Dear Professor Theophilus:

I'm confused about something. How closely is God involved with each of us? I mean, if you take someone with a drinking problem (porn, drugs, whatever) and he really wants to quit, why do you suppose God doesn't help right away? Here is someone really reaching out, and it seems as if the help is not provided, because he still remains hooked. Those that do quit, seem to quit because of their own will. Please respond. Thanks.

Reply:

You raise good questions. How deeply does God really care for us? He loves us more than we can imagine. But if that's true, then when an addicted person wants to quit, why doesn't God help right away? Don't those who do quit, quit of their own free will?

Sometimes the best answer to a question is another question. How do you know God doesn't help right away? I would say that He must be helping. Addiction weakens our free will. If an addicted person is nevertheless able to quit "of his own free will" — something that would seem to be impossible — why not say instead that Christ is giving help to his free will?

You see, God gave free will to us. It's His gift. His idea of healing us isn't to override the gift, but to make the gift holy. He could have made us robots without free will — beings that made no real decisions, but did the right thing no matter what. Some people would like that, because then there wouldn't be such things as addiction; we'd escape the very possibility of self-inflicted evils. Here's the problem with that so-called solution: Without free will, we would also escape the very possibility of the greatest goods. How so? You see, God loves us, and it was His purpose to make us in His own image — like little finite copies of Himself, able to receive His love and to love Him in return. But for that, free will is crucial. No robot can love, because love, by its nature, is something freely chosen.

Do you see how this works? To be made in His image we must be capable of love; to be capable of love we must have free will; but to have free will, we must also be capable of willing wrongly. To "fix" the addicted person by destroying his already-weakened free will would be to complete his destruction. It would also make all his decisions meaningless, because they wouldn't really be his.

Instead, in Christ, God does something much more amazing, much more profound, something which transcends our understanding. Rather than destroying our free will, He heals it.

But what about those who don't escape their addiction? Isn't God helping them? There are two issues here.

First, you say the person "really wants to quit." How do you know that? When we are wrapped up in our sins, we often say to other people that we want to quit, even though we don't really. We even try to convince ourselves of the lie. Only Christ can penetrate the veil of deceptions and self-deceptions; we can't.

Second, although you say the person wants to quit, you don't say that the person wants God's help in quitting. God doesn't often help without our asking. Often we don't even want His help. To receive His help is to give up control, to abandon the claim to self-ownership, to admit that we are in ruins and cannot help ourselves. This is a blow to our sinful pride.

Besides, it is a fearsome thing to pass into the hands of the living God — even into His helping hands, for God's idea of helping may be quite different from our own. Our idea of help may be merely that we escape some sin or addiction, then return to our old lives, still without Him. But His love is inexorable, and in the torrent of that love He desires goods for us which we have never thought of and which would, in our present state, make us tremble to conceive.

Third, although God will one day wipe every tear from the eyes of His redeemed, He does not promise to heal every hurt in this life. Every now and then we get glimpses of some of the reasons. Here's what Paul wrote about one of his own afflictions.

To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But He said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:7-10, NIV)

The triune God made us for Himself, and He will be satisfied with nothing less than our transformation: purifying and burnishing us until we reflect back His image as perfectly as the angels reflect His light. Do we want that much help, that much good, that much glory? That is the question.

Grace and peace,
PROFESSOR THEOPHILUS

WHY DOES HE LET SATAN MESS WITH US?

Dear Professor Theophilus (I sort of think Obi-Wan might be a better title):

Why does God let Satan fool with people at all? I mean, I understand about free will, but letting him mess with us seems to make us less free to respond to God. What if God had stopped and barred Satan from coming into contact with humans? Does that make sense or is it muddled?

Also, isn't God going to do away with Satan him in the end times? If so, then why not do away with him now? Even if he's not going to "kill him," I wonder why God lets him "loose."

Reply:

I think God allows Satan to mess with us in part for the same reason He allows us to mess with each other. If there is to be real love, there must be real free will; but if there is to be real free will, then our wrong decisions must have real consequences for us and for other people. You know, men and angels both were given free will, and Satan is just a fallen angel. Over the centuries, many other possible reasons have been suggested. For example, if God did not allow even the possibility of evil, then perhaps we would have no chance to experience great goods like the virtue of courage. For another kind of answer, read the story here.

I don't know what would have happened if Satan had been barred from coming into contact with human beings, but it's possible that we needed to be tempted. Notice that I didn't say that we needed to sin. But if there had never been any temptation — if the possibility of turning away from God had never been presented in a way that made it seem real to us — would our adherence to God really have been freely chosen? Notice that God often allows human beings to undergo trials or tests. The purpose of the test isn't to tell God something about us, because He knows everything. It's to tell us something about us. For a fictional presentation of this view, you may be interested in the novel Perelandra by C.S. Lewis. In the novel, the tempter is trying again, but on a new planet.

Now about your final question — why God doesn't act immediately to put an end to the evil Satan commits against human beings. Though we don't have all of the answer, we have part of it. The crucial thing is that God has already acted against Satan. Remember that Satan's greatest harm to us was in the past, when he led our first parents astray. Ever since then something has been wrong inside the human heart, where Satan established his foothold. God's plan against Satan began to unfold immediately; it was His plan for our redemption. The calling of Israel, the giving of the Law through Moses, the prophecy of the Savior through the Prophets, the coming of Jesus, His atoning death and resurrection, the founding of the Church — all of these things were part of God's plan against Satan.

If you ask why God didn't use a faster-working plan, I suspect that part of the answer is that no faster plan could have succeeded with beings of the kind that we are — beings who have free will and so cannot be "forced" to be good, but in whose hearts the damage of sin had already been done. God could have destroyed Satan at any time, but the sinful bent in our hearts would have persisted. More important than destroying Satan himself was putting an end to Satan's power over us, once and for all.

That's what happened on Easter morning. Jesus' sacrificial death and resurrection on our behalf was the beginning of the end for Satan, because it destroyed his foothold in the contested territory of our hearts. Every human being who turns in repentant faith to Christ the Rescuer dies with Christ to his sins, and is raised in Christ to a new kind of life. Of course this new life takes root only gradually, but as Lewis explained, the entry of Christ into a human heart is like the landing of the Marines on the strategic part of an enemy-occupied island. Once the Marines establish their beachhead, the expulsion of the enemy from the rest of the island is only a matter of time.

We don't fully understand what God has told us about the closing phases of the war. In this phase, however, what we see is that the Marines are landing on island after island — Christ, in other words, is establishing his dominion in heart after heart. The timing for God's destruction of Satan is merely one small part of his larger plan for uprooting the evil done by Satan in our souls. God could have merely destroyed Satan but let the sinful tendencies in our hearts persist. In His compassion, He attacked sin at the root. I think this is more glorious still.

In the meantime, Satan is allowed to do no harm that God has not foreseen and provided for. God still allows us to be tempted — but He has promised that so long as we remain in His will, He will not allow us to be tempted beyond our power to resist. By permitting lesser temptations, He instructs us, "for the Lord disciplines those He loves" (Hebrews 12:6, RSV). In this way, even the Enemy's attempt to do harm is turned by God into a means of our good.

Grace and peace,
PROFESSOR THEOPHILUS

WHY DID HE MAKE HIM, ANYWAY?

Dear Professor Theophilus:

I've been reading and thinking, and I'm getting hit with some shaky questions. If evil didn't exist until Satan brought it about, how did it end up in Satan's nature? If Satan's nature is evil, how could God have created him? Can God create something contrary to his own good nature? Then the thought trickles down: Is God free?

Reply:

Different writers may explain these matters somewhat differently, but as I see it, the main outline of the story is something like this.

God is free in that nothing apart from God "makes" Him do what He does. Although everything He does is good, this isn't because something different than God, called good, somehow limits Him. Rather, good is what He is. Good isn't abstract, but personal.It's Him, in the triune love of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

It wasn't contrary to God's nature to give His created rational beings the gift of creaturely freedom, because the gift didn't make them rebel against Him; it merely enabled them to choose. True, to be able to choose is to be able to choose rebellion. But to be able to choose is also to be able to choose to follow Him — and some goods, like love, can come into their own only if they are unforced. So the gift itself was good and in keeping with God's own goodness.

To answer your question about how Satan became evil, I have to clear up an ambiguity in the way we use the word "nature." Sometimes when we speak of something's nature, we mean "how it is." For example, this is how we speak of God's nature. But when we speak of the nature of created things, we are usually referring not to how they are, but to how God designed them to be. Human nature is the design that God imparted to human beings; angelic nature is the design He imparted to angelic beings. In this second sense, there is no such thing as an evil nature, because all of God's creational designs are good. Even Satan was created with a good nature. He had existence (that was good), intelligence (that was good), various other powers for serving God (those were good), and freedom (also good).

However, because creaturely freedom includes the ability to choose whether or not to follow the Creator, Satan could rebel. And he did. It makes no sense to ask what pre-existing evil "made him do it." There wasn't any, for if something had made him do it, then his doing it wouldn't have been free. The explanation of why you commit a free act is that you choose to commit it.

By rebelling, Satan misused the good gifts God had given him; he put himself in conflict with his own design. It's exactly the same when we rebel. Our freedom isn't like the Creator's freedom, because God cannot act against His nature, but we can act against our natures. Though nothing "makes" us do it, we can use our freedom even to impair our freedom, to ruin ourselves.

So you see, there were no evil things in the beginning; the only way to get a bad thing is to take a good thing and ruin it. That's what Satan used the good gift of freedom to do, and that's what he taught us to do. We do it every time we use the good of intellect for cheating, the good of knowledge for rationalizing, the good of trust for deception, or the good of sex for lust.

Thanks be to God for untying the knot of this terrible sorrow through Jesus Christ, who, though sinless, took the burden of our sin and dislocation upon Himself. Have I answered your questions?

Grace and peace,
PROFESSOR THEOPHILUS

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