The Just Creator

About the book

Four decades. A hundred investigations. One question no professional training ever prepares anyone for.

Across Beyond Human Design, the forensic habit established that the world has a Creator, and that this Creator has communicated through a preserved message. That message describes Him as just, merciful and wise. This book brings the same habit to the hardest objection that verdict faces, the oldest and most powerful challenge to any claim of a good God: if He is just, why a world of suffering, and above all the suffering of the innocent?

Three admissions are made before a word of reply. The objection is not a trick but the strongest case ever mounted against a good Creator. The pain is real, and no answer may begin by making it smaller. And any answer worth giving must be one that could be spoken in a hospital corridor, to the parent of a dying child, without shame. Then the charge is stated in each of its forms: the earthquake and the cancer cell, the evil human beings do, the evil that is allowed to run its course, and suffering that falls on the kind and spares the cruel.

The question of suffering and the question of what follows death are not two questions. They are one.

Then the answer is built. Evil done by human beings is the shadow of the greatest gift, a real freedom to choose. Suffering with no human author belongs to a world made deliberately as a test, in which courage, patience and compassion come into being. No creature is placed to judge any suffering pointless. The account is not closed at the grave: the wronged are compensated, and no soul is wronged by an atom’s weight. Mercy frames even the Fire, and no one is condemned for a message never fairly received.

Consider how a careful examiner separates what he has proved from what a reliable witness has told him. At every step the book marks which currency it is spending: reason and ordinary evidence on one side, and on the other the testimony of the Creator, whom the earlier volumes established as a witness who can be trusted, about what lies beyond death. Where the tradition’s own scholars disagree, on the duration of the Fire or the fate of the honest doubter, both positions are set out.

Both are evidence. Both are weighed. The second is never handed to you while being called the first.

The book does not claim that every particular grief can be explained. It claims that the charge which seemed decisive at the outset, that a world like this cannot have a good Author, does not hold. It is written for the reader who is hurting as much as for the reader who is arguing, and it does not hurry either.

Along the way it meets the questions that press hardest on a believer: why the innocent child suffers; whether freedom is real if God knows and decrees everything; whether an eternal punishment can be just; what becomes of those the message never reached; and why, if the evidence for God is strong, He does not simply make Himself impossible to doubt.

The author writes as an examiner, but also as a son who watched his own father hold on to his faith through long years of illness, and the book is written in that knowledge. Every argument is set out so that it can be checked, and every source is named.

Written by Abdul Zahir Sheikh, a Certified Fraud Examiner and Senior Partner at BDO East Africa with four decades of investigative experience across fourteen countries, this is the book that follows the hardest objection to the end of the ledger.

Follow the hardest objection to the end of the ledger. See what a just Creator must be.