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On January 6, 2018 a child was rushed to the Tuen Mun Hospital in Hong Kong. The five-year-old girl was unconscious, wearing a diaper. Her body was covered with 130 injuries. She later died. The same day, her eight-year-old brother was sent to a different hospital. He was underweight and covered with about the same number of injuries. He survived. An autopsy of the girl showed she died of septicemia from salmonella and staphylococcus infection. The children had been routinely abused by their father and stepmother for months. They were eventually convicted of murder.*
Do stories of child abuse, like this one, fill you with outrage? Some things are just horribly wrong. Child abuse is one. I’m sure you can think of others as well. Some things are just evil. We know it. Even those who don’t follow Jesus know it. All people everywhere have an inborn sense of fairness. We know some things are evil and some things are good.
This sense of fairness, which results in moral outrage, is proof that good and evil exist. More than that, it is proof that God exists. People often wonder whether God is real when they see all the evil in the world. But if God were not real, we’d never see evil. We’d never agree on evil. Or more importantly, we’d never know good either. Without God there is no definition of good. Even the bad things in this world point us to God.
*Jasmine Siu, “Hong Kong couple found guilty of murdering 5-year-old daughter in horrific child abuse case,” South China Post, April 13, 2021, https://ca.news.yahoo.com/hong-kong-couple-found-guilty-064604370.html
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Bumper music “Landing Place” performed by Mark July, used under license from Shutterstock.