People often talk about “The Problem of Evil and Suffering” and many try to use it to disprove the existence of God. While I don’t think that the existence of evil disproves the existence of a sovereign, loving, Creator-God, I think that it does prove the fact that every person has a sense that something is not right with the world. Our world seems broken. The strong consume the weak. The whole worldview of Naturalistic Evolution is built around the principle of the “Survival of the Fittest.”
If you read the news, watch TV or even just look around at all, all the pain, destruction, and oppression of the weak in our world, both from natural and human causes, is hard to miss, and it’s distressing. Our world is broken. The Bible attributes the pain, destruction and breakdown of human relationships we deal with each day to a result of sin entering the world; and sin is defined as anything that humans do in rejection of God and God’s authority over our lives. We reject God and exalt ourselves instead. He has designed the world to work in a certain way and when we as the human race rejected that way (beginning with Adam), all our relationships – with God, with each other, and with the created world itself – broke down.
In Psalm 73, Asaph observes these truths and is heartbroken over it. He begins by acknowledging God’s character and faithfulness to his people (1), but quickly admits his difficulty with what he sees in the world. From his perspective, people bent on greed, selfishness, malice and cruelty are prosperous and have little difficulties in life; while those who reject their old, sinful patterns in pursuit of God’s way suffer and are beaten down, poor and afflicted. Asaph “nearly stumbled”, when he observed that the ungodly increase in wealth, become fat with fine eating, and are ever-increasing in their pride, arrogance, violence, boasting, and rejection and cursing of the heavens (3-9). He also mourns the fact that Israel, God’s people, are sympathetic to them as they “turn back to them, and find no fault in them.” (10) Asaph admits, upon seeing that this is the way the world seems to be going, that he feels his godly efforts have been in vain—that he is wasting his time and effort: “All in vain have I kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. For all day long I have been stricken and rebuked every morning.” (13-14)
Next time, we’ll look at how Asaph responds once he gets alone with God and considers the reality of their prosperity and how God is really treating them.
