In this book, Thomas Long offers preachers encouragement and resources to face the problem of evil and suffering head-on. He analyses the basic issue for Christian and Jewish believers succinctly: how could an all-powerful and loving God permit innocent suffering? He argues – rightly, I think – that the answer to this question requires that we already be in a faithful relationship with God. The assertion of God's existence, power and love arises out of our experience and faith. We cannot therefore use the problem of evil as a way to put God's existence, power and love in the dock, unless we are willing to admit that we are ourselves already in love with God.

Our pathway through the problem of evil is best marked out by lovers of God who have struggled with it. Accordingly, Long turns to Job and Jesus. For Long, the drama of Job shifts attention away from the question of innocence and guilt, to a God whose creative genius matters more than our own need to be vindicated in a court of law. God has ventured greatly in creating a universe, and we are a product of that venture. By implication, our suffering is the unavoidable but ultimately redeemable by-product of God's world-making.

This is borne out in Long's searching exegesis of Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds, where the very conditions favouring the reign of God provide an unwittingly friendly environment for exclusion and violence. Why? Here I may be reading into Long's argument, which becomes somewhat diffuse at this point. The God of Job and Jesus creates and sustains the universe on the principle of more variety, not less. This means God permits the collusion of random forces in the natural order to produce new things (e.g. evolution), and, when intervening in human affairs, does so by non-violent means (e.g. intervention only via spiritual transformation of the human heart, ultimately through God's Word, incarnate, crucified and risen). This offers no immediate consolation for tragic loss from random natural evil or human wickedness. But for those who have established a personal relationship with this God, it provides a basis for long-term trust. God, who is love, is also ultimately powerful, and will bring all God's children home.

Long's account is essentially Augustinian, inasmuch as he insists that God is ultimately powerful but is not in any way the cause of evil. It is therefore confusing when Long says that Augustine blames evil on free will, on the assumption that free will is at its heart the ability to choose between good and evil. If that were the case, evil would be an option from the outset, and God would be its author. But this is not what Augustine means by free will. Free will is simply the ability to love God in return and, by extension, to love one another. The possibility of evil is not included in Augustine's notion of free will, which is why he describes the fallen will as essentially irrational – a falling away of the will from God and the neighbour, its proper objects, to a falsely constructed, disconnected self. In any case, Long seems to agree with Augustine in the end. To know God is to recognise evil as a real contrast to God, but one that is ‘provisional’. We cannot isolate ourselves from the possibility of random suffering as the result of natural forces, or the suffering which comes as the result of human selfishness. But the cross and resurrection declare both the reality of tragedy and its comedic end.