Chris Wright notes that asking questions in order to understand, to bring order and sense is a profound aspect of people being made in God's image and then makes these helpful observations:
Thus, true to form, when we encounter this phenomenon of evil, we struggle to apply to it all the rational skill - philosophical, practical and problem-solving - that we so profusely and successfully deploy on everything else. We are driven to try to understand and explain evil. But it doesn't work. Why not?
God with his infinite perspective, and for reasons known only to himself, knows that we finite human being cannot, indeed must not 'make sense' of evil. For the final truth is that evil does not make sense. 'Sense' is part of our rationality that in itself is part of God's good creation and God's image in us. So evil can have no sense, since sense itself is a good thing.
Evil has no place within creation. It has no validity, no truth, no integrity. It does not intrinsically belong to the creation as God originally made it nor will it belong to creation as God will ultimately redeem it. It cannot and must not be integrated into the universe as a rational, legitimated, justified part of reality. Evil is not there to be understood but to be resisted and ultimately expelled. Evil was and remains an intruder, an alien presence that has made itself almost (but not finally) inextricably 'at home'. Evil is beyond our understanding because it is not part of the ultimate reality that God in his perfect wisdom and utter truthfulness intends us to understand. So God has withheld its secrets from his own revelation and our research.
.......
Now this may seem a lame response to evil. Are we merely to gag our desperate questions, accept that it's a mystery and shut up? Surely we do far more than that? Yes indeed.
We grieve.
We weep.
We lament.
We protest.
We scream in pain and anger.
We cry out, 'How long must this kind of thing go on?'
And that brings us to our second major biblical response. For when we do such things, the Bible says to us, 'That's OK. Go right ahead. And here are some words you might like to use when you feel that way.'
chris wright, the god i don't understand, p.42
