When Evil Comes For Children, Where Is The Light?

Last month, a horrible abuse story broke in my state, Alabama. It involved children, a bunker, and sex trafficking. I can’t tell you any more than that because I couldn’t bring myself to click on the reports. I fear that if I look head-on at such suffering inflicted on helpless children, the weight of that evil would crush me.

The contemplation of great evil can wreck a person’s faith. Last week, Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative Party in Britain, gave a wide-ranging interview in which she talked about losing her Christian faith after reading the horrific story of Josef Fritzl, an Austrian man who imprisoned his daughter as a sex slave for 24 years. Badenoch said,

I couldn’t stop reading this story. And I read her account, how she prayed every day to be rescued. And I thought, I was praying for all sorts of stupid things and I was getting my prayers answered. I was praying to have good grades, my hair should grow longer, and I would pray for the bus to come on time so I wouldn’t miss something. It’s like, why were those prayers answered, and not this woman’s prayers? And it was like someone blew out a candle.

Revealing Question

Badenoch is asking a version of the question “How could a good God allow suffering?” Somehow, this question comes into focus most sharply when children are involved. Children are weak and defenseless. Jesus loved children and welcomed them. How could a compassionate God fail to protect them and deliver them from evil?

The question ‘How could a good God allow suffering?’ comes into focus most sharply when children are involved.

The Scriptures ask versions of this question again and again: “O LORD, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked exult?” (Ps. 94:3). The Bible anticipates the discordance we feel between an all-powerful God and unjust suffering.

But the fact that we ask this question at all is evidence of what theologians call common grace. Although sin and death pervasively taint everything in our world, this world isn’t as bad as it could be. It isn’t acceptable or legal for fathers to rape their daughters. It isn’t acceptable or legal for women to sell children to sex traffickers. Although sinful men and women have flawed consciences, we know that children should be—must be—protected from cruelty.

C. S. Lewis writes of himself before his conversion,

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.

Had we been the product merely of chance plus time, we might have felt an evolutionary instinct to protect our own offspring, but we wouldn’t feel a moral revulsion when others mistreat theirs. Human beings judge each other because we’re made in the image of a just God.

Promised Justice

Ironically, many people who reject the Christian faith because of the problem of evil also decry the belief that God would send anyone to hell. They cry out for justice, but only in moderation, please.

When it comes to justice, God doesn’t go in for half measures. He never turns a blind eye to sin. We know this because he allowed his own Son to suffer and die rather than let our sin go unpunished. And God will not turn a blind eye to people who hurt children. One of Jesus’s most startling warning condemns those who harm the young: “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matt. 18:5–6).

When it comes to justice, God doesn’t go in for half measures. And God will not turn a blind eye to people who hurt children.

God hasn’t told us all the reasons he allows unjust suffering, but he has promised he’ll ultimately judge the wicked. He’ll right the wrongs. Isaiah prophesies about the Savior to come, saying, “With righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked” (Isa. 11:4).

Why is this judgment necessary? Because only once the threat of the wicked is removed can little children be safe. Just a few verses later, we read,

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat. . . . The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea. (vv. 6, 8–9)

Isaiah is describing a world without predators—human or animal. This is the kingdom that Jesus will bring when he returns in glory.

Fulfillment of Hope

Some might say the Christian hope for ultimate justice is wish fulfillment. We want there to be justice, so we believe there will be.

In Lewis’s novel The Siver Chair, an evil witch rules an underground kingdom. She has cast a spell on its inhabitants to make them believe there’s no Narnia above. She tells them that the memories they have of a better world are their own vain imaginings. Puddleglum, a Narnian, breaks the spell when he challenges the witch:

Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play world which licks your real world hollow.

We can’t prove that our hope is grounded, but we can ask ourselves why we find evil so repulsive, if indeed evil is bound to be forever unhindered. We can ask why people who have only known a broken world long for a world that’s whole.

We can’t prove that our hope is grounded, but we can ask ourselves why we find evil so repulsive.

When evil men and women hold children captive in a bunker, they tell them there’s no such thing as freedom. They try to snuff out the candle of hope, because a person with no hope is compliant. But when those children are delivered after 4, or 12, or 24 years, they learn there’s sun and grass and love and justice, something they always hoped was true.

When we hear a story of evil so heavy it threatens to crush us, we must close our ears to the whispered lie, “This is all there is.” We must become the voice of hope that rages against cruelty, cries out for justice, and looks for a promised deliverance.