“This is not Heaven” recorded live from the  musical “His Story” featuring Fiona Poustie and the Mustard Seed Soul Band

One of the classic questions often asked is “Why does God allow evil in the world?” or perhaps “How can there be a God when there is so much evil in the world?”
I believe it I can be argued that man’s greatest quality is the capacity to love. However love has to be freely given – it is not true love if we are forced into it – we have to be able to choose whether to love or not – hence we need to have a free will. A consequence of having a free will is that we may choose not to love – in fact to do the opposite which is to hate – hate and evil are closely related. I appreciate that hatred can be positive if we hate, for example injustice, however hatred normally spurns bad things and bad things can be so bad that they can be regarded as evil. So it could, perhaps be said that there is evil in the world as a consequence of God giving us the capacity to love, together with a free will to choose whether to love or not.
In the featured video Dr Ravi Zacharias argues this issue much more articulately than I have, but the issue of why there is suffering in the world is something I wish to consider in the forthcoming blogs.