When “Just Be Better” Isn’t Enough

A Reflection on Evil, Privation, and the Cry of the Cross

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Jesus’ words from the cross cut through every tidy explanation of suffering. They are not the complaint of a man who made poor choices. They are the anguished cry of the sinless Son of God, nailed to wood by the collective evil of humanity, abandoned in a way none of us will ever fully grasp. This moment refuses to be reduced to a mere absence of good. It demands that we reckon with evil as something real, active, and objective—something that invades, oppresses, and destroys, even when no human hand is at fault.

I recently spoke with a friend who holds a different view. He loves the early church fathers, especially Augustine, and he is deeply committed to biblical counseling. His conviction runs like this: evil does not truly exist as a substance or a force. It is simply the privation of good, like darkness is the absence of light. All suffering, then, ultimately traces back to human choice. A bad decision here, a moral failure there—and the ripple effects become the pain we experience. Therefore, the primary task of Christian counsel is to help people make better choices, to train them in virtue, to teach them how to live in such a way that evil is minimized, if not eliminated.

On the surface, this sounds reasonable. After all, sin does produce suffering. Repentance does lead to change. Virtue does bring blessing. But the more I listened, the more uneasy I became. Something essential was missing. The cross itself was being sidelined.

Privation theory is not wrong—it is incomplete. Yes, moral evil begins when a creature turns away from God’s good design. Yes, much of the pain in the world flows from human rebellion. But to say that evil is only the result of bad choices is to ignore the biblical witness that evil operates independently of human agency. Satan fell before Adam breathed his first breath. The serpent spoke before Eve reached for the fruit. Demons torment, disease ravages, earthquakes swallow cities, and children are born with bodies that fail them long before they ever make a moral decision. The apostle Paul did not wrestle merely against flesh and blood, but against spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Creation itself groans, subjected to futility, not willingly, but by the will of the One who subjected it in hope.

This reduction of evil to human behavior gives birth to what I call therapeutic dualism. It divides reality into two separate realms. In one realm are the things we can control: our choices, our habits, our responses. In the other realm are the things we cannot: natural disasters, demonic oppression, the mysterious will of God. The first realm becomes the domain of counseling—change your behavior, and your life will improve. The second realm is left to divine sovereignty—accept it, trust God, move on. But this split creates two devastating problems.

First, it blames the victim. The woman with cancer wonders if she lacked faith. The child abused by a parent is told to forgive faster. The man who loses his job through no fault of his own is encouraged to examine his hidden sins. Like Job’s friends, we sit in the ashes and demand confession where none is warranted. We turn suffering into a moral report card.

Second, and more dangerously, it diminishes the cross. If evil is fundamentally a human production, then Jesus’ role becomes that of a moral teacher, a life coach with a really compelling example. He shows us how to live better, how to avoid the consequences of sin. But the New Testament says something far more radical: the Son of God entered evil. He did not stand above it, lecturing from a safe distance. He was pierced by it, crushed by it, forsaken in it. The punishment that brought us peace was laid on Him. He became sin who knew no sin. The Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world.

Jesus did not come to teach us how to avoid suffering. He came to destroy the works of the devil by becoming their ultimate target. His cry of dereliction is not a failure of faith—it is the very means of our salvation. In that moment, objective evil did its worst, and objective love did something infinitely greater.

This changes everything about counseling. The goal is not behavior modification. It is not training people to produce less evil through better choices. It is union with the One who bore evil in our place. It is learning to behold the Lamb in the midst of the storm. It is discovering that even when evil comes—not because of our sin, but in spite of our righteousness—Christ is enough.

Biblical counseling, then, begins with lament. It gives permission to cry out, “My God, why?” without fear of rebuke. It sits in the ashes with the sufferer, refusing to offer cheap answers. It points again and again to the cross, where innocence was punished so that the guilty might go free. And it calls people to holiness, not as a way to earn rescue, but as a response to the love that has already rescued them.

My friend wants less suffering in the world. So do I. But the path forward is not through moral self-improvement. It is through the broken body and spilled blood of Jesus. Evil is real. It is objective. It is bigger than us. But Christ is realer. He has entered the darkness, absorbed its fury, and risen victorious. Until He returns to wipe every tear from every eye, we walk with the wounded, weep with those who weep, and fix our eyes on the One who was forsaken so that we never will be.

Because in the end, the cross is not a footnote to the problem of evil. It is the answer.