’s murder of 6 million Jews during World War II, is one of the best proofs for the existence of God.

That may sound incredible to you.  One of history’s most notorious atrocities - commemorated with a Holocaust Museum and concentration camp museums such as Auschwitz - and here I am trying use it to prove to you that there is a God in heaven.  Doesn’t this kind of evil rather play into the hands of God-deniers?  If there’s a God in heaven why would he have allowed the Bali Bombings or the disaster of the New York’s Twin Towers?  Rather than being an encouragement to faith are such atrocities not a hindrance to faith... and a strong motivation for unbelief?  If there is a God how can He just stand by and let more than a thousand innocent civilians be butchered by a terrorist organisation?  If God is good and loving and all-powerful... then why such evil?

But let’s turn that question around?  If there is no God then why not?  Why shouldn’t Hitler and his cronies exterminate 6 million Jews?  If God does not exist what’s wrong with blowing up the Twin Towers in New York?

The point is that once you do not believe in God you have another problem.  Why should there be a difference between good and evil?  Who decides what is good and what is evil?  Some people say: society decides.  But if that’s the case, whose society?  Hitler’s society...?  The society over which Hamas has control...?

And what about the whole matter of evolution - the random time-plus-chance process - that supposedly kicked off life on planet earth and which we’re told led to us human beings arriving on the scene.  Well, if that’s all true why shouldn’t Hitler exterminate all those who didn’t measure up to his standard of the Master Race?   Isn’t evolution all about the survival of the fittest?

No!  You and I know that there is a difference between good and evil.  And we are concerned about massive outbreaks of evil precisely because there is a God who has said what is right and what is wrong.  This God has built moral values into the universe He has made.  That’s why I’m bold to make this claim: the very fact that people are upset by suffering and evil... the very fact that we are angry at atrocities such as that carried out by Hamas, is powerful evidence that there is a God who created a moral universe.

Let me put it this way: if there is no God - and therefore no Day of Judgement and no life after death - then why worry about injustice and evil, why worry about murder and rape?  Who cares?  Because ultimately life that is based on the survival of the fittest is meaningless anyway.

Some may want to reply by saying, “If God is good and all-powerful why doesn’t He just stamp out evil?  If God is good why doesn’t He just get rid of all that is not good?  Maybe you’ve sometimes thought that way.  Okay, but then let me ask you: where would that leave you?  I’ll tell you where it would leave you: you too would be stamped out.  Why?  Because for God to be consistent he would have to stamp out everything and everyone who didn’t measure up to His standard.

Okay, I have to admit I don’t have all the answers as to why God allows evil,  But I do have this answer: God once allowed an enormous evil to take place in our world.  He sent His own sinless Son into the world.  Evil men took Him and nailed Him to a cross.  But that was God’s way of paying for the evil in the world - Jesus God’s Son took the punishment so that there would be a way in which you can make sure that you are not stamped out on that Judgment Day when God will stamp out forever all that is not good.  Those who trust in the saving work of Jesus will therefore live in a renewed creation from which all evil will have been removed forever.

John Westendorp