R.C. Sproul

It's hard enough to understand how human beings could be so inhumane and so wicked in their treatment of other human beings.

But how could God allow these things to happen?

Well, those questions are the questions that every generation seeks to answer.

And the people in Jesus' day were no different.

And they came to Jesus and reported two specific incidents from their own day.

The first one refers to an event that took place in Galilee where while people were in the midst of worship in church, if you will,

Some of the soldiers under the authority of Pontius Pilate came in and massacred them, mixing their blood with the blood of the animals.

I mean, these were not warriors on the battlefield.

These were supplicants in the worship environment who were stormed upon and treated with a brutal massacre so that their blood was flowing and desecrating the sanctity of the religious buildings there.

And so they come to Jesus and they say,

You know, how can this be?

And Jesus answered and said to them, do you suppose that these Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered such things?

Jesus, in a sense, ducks their question and takes this opportunity to instruct them on a very weighty and difficult theological truth.

Jesus answers the question with a question, and it's very similar to the response He gave elsewhere in His ministry that's recorded in the ninth chapter of the Gospel of John.

where people brought a man who had been blind from birth to Jesus and asked this question.

Trying to trap Jesus with a theological poser, they said to Jesus, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?

Now, those who raised that question committed an informal fallacy of logic, and that fallacy is called the fallacy of the false dilemma, or sometimes it's called the either-or fallacy.

They came with Jesus, and they only gave Him two options to account for the man's blindness.

Either

They said, the man was born blind because of his own sin or because of the sin of his parents.