How can Christians best respond to the reality of evil and suffering? What does it mean to trust God through our pain? Sean and Scott interview Ingrid Faro about her new book Demystifying Evil. She shares some vulnerable and honest stories that can bring hope during suffering.


Ingrid Faro (PhD, MDiv) is Affiliate Professor of Old Testament and Coordinator of the MA in Old Testament–Jerusalem University College Program. Ingrid is an author and international speaker on topics including deconstructing evil, navigating suffering, forgiveness, lament, abuse and power dynamics, women in the Bible and ministry, Genesis, and Ecclesiastes. Ingrid is the author of Evil in Genesis, co-author of Honest Answers, and forthcoming with IVP, Demystifying Evil.



Episode Transcript

Sean: How can we best respond to the evil and suffering we experience in our lives? How can we see God's work when the world seems so broken? Our guest today, Ingrid Faro, has written a new book called,“Demystifying Evil” in which she offers a biblical and personal exploration of evil. I'm your host, Sean McDowell.

Scott: I'm your co-host, Scott Rae.

Seam: And this is Think Biblically, brought to you by Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. Dr. Farrow, welcome to Think Biblically.

Ingrid: Thank you. Good to be here.

Sean: So, let's just jump right into your book. Tell us a little bit about the motivation to write a book that has so many personal stories in it, in which you take a personal and a biblical exploration of evil.

Ingrid: This book is a culmination of both my life, my own struggles, as well as my biblical studies. I started studying theology because I had come to a place where I did not know if God was good. I didn't know if I should even believe in Him. The only reason I believed in Him was I knew I had encountered Him as a young Christian. I didn't know if I could trust Him, didn't think He loved me, didn't know if He was just—in other words, I just was questioning everything. But I did have a sense that I needed to get answers, and I sensed God was telling me to get them for myself from Scripture and for me to get it from the Greek and the Hebrew. So, I started studying theology because I had so many questions. And the questions continued to build up, and life continued to get harder. I had experienced a lot of abuse and trauma in my life, and nothing to me seemed to make sense. And so, this book is the result of the wrestlings that I had with God in Scripture, as well as my life. So it is a reflection of both of those processes and the integration of the cognitive, the psychological, the study with just pure, raw heart issues.

Sean: Okay, so you are already a Christian and then went through this journey of personal and biblical exploration and thought, "I'm not even sure if I believe God is good." And then this book is kind of a process of you coming back. Is that correct in your life as a whole?

Ingrid: It's telling the process that I went through. And it was really during the work and my dissertation when I was just digging into the Hebrew that pieces began to make sense. And I would be reading, and all of a sudden I would sense the Spirit say to me, "Okay, stop. Let's take a look at this," and a clip of something from my life, something that I had gone through would come back and then it would start to make sense. So it was the process of making sense of the evil and traumas and losses that I had had in my life, as well as, of course, looking at the world around me. But it was – evil isn't just philosophical, psychological, it's personal.

Sean: That's right.

Ingrid: It's really personal for all of us.

Scott: I think, Ingrid, you're the first person I've heard say that writing a doctoral dissertation could have such a therapeutic effect in your life.

Ingrid: I know. [all laugh]

Scott: They don't usually do that. So, tell us a little bit more about your title, “Demystifying Evil.” What do you mean by that and what does demystifying evil actually accomplish for us?

Ingrid: I've found most people are afraid of evil. They don't want to talk about it. They don't want to think about it. They'll go to great lengths to not even face the things that have happened in their life that don't seem to make sense. So, wrestling with evil is really an attempt to make sense of the world, make sense of life. And so evil, because we don't want to talk about it, we go to churches and they just – I was in churches that I call happy-clappy. They don't want to hear about it, they don't want to talk about it. And so it just – evil becomes this great mystery, which makes it frightening, scary, and it paralyzes. When we go through things, most people either get paralyzed or just start charging in anger. But whatever happens because of the evils that we see and experience, we often become irrational. And that's not a slam, it's just a fact. It's a brain fact. It's what happens to us. And so, demystifying, it's like, let's take this out of the shadows. Let's talk about it. Let's look at it and let's face it and take it apart. So, this is a process of taking it out of those shadows, taking it out of the mystery, and saying it's really not all that complicated. It's certainly by no means trying to oversimplify—because that's one of my goals in the book, is let's quit trying to oversimplify evil and give bad answers, because all that does is hurt people more. But we have to be able to look at it, and – because God's not afraid of it. So we should not be either. He doesn't want us to be afraid of it, and it doesn't help us to fear it.

Scott: So, tell us just a little bit more about what demystifying evil accomplished for you personally, because you have a number of sidebars in the book that talk about some of the trauma that you've experienced. You've taken a lot of direct hits in your life. What did this demystifying process do specifically for you?

Ingrid: It helped me begin the process of just facing it. When we run from the problems, when we run from things, we're never going to be able to get through them. And so it starts the process. It starts by saying, "All right, I'm going to quit running from or hiding from or just hitting blindly at the things that happen. I'm going to look them square in the face and say, 'What is this? What happened? I want to find out.'" And so it is an act of courage to face evil. And as I put in my book, courage – and many other people have said, courage is not the lack of fear, but it's the decision to act in the face of it. And so, for me, it made evil no longer fearful, because I was staring at the face and saying, "Whatever you are, and whatever's happened to me, I am no longer going to lay down and play dead, and I'm not going to let you have the last word." And so it was that process of confronting evil. And I was one of the most fearful people you could imagine. I would just do anything to avoid a conflict. But it came to a point where either I was just going to die or else I was going to pick up and decide to live. And to decide to live meant facing what had happened in order to go forward and not just get run over and backed up over and over again.

Sean: Okay, so in some ways, you answered my question, but I'm really curious why you decided to start this process of demystifying evil. And let me just give context to this. I think you're right that evil, if you look at whether it's our worship songs or our sermons, sometimes it feels like we touch on evil on the surface, but don't recognize the depth of evil that's in the world, in our hearts, and in our experiences. So, we kind of hold it at bay. So, you're saying rather than hold it at bay, we need to lean into it because God leans into it and He's not surprised by this. What brought you to the point where you said, "All right, I have to do this"? Because I can imagine what holds a lot of people back is the fear that maybe, if I'm questioning that God is good, maybe Christianity doesn't have the answers. Maybe Christianity is not true. I mean, this is the biggest objection in different incarnations that unbelievers have to the faith. And I would say takes many Christians out of their faith. So, where did you get that courage and willingness to just lean in and all its messiness and say, "I'm going to wrestle with this"?

Ingrid: I had really come to the bottom and I did not have any desire to live. And so it really was for me a life and death. My life actually flashed before my eyes. They say that usually happens when you're dying or when you're in a severe mental state of despair. And so I was there. But I do meet so many people who say, "I'm afraid if I start crying, I'll never be able to stop," and so forth. So, there is certainly that fear. But some of it was also being willing to face myself. So, where was I complicit? Where were things in myself also that needed to change? So, there were so many factors. But there comes a point where you just decide, "Am I going to live, really live and find out what it means to live?" And just jump in and find out what is going on. And so, I think of the lament Psalms. We know that about a third of the Psalms are lament Psalms. And so, God is not afraid of our questions. And I remember as I was studying, as I began really studying God's word and reading even about Jacob, who God invited him to wrestle with him. And he named Israel after the one who wrestles, contends with God. So, I came to recognize that God wasn't—I was afraid that I wasn't allowed to ask God questions. Instead, I found out God was inviting me. "Come on, let's do this." He was inviting me into the wrestling match. And so, there was a certain invitation that I sensed to just dig in and begin the process. And we certainly, now at this end of it, as I look at it, we look at how God faces evil. Certainly he's not afraid of evil. He overcame evil by facing it and taking it upon himself for us. And so there was a process of discovering that as well. And it's... Yeah, I don't know if I answered what you were asking.

Sean: Yeah, you did. You definitely did.

Ingrid: Okay.



Scott: Ingrid, let me follow up on that just a little bit further. In fact, I love your comment on the Lament Psalms. I think it's so appropriate. One of my favorite books on those Lament Psalms is called, "Nobody Says Please in the Psalms."

Ingrid: [laughs] It’s good.

Scott: And it's just sort of brutal honesty that the psalmist has with God about these terrible things that are happening to him.

Ingrid: Yeah. Yes.

Scott: So, here's my follow-up. There's a really powerful story in the book about your friend, Gail. Who asked you about what had happened to you and if you believed it was God's will. What did she say to you, I love how you put this, "It transformed you from a beaten dog to a warrior with a mission."

Ingrid: Yeah.

Scitt: I love the way you put that.

Ingrid: Yeah.

Scott: What did she say to you that made that difference?

Ingrid: Yeah. We hadn't seen each other in several years. And so, when I went to visit her, her husband had died, my husband had died, and we were talking. She looked at me and she was saying, "You just don't look the same as I remember you. You look exhausted." And then she stopped. And she's one of these friends that everybody needs friends like this. We'll just say what she's thinking. Just no holding back. And so she just looked at me and she said, "Ingrid, do you believe that everything that happens is God's will?" And at that point in my life, I kind of sat back. I kind of shrugged and went, "Yeah. Well, yes, I do." And she looked at me and she said, "I do not." And I felt it was like when she said it, she had slapped me on the face, taken the whole Gatorade thing full of ice, dumped it on my head. And in that moment, I knew that I had to change a foundational belief that I had held. And it was just in that moment, it was like it shook something off of me. It shook off a complacency. It shook off a, "Well, you know, it's just..." I mean, we know scripture does say, "The Lord gives, the Lord takes away." But I love the Old Testament. And I already knew the story of Joseph. When he was a slave, he didn't say, "Well, I guess this is going to be the faith the rest of my life. This must be what God has for me." And, "Well, now I'm in prison. So, I'm just…” He still believed that God had spoken to him. And so, there was something for him to do. And so, in that moment, I realized there was something that I had to do. And I also somehow—it was kind of like scales falling off my eyes, really. It was just that, you know, there was a spiritual force to her words, where I realized I have just been letting evil run over me and back up. And I had learned, through counseling, after my first husband who tried to kill me that it's not good or nice to allow evil to run over you. But I realized I had been allowing evil to run over me. And in that moment, I also realized that there was something I needed to do to confront and stop evil in my life and let it go out from there. And so, it was just this kind of accumulation of things that began to then build in me. And this happened the summer between completing an M.Div degree and starting a PhD program. So, I was certainly no master of divinity after completing my M.Div degree. I had more questions, but that summer in between was when God got hold of me in that moment and a few other things to say, "Let's tackle this. Let's see what my responsibility is." And of course, then, as I was studying the image of God and all of that means, in terms of us being co-regents with God and how He created, why He created us and our purpose as His image bearers, so much began to just build into this that really transformed. And I also realized there is a Satan and there are spiritual forces of darkness. And they hate me because I'm an image bearer. They hate every human being because we're image bearers of God and they want nothing more than to mar the image of God. They can't get to God, so they're going to get to us. So that began this process of looking at, where does evil get in? Where are the different places? Sometimes it's through our own ignorance. Sometimes it's through our rebellion. Sometimes it's through spiritual forces. Sometimes it's through other people's malevolence. Sometimes other people's ignorance. There are so many ways that it can get in, but we have a responsibility in the process.

Sean: Ingrid, when you said, you know, was it God's will for you to kind of suffer in a certain way? I could hear some people saying, well, it's within God's sovereign will, within his plan, and he's going to work all things for the good. You had kind of believed more so before that, if I understand correctly, that God really caused these things to happen. So, the shift for you was, oh, God is still sovereign, but I have some response and agency on how I respond to this. Is that like—clarify that shift for me when you make that point?

Ingrid: Yes, you said that absolutely correctly, because I had become basically passive. It's the way people sometimes just so nonchalantly say when something bad happens, “Well, God is in control” as if I have no responsibility in the process of what happens. And it's really, it becomes a lack of faith, and a lack of belief that God actually wants good. It's a lack of even definition of good. And frequently that's where I, when I'm speaking about it, or to groups sometimes I have to start with, let's start with what is good? Because so I was calling good evil and evil good, and that is not acceptable. When we’ve blurred those lines and we start thinking that God is the author of evil, and then that's when our minds become twisted and we no longer can believe in God or trust him to help us through. I remember one specific moment when I was wrestling through sort of this shift of process, and the Lord brought up to me this Psalm 23, everybody knows, “Even though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for you are with me.” I'm thinking, yeah, that's a good verse. The word here is to “get through.” Don't lay down in the valley of the shadow of death. Don't set up your camp here. I am with you to bring you through this. So, fear nothing bad, fear no evil. So, that's the shift. The shift isn’t just punch me again. Okay, punch me again. Or it's like, wait a minute. This is not right. You are not doing good for me or yourself. Stop it. It's saying to the evil stop it and saying, okay, Lord, what is the good you want to bring out of this? He doesn't mean it like Joseph. He didn't want him to stay in prison. He didn't want him to stay in a defiled, depleted state. He wanted to show him how he was with him to bring him through so that he could take the evil that it had intended and turn it into good. And that's the shift. The evil that happens is not supposed to be the end of the story.

Sean: Amen. Amen. Well said. Let me lean in to something that you share in the book and you shared earlier with us and just kind of ask you in some ways point blank the problem of evil. And I realize you wrote your dissertation on this, the book on this, and in some ways your book is not just trying to perfectly answer it but wrestle with it. But you share tragic experiences. You mentioned a moment ago that your husband tried to kill you, the death of your husband, your son rebelling by dropping out of high school, a business failing, and if I read it correctly, being homeless for a season. What would you say to the person who says, “Ingrid, why would a loving God allow such tragedy to happen to you?”

Ingrid: Yeah, and obviously I don't want to give a super simplistic answer but more of a perspective. And it's important, one, it was important to recognize where did I participate in the process that allowed these things to happen also. And that's not to blame myself because God knows everything, you know, the things that I had gone through that caused me to be in the state that I would accept some of the things that happened and so forth. But, I think, I remember when I was reading Luke 22, in verse 31, where Jesus’ crucifixion is coming up and Peter and the disciples have just been talking about who's the greatest one. And then Jesus turns and he says to Peter, now he calls him Simon, Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you like wheat. We know in the Greek that, it could be translated, he's demanded with a right to demand to sift you like wheat, but I've prayed for you that your faith wouldn't fail. And I remember it hit me, what? Jesus, you could stop saying, what do you mean I prayed for you? That's not good enough. You could stop him. But Jesus said, but I've prayed for you that your faith wouldn't fail and when you've turned to strengthen your brethren. And so, it was like, there are things that Satan, even though Jesus is Lord and I don't want to diminish the Lordship and the power of our God at all, but there are things, I've come to call them “flesh hooks.” There are things—and this is just one response—sometimes there are things in us that allow evil to grab hold. So again, I just call them flesh hooks. So here, Peter, he thought really highly of himself, you know, Lord, I'm good, I would die for you and all that. And so there was something in him that allowed Satan to sift him like wheat. And we know that ancient sifting process, the winnowing, you beat it on the stone or hard ground and you throw the grains up in the air, the wind blows. It's just this messy, hard beating process. And so, sometimes there is a process that we go through. And then I remember when my son, after dropping out of high school and doing drugs, and again, he had given me permission to share all these things, of course, but he had just been a mess. But he came to a place where he wanted to get his life right again. He wanted to get back with God. And he came to me, he said, "Mom, I'm trying so hard. Why isn't God helping me more?" And every once in a while, you'll find yourself saying something that you know God is really speaking through you. Because, at the time, I’m like, “Lord, help me know what to say.” And what I heard myself saying was, "Son, God really loves you. He just wants to pour out good things on you. He wants to give you all kinds of things. And he just wants wonderful things for you. But he's also a really good father. So he doesn't just want to pour things out on you. He wants you to become wise. He wants you to grow up to be like him. And that requires a process of learning. And so that's also, God is with us. He doesn't do the evil things. Evil things are going to happen for multiple reasons,” which again, one of the reasons I wrote the book, all the different ways that evil can come in. “But God allows it.” I love there's a quote by Abraham Heschel who wrote the book, “The Prophets.” And in his quote, he said, "There was a moment when God looked at the creation he made and said, 'It is good.' But there was never a moment when God looked at the history that mankind has made and said, 'It is good.’" So, God has given a degree of autonomy to humanity, a large degree of autonomy, because that mandate, his creation, when he made us in his image according to his likeness, so that we will rule over this creation as his stewards, as his representatives. And he's never taken that away. He gave us that authority and that responsibility. And we need to learn what that is and step into it. And it's so rich when we realize who he made us to be. So when we say, "Oh, I'm only human," we're really underestimating who God made us to be. Because yes, we're dust, but we're also in breathed with His spirit. And so, he's given us that authority and the responsibility, especially through Christ, to take dominion and to turn things around. In his name, he empowers his word when we're walking and fulfilling his word.

Scott: Yeah, that's a really good, helpful word. I think it's part of the answer to Sean’s question about why God would allow the tragedy to happen to you. You bring out, when you discuss Job, where you point out, I think correctly, that Job's friends all had rational, cognitive answers for why Job was suffering. But none of those turned out to be adequate. They were incomplete at best. And when God comes on the scene at the end of the book of Job, everybody's expecting, "Now, God, you're going to provide the answer for this." And he doesn't. And you point out that God does not provide a rational answer for Job. Instead, he gives him his presence as a person to walk with him through the things that he's experiencing. And I think some of these things, we're not going to know the why's for some of these things until we get to glory and see God face to face. And I think our lives sometimes, I think, resemble the bit of the underside of an oriental rug, where you can sort of faintly make out the design, but it's got lots of holes and knots in it. And it's not very attractive, but when we get on the other side of that oriental rug, you see this really intricate, beautiful design. And I suspect that may be a bit of what Solomon means by living life under the sun or this sort of this side of eternity. So, a question that relates to natural evil. Evil we've talked about so far are things where you have evil people inflicting evil on other people. And it's not that you've sinned, but you've been sinned against. But natural evil is something a little different than that. Natural evil, as you described, doesn't have any intent, but it's just as destructive and just as harmful. I'm thinking about the tsunamis and the hurricanes and the earthquakes that seem completely random, completely out of the control of God. Yet those, I think, are some of the hardest things for the philosopher to explain. So, what are some important biblical truths for thinking about natural evil?

Ingrid: Yeah. And that might have been one of the hardest chapters to write, because it's multidimensional. It's not a simple answer for that either, because God created laws of nature. There's a regularity, a dependability of nature that is good, that's part of God's good creation. We know the laws of gravity. We know the laws of physics. And yet there’s the weird things of quantum physics and string theory and all that. So, but there is still a regularity to the natural world that God created that is good. And there's a wisdom in creation. But there's also an interconnectivity between nature, humans, and non-human forces, both of good and evil. And so, we are taking the Adam from the Adamah. We are connected to nature. The Bible speaks of the earth as active, a living participant that sees and responds to what people do. And so, the land itself is witness to God's covenant and it self-responds to violations by those that God has appointed as earth's caretakers. And so, that interconnectedness and God giving us responsibility is stewards of creation. And again, there's some great books on that as well. But we are stewards of creation. We have responsibility. So, nature does also respond to us, just like in Genesis 3 when the humans rebelled against God, then they had put themselves in a position where they had set themselves also against God's creation. And so, the earth became hard toward the humans. It was going to cause them grief and suffering to produce from it. And so, there is this interconnectivity, we have to know that we have a stewardship for the earth and that everything is connected. So what we do does impact the earth as well. And so, just looking at the natural evils, there is a cause and effect in there where innocent people do get severely hurt by nature itself. And so, there's sort of that long view of our responsibility and our failing to take care of this earth, these good stewards, caretakers of this earth God has given us. And so, there's this millennia of that effect. I remember in 2010, there was an article that said, “The Year 2010: the Year the Earth Struck Back. So, again, we do recognize some of our complicity in ruining soils and things like that. But yet when things do go really bad, when there are these tsunamis and so forth, we do have a responsibility to do everything that we can to take care of those who have been injured by it. So that is certainly one aspect of it. So we can look at sort of that long, the long game of how we have, you know, like Hugh Ross points out that mosquitoes used to be in only 10% of the world. Now they're in 100% of the world. Because of us, we've spread them. We've spread rats. We've spread disease, you know, all the things that we've spread and continue to spread. And even some of the archaeological things that I've read that, you know, are from the earliest histories of agriculture, we've been basically ruining the earth. So, all of these things accumulate. But at the same time, one is just being there to help people when things go wrong. Two, being responsible, like putting railings on balconies. I mean, there's some simple things that we can do to protect people from the laws of nature. But also to pray. There is a power in prayer that sometimes, even with nature, that we fail to avail ourselves of. You know, we see Jesus speaking to the wind and the waves. And so, I've heard many, many stories of people praying in the midst of natural disasters and seeing sometimes the weather change, sometimes being protected, sometimes getting wisdom. So, we do need to partner with God even when nature is acting badly and say, "Lord, how do you want me to pray? And what do you want me to do in order to try to and to see what God can do?" Again, I've got some wonderful stories of the things that God has done, even as people pray in the face of natural disasters.

Sean: You do. That's one of the things that really struck me about your book is how many stories are in it. Because I'm an apologist. I was kind of expecting to go in reading an apologetic defense of evil, a defense of God in light of evil. But really more than anything, this is, I would almost say, personal and biblical. You rely upon the Scriptures but share so many personal stories. So, I would say, my suggestion is for somebody who's looking to say, and I'm looking for an airtight logical defense of the Christian faith in light of evil—that's not the book you're trying to write. Seems to me the book you're trying to write is saying, "I'm a Christian who has been through profound pain, profound hurt, wrestled with God. I don't have any simple, clean answers for you, but here's how I've made sense of it. Here's what Scripture says." And if somebody's open to that kind of story, I think they would be really, really encouraged by your book. So, I appreciate your honesty. Appreciate you taking the time to write a popular version of your dissertation. And thanks for joining us on the Think Biblically podcast.

Ingrid: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Sean: This has been an episode of the podcast Think Biblically: Conversations on Faith and Culture. The Think Biblically podcast is brought to you by Talbot School of Theology at Biola University. And Scott, you know, we have programs in Southern California and some fully online, including, where I teach, which is in the Masters of Christian Apologetics, now offered fully online. In fact, I teach an entire course on the problem of evil. To submit questions, ask questions, or to submit comments or ask questions, or suggest issues or guests you'd like us to include, please email us at thinkbiblically@biola.edu. That's thinkbiblically@biola.edu. Please consider giving us a rating on your podcast app and consider sharing with a friend. Thanks for listening. And remember, Think Biblically about everything.