The perspective dilemma deals with man’s inability to see things in the same context that God does. This dilemma is the crux of God’s retort to Job’s complaints in the Book of Job. Since the Garden of Eden, man has sought to be God with respect to possessing all knowledge. That was never God’s purpose for man. God’s purpose for man was to simply know him and thus, worship him and depend upon him for everything – including knowledge. God never designed man to be another God; despite what the Mormon’s teach. In this article of “Good and Evil” we’ll explore more about how to help others, and ourselves to reason this out with both believers and unbelievers alike.

After 37 Chapters of Job and his “friends” bantering about Job’s suffering and Job’s “friends” trying to get him to confess to some secret sin that they posit is the cause of all his suffering, God finally responds to Job at the beginning of Chapter 38 with these words:

“Who is this who darkens counsel
By words without knowledge?
3 Now prepare yourself like a man;
I will question you, and you shall answer Me.”

Gulp. Look at that first sentence. That should tell you exactly what God is going to spend several chapters emphasizing to Job – that God is God and Job is not. Thus Job is not in a position to judge God about anything. His understanding is finite; God’s is infinite. As God presents his case to Job, he says something that has always haunted me:

“Would you indeed annul My judgment?
Would you condemn Me that you may be justified?” – Job 40:8

It seems incredible to us as believers that man would have the audacity to condemn God so that they may justify themselves, but it happens all the time. Sadly, we can be guilty in our hearts of doing the exact same thing if we’re not careful about keeping our in check with God’s word, rather than wandering off into the vanity of our opinions and our own futile and limited understanding. People are not comfortable in the dark; especially believers. Sometimes God will speak to us in the middle of a crisis and give some light; sometimes he doesn’t. It’s when he doesn’t, that we need to be very careful about not introducing our own “light” which, without the Holy Spirit, is really just darkness. We have to be okay with not having all the answers and deferring judgement on situations that we don’t understand until God shows us what’s going on – if he choses to. Sometimes he can’t because we simply wouldn’t understand things from the context that God does; just like Job. I call it the “Goldfish in a bowl” situation; more on that a little later.

Along those lines, have you ever wondered about exactly what the sin was committed in the Garden of Eden? We all know that Eve ate of the fruit (the Bible never says it was an apple, by the way) and their eyes were opened to the knowledge of good and evil. So why was that a sin? Wouldn’t knowing good and evil be a good thing? Well, first of all, partaking of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was deliberate disobedience (short aside: Unbelievers have a major misunderstanding about this passage, by saying that God forbid Adam and Eve to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, because He didn’t want them to know anything, which is false), and, (this is KEY), man does not possess the ability to know Good and Evil as God does. Only God can see Good and Evil in its totality. He knows every single action and reaction and every consequence for good and bad in every single decision that we make. Man was never created with the capacity to shoulder this level of knowledge; that purview belongs solely to God. There’s an old Chinese proverb that illustrates this pretty well:

The “Maybe” Story:

Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.”

The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”

The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.”

The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”

The author states: “The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad — because you never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune; or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.”

So to understand everything that God permits into our lives as far as what the intention is, is impossible. Unless you’re God. The “Why does God do ______” question is a failure to understand who He is and who we are. It’s not that the question is a bad question, it’s a sincere question. It’s that the question fails in its perspective. Imagine this:

You have a goldfish in a bowl. All that goldfish knows is his little bowl and that when the big scary creature (you) shows up to put stuff on the surface of the water, that means it’s time to eat. That’s all he knows. Can you imagine trying to explain to him what goes on outside his bowl? That the bowl is in a room. Which is inside a house. Which was built by carpenters using wood, sheet rock, and cement. That his room is lighted with a thing called electricity which occurs through the movement of electrons through a filament. Outside his bowl, creatures exist by exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide through a process called breathing. And that every day you get in what’s called a “car” and that car works through a combustion process in an engine, where you drive on roads and go to work and earn a living which pays bills by which you pay for food to feed them...

You see how complicated this gets? First of all, could the goldfish understand what on earth you were talking about even if you were to tell him? NO! (or if you have one that can, PM me offline because we’ve got some money to make). That is in short, the entire thrust of the Book of Job. We do not possess the capacity to understand the context of anything God understands. This is the point God is trying to make to Job:

4 “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Tell Me, if you have understanding.
5 Who determined its measurements?
Surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
6 To what were its foundations fastened?
Or who laid its cornerstone,
7 When the morning stars sang together,
And all the sons of God shouted for joy?” - Job 38:4-7

Now I ask you – do you think Job could have understood how God hung the earth on nothing, even if it was explained to him? How gravity was formed and how it works? How the distance from the earth to the sun and its axial tilt of 23.439281° is so precise because any more and we would freeze to death and any less we’d bake like cookies? I’m putting this in simple terms of course, but you get the idea. There’s no way Job would have understood any of that because he doesn’t possess the capacity to, and since even today we’re just getting around to figuring out the complexities of something as basic as gravity, I think understanding how the earth actually is suspended on nothingness is a bridge too far for us goldfish…

Hopefully, now you see why it was a sin for man to think he could understand good and evil as GOD understands good and evil. The idea was for man to defer to God on those things – not to take it on for ourselves. This is at the core of the “good vs. evil” objection with God. In their arrogance, intentional or not, man thinks he can see things from God’s point of view outside of what’s revealed in his Word. When they don’t understand, they pass judgement off on God as if their opinions are the sum total of all knowledge.

The point of these articles is not to give you the words to say to someone, but rather to give you the understanding so that you can reason with someone on your own terms in a way that the person you’re talking to can understand.