Posted October 19, 2026
Comedian Billy Crystal is currently appearing on Broadway in 860, his one-man show named after the street address of his California home that was destroyed by wildfires last year. In a recent interview, he discussed the loss of his longtime home and the death of his close friend Rob Reiner.
In his previous one-man show, 700 Sundays, the Jewish actor described his conversations with God. When asked if he had been speaking with God after these painful losses, he replied, “No, ‘cause I don’t trust him.”
“Too many bad things have happened,” he added. “The Earth is in bad shape. This is a weird, scary time. So no, not anymore.”
A priest preparing Communion on Saturday at a church in Ecuador was struck by a falling crucifix and killed. The same day, an Air Force member died from injuries he suffered when rappelling from the Alamodome’s ceiling in San Antonio as part of a college football pre-game ceremony.
Four service members were killed and dozens were seriously wounded in an incident at a military base in the Canadian province of Alberta. And two people, including a six-year-old boy, were killed and ten others were injured when a truck drove through a youth soccer game in Wichita, Kansas.
In such times, Billy Crystal’s loss of faith in God makes compelling logical sense.
Jews and Christians alike believe that God’s existence is not just correlative to world events but causative. It’s not just that an all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful deity happens to exist in a world filled with evil and suffering. Rather, his sovereignty requires us to connect his knowledge, love, and power to our pain.
It makes sense that if anyone has the capacity to prevent evil but does not, then that evil’s existence is in some sense their fault—God included.
Of course, the opposite is therefore true as well. As Dr. Ryan Denison noted in his Friday Daily Article response to the Oregon school shooting, “If God bears any sense of responsibility for the lives that were lost, then he bears at least some responsibility for the lives that were saved as well.” If he is held to be causative for evil, he must also be considered causative for good.
I agree completely with Ryan’s assertion. However, if I were Billy Crystal, I would counter that the more we credit God for the good in our world, the more we have the right to be frustrated by the evil. If he can limit a school shooting to fewer victims than would have otherwise occurred, he can stop the shooting altogether.
What I really want God to do is to stop evil as I define it every time it would otherwise occur. But this is because I have not thought through what I am asking him to do.
First, I need him to adopt my definition of evil over yours. The rain that frustrates a golfer answers the prayers of a farmer. Next, I need him to prevent evil actions, which requires him to prevent evil thoughts, which requires him to prevent evil attitudes. And yet, I need him to preserve human freedom in all this lest we become robots at his sovereign command.
In essence, I want him to make a world in which humans are free and souls can mature without the evil and suffering that are consequences of the former and occasions of the latter. I am therefore asking God to do the logically impossible, like making a square circle or two mountains without a valley between them.
But asking for the illogical is an illogical thing to do. So, I need a different approach to this most vexing of all issues.
By logic, a loving and sovereign Father must either prevent or redeem for greater good every vestige of evil in our world. If he does not choose the former, it must be because he has chosen the latter.
In such cases, I should not expect to understand his reasoning, not only because my finite mind cannot comprehend his omniscient ways (Isaiah 55:8–9), but also because this greater good will often exist in ways I cannot comprehend in the present or see (yet) in the future.
However, detecting such redemption in the past encourages us to expect such redemption in the present.
For example, last Friday marked the anniversary of the 1555 executions of Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley in Oxford, England. Both were burned at the stake for their Protestant convictions. Before their death, Latimer exhorted his friend, “Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”
And they did. Their deaths galvanized public opposition to Queen Mary’s persecutions and paved the way for the Protestant Reformation in England. I have stood several times before the Martyr’s Memorial at Oxford dedicated to their sacrifice, each time relighting their “candle” in my own soul and service.
Following their example, we can choose to trust our Father, not in spite of our suffering, but because of it. The darker the room, the more urgent the light.
Eugene Peterson believed,
“Suffering is not evidence of God’s absence, but of his presence, and it is in our experience of being broken that God does his surest and most characteristic salvation work.”
Will you ask your Father to do such “work” in your soul today?
“The pain of our shattered plans is for the purpose of scattered grace.” —John Piper
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