__________________
A positional paper
Presented to
Dr. Stephen J. Wellum
The Southern Baptist Theology Seminary
__________________
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for 27070WW
__________________
by
Fazhi Zeng zengfazhi@gmail.com 12/10/2016 IF GOD IS OMNIPOTENT AND GOOD, THEN WHY IS THERE EVIL IN THE WORLD
When Christians share gospel in Bible studies, we might have met questions from other non-believers or believers: if God is omnipotent and good, why are there still evil, hurt, painful and death around us in the world? There was one time, we were sharing gospel to an old lady, who experienced China’s cultural revolution. We talked about God’s unconditional …show more content…
In Genesis, the first verses of the whole Bible describe that “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. (Genesis 1:1)” Then the following part of this chapter describes how God created the world and how it was good in God’s eyes. God created the world and human beings. This shows His lordship over all created things. Isaiah 44:24 records that God announced “This your Redeemer, who formed you in the womb: I am the LORD, the Maker of all things, who stretches out the heavens, who spreads out the earth by myself.” He is our redeemer, our ultimate reason to live and creator of all heaven and earth. “Because God has created the world, he has right to do as he wishes with his own. In another words, God can do anything He pleased (psalm 115:13). At the meantime, we should remember that God is always good and almighty. His mind is higher than ours and his purpose is greater than …show more content…
As I mentioned in previous part, there are people who use logic to deny the omnipotence of God, even some people deny the inner sense that God exists. This is also records in the Bible Psalm 14:1. And this deep sense of deny is one of the consequence of sin. Sin will cause people to deny their knowledge of God. Human beings are created by God and we are limited. Limited in the time, space and even our logic. God created us which means He is infinite and we are finite. The fact that we cannot use logic to figure out the existence of God does not mean that God does not exist. Especially under the fact that our logic is limit. But this limitation cannot prevent us from knowing the existence of God and truth about Him because “for since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” Also we have Bible, which is the true knowledge about God and “we can know some of God’s through- even many of them- from scripture, and when we know them, we, like David, find them to be ‘precious’ (Ps.