Human beings are curious by nature, so it is understandable when people wonder why bad things happen. If there is a God, and if God is good, then why does evil exist? Surely there must be a reason.To answer this question, we must first begin to understand the concept of God’s sovereignty and holiness. I realize that’s a bit like saying, “In order to put gas in your car, you must first learn how to build an internal combustion engine while blindfolded,” but let’s just touch on some of the basics.

What is the very first thing we learn in scripture? “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). That’s pretty straightforward. The Bible opens by saying that everything exists because of God. Naturally, there is the assumption that the Creator is in control of his creation. In other words, he has complete sovereignty.

Scripture teaches us that while God does not condone evil (Isaiah 13:11), he did ordain that evil exist. This has everything to do with his sovereignty. In fact, as we see in the book of Job, not even Satan can make a move without God’s say-so.

God himself is not the sinner, nor does he act as an agent of sin. But he can and does intend sin for good. One example of this can be found in Genesis 50:20, where Joseph confronts his brothers who sold him into slavery: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.”

Note that Joseph didn’t say that God used evil for good. He meant for evil to happen so that a greater good would come from it.

Perhaps the ultimate example of God ordaining evil for good is the sacrifice of his only son for our sins. The crucifixion of Jesus Christ was clearly an evil act committed by evil men—there is no other way to describe the execution of the most innocent person who ever lived—but Christ’s death was predestined even before the world began (Acts 4:27-28, Eph. 1:5-7, 1 Pet. 1:18-20). And it is that sacrifice that has purchased eternal life for those who believe.

The blessed truth to be found here is that God is in control of all things (Deut. 32:39, Job 1:21-22, Isaiah 45:7, Amos 3:6, James 4:14-15). Everything that happens is in accordance with God’s will. In Ephesians 1:11, the Apostle Paul writes, “In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will.”

The sovereignty of God is absolutely fundamental. As Charles Spurgeon preached:

There is no half way between a mighty God that worketh all things by the sovereign counsel of his will and no God at all. A God that cannot do as he pleases—a God whose will is frustrated—is not a God, and cannot be a God. I could not believe in such a God as that.

God is nothing if not sovereign.

God is also holy. He is perfectly good and just in every way. While it may at first seem like a contradiction for a holy God to even allow evil to exist, much less ordain it, the existence of evil helps us understand who God is. Let me explain.

As human beings, you and I long for that which is good. We want to do what is right. We strive constantly for something that is higher than we are. And there is nothing higher, more right, or more good than God. He is the epitome of purity and perfection. As such, he cannot help but bring glory to himself. To do anything less would be a sin—and God does not sin.

In short, the existence of evil allows God’s glory to shine. The great American theologian Jonathan Edwards gives us a much more detailed explanation:

It is a proper and excellent thing for infinite glory to shine forth. And for the same reason, it is proper that the shining forth of God’s glory should be complete. That is, that all parts of his glory should shine forth, that every beauty should be proportionately radiant, that the beholder may have a proper notion of God. It is not proper that one glory should be exceedingly manifested and another not at all. Thus, it is necessary that God’s awful majesty, his authority and dreadful greatness, justice, and holiness should be manifested. But this could not be unless sin and punishment had been decreed so that the shining forth of God’s glory would be very imperfect, both because these parts of divine glory would not shine foth as the others do, and also the glory of his goodness and love and holiness would be faint without them. Nay, they could scarcely shine forth at all. If it were not right that God should decree and permit and punish sin, there could be no manifestation of God’s holiness in hatred of sin or in showing any preference in his providence of godliness before it. There would be no manifestation of God’s grace or true goodness if there was no sin to be pardoned, no misery to be saved from. How much happiness soever he bestowed he would not be so much prized and admired, and the sense of it would not be so great. So evil is necessary in order to the highest happiness of the creature and the completeness of that communication of God for which he made the world because the creature’s happiness consists in the knowledge of God and the sense of his love. And if the knowledge of him be imperfect, the happiness of the creature must be proportionately imperfect.

So, why does evil exist? If I had to answer in a single sentence, I would say this: Evil exists because its inevitable defeat ultimately glorifies God.

In coming weeks, you can expect to see leaders of various parachurch organizations stumping hard on behalf of the Marriage Protection Amendment (MPA), which will be voted on by the Senate during the week of June 5th.

Speaking after the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a constitutional amendment defending “traditional marriage,” Richard Land said, “It is now up to the American people to let their voices be heard loudly and clearly that they want their senators to vote for the Marriage Protection Amendment to keep activist judges from ramming same-sex marriage down their throats.” The line among evangelicals seems to be that we must define marriage for judges or they will define it for us.

Under the auspices of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and Focus on the Family, Land and James Dobson penned a letter asking pastors to gin up the troops in a fight on behalf of MPA:

Pastors could distribute information about same-sex marriage on that Sunday, perhaps preach on the issue if God should lead them to do so, and hold a postcard signing time at the end of the service. The churches could gather the postcards and deliver them to a local office of their senators or mail them to their senators’ DC offices.

Why are religious conservatives always taken in by this charade? For as long as I can recall, conservatives have been trotting out favored amendments that never go anywhere. Remember the Balanced Budget Amendment? Then of course there were amendments banning abortion and flag burning, or others in support of school prayer and term limits. I’m sure I’ve forgotten a slew of others.

Our friends among religious conservatives are right about one thing. At the heart of the gay marriage debate is the attempt by proponents of sexual and cultural revolution to subvert traditional institutions and normalize the abnormal and aberrant.

Nonetheless, amending the constitution is a foolish remedy? Why? First, it won’t pass! More importantly, the problem isn’t with the Constitution, but rather with American elites, in particular judges who wield the law as a weapon of revolution. The solution then, dear reader, is to rein in the judges, not rewrite the law of the land.

There is already an existing remedy to the problem written directly into the Constitution, but you won’t see conservatives embrace it because it would ring the death knell of a judicially imposed liberal imperium—and conservatives have neither the heart nor the stomach to fundamentally challenge the nature of the regime.

The Constitution authorizes Congress to limit the appellate jurisdiction of the Court. Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution says, “the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.”

Under that language, Congress may simply choose to forbid the Court even to hear, much less rule on cases involving gay marriage, abortion, capital punishment, school prayer, and a whole host of issues by a simple majority vote.

A constitutional amendment is not the answer to the collapse of marriage in American culture. Instead of adding amendments to our founding documents, true conservatives should be about the business of repealing existing monstrosities.

“This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror; I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.”

Thomas Jefferson
1820 Letter to John Holmes 
  
 
If President Jefferson was alarmed by the Missouri Compromise–that was to him a fire bell in the night portending the death knell of his country–imagine the fright he might take today at the five-alarm fire with which Americans are currently living. Jefferson could never have imagined the conflagration which we have today. This fire is so large that it requires an “all hands on deck” approach in order to battle it successfully. America’s klaxons are sounding the alert, but unfortunately there is very little response. 
Jefferson’s fire bell was the issue of slavery.

My five-alarm fire includes:
 
Fire Bell #1 – Cultural Self-Hatred
 
Last week it was reported that the Mullahs in Iran are going to force Jews and Christians to wear self-identifying badges of cloth in order to distinguish them from the Muslim citizens. Now we can and should all share outrage at this action, but we also must observe that the Muslims at least have no problem in embracing their own identity, even if they do so at the expense of those who aren’t Muslims. We may hate Muslims for it, but at least they esteem the culture and belief system that created them by isolating those who won’t esteem the Islamic belief system.
 
Americans, on the other hand, are full of self-hatred for the belief system that created them and made Americans to be Americans. This can be exquisitely seen in the recent phenomenon of the Da Vinci Code. Can you imagine an author or filmmaker in even a secular Islamic country like Turkey making a film mocking Mohammed? Of course you can’t. In America, the intellectual gatekeepers mock the Christian faith with films and political columns, complaining about how America is turning into Jesusland, while freaking out with dire warnings of societal gloom and doom when somebody makes a film about the passion of Christ. We live in a culture where our cultural self-hatred is seen everywhere. Most recently it was on display when our slandering cultural cognoscenti nominated a homosexual cowboy movie for an Academy award, and then turned around and offered up the blasphemous Da Vinci Code as entertainment, and let’s not mention Madonna’s most recent World Tour which finds her singing on a Cross with a crown of thorns on her brow.
 
A people who hate the belief system which made America cannot and will not be able to thrive. Our cultural self-hatred is a fire bell in the night that portends the death knell of what made America America, and I understand Jefferson’s terror.
 
Fire Bell #2 – The Eventual Return Of Economic Reality
 
For years, Americans have acted like debt created will never have to be debt repaid. On both a national and personal level, America is in hock up to its ear lobes.
 
On a national level, our deficit, trade imbalance, debt, near future nanny state ‘safety net’ responsibilities (Social Security, Medicare, prescription drug bill for the elderly), and the cost of empirical overstretch, (which itself alone is financed by $2 billion a day borrowing from international lenders), has pushed us to the deep end of the fiscal swimming pool with heavy anchors wrapped around our ankles.
 
On a personal level, the credit card debt of Americans remains at staggering levels. In addition to credit card debt, the average U.S. household is highly leveraged with mortgage debt, student loans, and automobile loans.
 
Americans are slow to realize that this debt must be repaid. They are also slow to realize that people in this kind of debt are slaves to their creditors (Proverbs 22:7), and they are slow to understand that it is possible that decisions made in this country at a political and economic level are not being made with the best interests of Americans in mind but are being made with the best interest in mind of those international creditors who are holding all of our debt. 
 
The economic reality that we have put ourselves into is a fire bell in the night that portends the death knell of America, and sound money men are filled with Jeffersonian terror.
 
Fire Bell #3 – Immigration
 
Just to show I am not racist, I will go on record saying that if 66 million liberal white Democrat and neo-con Republican politicians were going to be allowed to emigrate to these United States I would be just as filled with Jeffersonian terror as I am at the current prospect of 66 million immigrants from third world countries coming here over the next 20 years who have been completely untouched by the cultural influences that crafted These United States.
 
Both noe-cons / liberals and the proposed 66 million legal immigrants have in common the embracing of a culture alien from the Christianity that built this portion of western Christendom. Both groups believe in the state as God walking on the earth. Both groups believe in redistributionist economics. Both groups tend to build unstable family units. Both groups build cultures where large-scale graft must exist in order for their governmental structures to operate. The one virtue that the proposed 66 million legal immigrants might have that white liberal Democrat and neo-con Republican politicians lack is that many of them might have a strong work ethic.
 
Immigration on the scale that is currently being proposed will destroy America. With this kind of immigration, it will be Americans who will have to assimilate to the culture of those invading us in order to survive.
 
Our immigration situation is a fire bell in the night that portends the death knell of  America.
 
Fire Bell #4 – Dumbed Down Population
 
Tyranny and despotism thrive when the ignorant and the stupid occupy societies. Thomas Jefferson declared in 1816 that, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” In 1816 America’s citizens understood that the powers of governance rest in and are exercised by the people, and they believed and understood that the government was to be their servant and not their master. In 1816 Americans were familiar with what distinguished a constitutional republic from a democracy or a monarchy. Last week, I had a conversation with a college professor’s wife who was outraged that I was, “against democracy, the very type of government that our founders bequeathed us.” This belief is not uncommon.
 
A representative from the geography department of the National Geographic Society reported that young Americans are so ill educated, half of them couldn’t find New York on a map, let alone Iran and Iraq. “Many young Americans also lack basic map-reading skills. . .Told they could escape an approaching hurricane by evacuating to the northwest, only two-thirds could indicate which way northwest is on a map.”
 
John Taylor Gatto reports in his book The Underground History Of American Education that the literacy rate has consistently fallen in America in the 20th century.
 
This dumbing down of America has, of course, been quite deliberate, with the government schools leading the way in creating a sheep herd constituency that is easily controlled by both big government and corporate America. The last thing that either the socialist state or corporate America desires is a citizenry that can think on its own.
 
Our dumbed down culture is a fire bell in the night that portends the death knell of America, and we should wake with night terror when facing these facts.
 
Fire Bell #5 – Breakdown Of The Family Unit
 
Since 1970, out-of-wedlock birth rates have soared. In 1965, 24 percent of black infants and 3.1 percent of white infants were born to single mothers. In 2004, 69.2 percent of black infants and 24.5 percent of white infants were born out of wedlock, and the percentage of infants born to Hispanic women out of wedlock rolls in at 46.4 percent.  These statistics account for the fact that tonight, four out of ten minor children will not go to sleep in a home where the father and mother who brought them into this world are married to each other. 
 
Depending upon whose statistics you believe, somewhere between 40-50% of people who get married this year will eventually get divorced. This does not include all those heterosexual “couples” that will live together outside of marriage that will end up going their separate ways. Add to this the juvenile delinquency rate, the rise of the homosexual lifestyle, the annual number of abortions, the prevalence of teenage pregnancy, and the rate of child abuse cases, and pretty soon it becomes crystal clear that our family infra-structure is disintegrating.
 
This is yet another Jeffersonian fire bell in the night.
 
Now, if I were I a pessimist I would say that the hope of cultural renewal is between zero and zero cubed – especially when one considers that the one institution that exists to arrest this kind of slide is in a tailspin of its own. It seems that one faction of the Church today is merely following the culture in its sado-masochistic slide, while another faction is insisting that the Church as the Church isn’t responsible to speak to cultural issues because that would be to speak outside of its ordained sphere, while another faction is waiting for Captain Jesus to beam them up into the good Starship Heaven.
 
But I am not a pessimist. I am an optimist who believes that God’s kingdom will prevail, but not until we are realistic enough to admit the job that is in front of us. I could be like yet another faction of the Church I didn’t mention above, which manages to be optimistic by living in denial, going around denouncing those who point out the ringing fire bells, and instead go around telling everybody that, “all is well, all is well.”
 
Well, all isn’t well, and it will only be made well when we admit the task in front of us and when we return to the God of the Bible and the Law-Word of His reigning Mediator in Heaven who alone can grant awakening, reformation, and, consequently, cultural renewal, through the Spirit-led labors of His obedient priest kings. God sent His Son that the world might be saved through Him. As the Church is the body of Christ, it is the case that if the world is going to be saved from its personal and cultural dissolution, it will be because Jesus Christ saves it through the obedience of His Spirit-indwelt body.
 
The Church only needs to be filled with Jeffersonian terror if it will not be obedient and seek to extend the crown rights of King Jesus into every area of life. To the contrary, if the Church will just be obedient, it is the unrepentant sons of this present wicked age who need to cower in abject terror, for the King sits in Heaven above and He laughs in derision at their rebellious contumacy.
 
We are living in a five-alarm fire culture, but if the Church would just familiarize herself with repentance and get her own house and her own worship in order, everything could change. If the Church would just re-familiarize herself with the doctrines of grace and with the covenantal faithfulness of God, and with her institutional call to engage in cruciform dominion, Christ will bless her efforts for He intends to build and extend His already present kingdom through His body’s obedient faithfulness.
 
If she will not be faithful then, she deserves to be filled with terror.

I see that Richard Land has joined the immigration debate. He tells Baptist Press that Bush’s speech on Monday was “a tremendous, giant step forward.” Bush “clearly sent the message that the government is serious about controlling the border,” said Land. (Sigh!)

Land actually had the benefit of seeing the speech before commenting. John O’Sullivan, on the other hand, published this column BEFORE the president spoke. You won’t be surprised to know that O’Sullivan’s analysis is far closer to reality. O’Sullivan points out that whenever Bush gets in trouble on the immigration issue, he starts talking about enforcement:

“Did the president spend a large part of his speech on promising to secure the border by sending the National Guard there? Heigh-ho. This is the umpteenth time that Bush has promised to toughen up border security with a new initiative. He does so whenever there is public disquiet about illegal immigration.

Yet this kind of mini-initiative is fundamentally irrelevant. As this column has repeatedly pointed out, porous borders are the result of uncontrolled immigration as much as its cause. You cannot control the borders, however many patrols you hire or fences you build, if you grant an effective pardon to anyone who gets 100 miles inland.”

But even talk of enforcement is just that–talk. Speaking apparently with Vincente Fox in mind, the president said that we are not about to militarize the border. In fact, National Guard troops that head south will do so in lieu of their annual two-week training period. That’s right, head to the border for two weeks at a time. How effective can that possibly be? And as Steve Sailer has pointed out, the number of guardsmen Bush is proposing aren’t sufficient to do the job anyway.

Fred Reed has some intersting thoughts on the multiculturalist future of the United States. Fred lives in Mexico these days and tells us exactly what types of folks are heading north:

The Latinos coming into America are heavily Indian and uneducated. Mexican ophthalmologists do not swim the river. Mexicans who can make a decent living do not want to live in the United States. Thus the US gets the losers, the second-grade educations, people who on average have neither the intellect nor the urge to study. Yes, there are exceptions. But they are exceptions.

Everyone says, “But the Hispanics work hard.” They do indeed, in the first generation. Many people in fields such as construction have told me that the Latinos are the backbone of their operations, that blacks don’t want to work, have attitudes, show up if they feel like it and quit without warning. The Latinos work, now. Their children do terribly in school, however, drop out, and lose the desire to work. Then they join gangs.

It is interesting that some establishment liberals are beginning to speak with a touch of sanity on the immigration issue. At the NY Times, Nicholas Kristof, Paul Krugman, and even Tom Friedman have spewed the occasional sensible utterance. Over at the Washington Post, Robert Samuelson is writing with great clarity, too. Here is a taste:

President Bush’s immigration speech mostly missed the true nature of the problem. We face two interconnected population issues. One is aging; the other is immigration. We aren’t dealing sensibly with either, and as a result we face a future of unnecessarily heightened political and economic conflict. On the one side will be older baby boomers demanding all their federal retirement benefits. On the other will be an expanding population of younger and poorer Hispanics — immigrants, their children and grandchildren — increasingly resentful of their rising taxes that subsidize often-wealthier and unrelated baby boomers…The central problem is not illegal immigration. It is undesirably high levels of poor and low-skilled immigrants, whether legal or illegal, most of whom are Hispanic. Immigrants are not all the same. An engineer making $75,000 annually contributes more to the American economy and society than a $20,000 laborer. On average, the engineer will assimilate more easily…

As the president says, we need a “comprehensive” immigration policy. He’s right on some elements: controlling the border; providing reliable identification cards for legal immigrants; penalizing employers that hire illegal immigrants; providing some legal status for today’s illegal immigrants. But he’s wrong in wanting to expand the number of low-skilled immigrants based on the fiction of U.S. labor “shortages.” In his testimony, economist Chiswick rightly argued that we should do the opposite — give preferences to skilled immigrants. We should be smart about the future; right now, we’re not.

Even with changes made to the original Senate “compromise” bill, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation calculates that the number of legal immigrants who would enter the country or would gain legal status over the next 20 years is 66 million.
Steve Sailer also makes the point here that Mexico is actually above average in terms of income, which means that any “temporary” worker program may bring scores of Asians from China and Bangladesh while Mexicans will continue to sneak across the border.

With all of this, not to mention that foolish war we’re waging, is it any wonder that presidential and GOP support is in the tank?

On Monday evening President Bush, with his approval numbers heading toward the realm of the dead, appeared before the nation to speak on immigration hoping that his plan on immigration would shore up his political base. It didn’t work.

It seems that the President was playing ‘I’m moving my lips so I must be lying’ politics. This can be said because not 48 hours after the President told us that the borders must be made secure Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation published a ‘welcome back to reality’ study. Rector, who has studied Congress for a quarter of a century, said this week, that if the immigration bill being crafted by  (the Republican) Congress goes through, “It would end the U.S. as we currently know it.”  Further Rector said, in relation to the ‘Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act’ (S.2611), that ‘within 20 years, some 103 million new immigrants would enter the U.S.’ – and this is on top of the amnesty that it will provide for the current 10 million illegal immigrants that are already here.