Anyone with sensitivity and concern for the world can see that pain, suffering, cruelty, injustice, and immorality are active in humanity.  Man is able both to rise to great heights and to sink to great depths of cruelty and tragedy.   This is the great dilemma of mankind.  All of us find ourselves seeking answers and resolution to this dilemma. 

Of course, it is possible to try not to get involved in man’s dilemma; but the only way not to get involved in the dilemma of man is by being young enough, well enough, having money enough, and being egotistic enough to care nothing about other human beings.  

As we consider this question of man and his dilemma, only two possible explanations can be given. The first explanation suggests a metaphysical cause. This says, in effect, that man’s problem is that he is too small, too finite to wrestle with the factors that confront him. The second explanation is quite different; it puts man’s dilemma down to a moral cause.  

If the first explanation is right, then one is bound to conclude that man has always been in the same dilemma. Thus, for example, a lot of the ideas in modern thinking and philosophy say that man has always been fallen man. This also means that there is no moral answer to the problem of evil and cruelty. Because man, whether somehow created by a curious thing called god or kicked up out of the slime by chance, has always been in this dilemma, the dilemma is part of what being “man” is.  

But the Bible says that this is not the situation.  We will post more on this tomorrow… 

Thoughts developed and/or taken from the works of Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer, Trilogy – The God Who Is There