Why Cosmic Geography Matters for Theodicy

"How long will you judge unjustly, and show partiality to the wicked?" (Psalm 82:2). That indictment is not aimed at a human court. It is aimed at the corrupted members of the divine council itself — the very beings Deuteronomy 32 describes as having been given authority over the nations — and it names something a purely individual account of evil can never fully explain.
Cosmic geography supplies part of the missing dimension behind evils that a bare appeal to human free will alone struggles to account for, especially evil operating at the level of nations, empires, and systemic oppression rather than only individual moral choice. If the nations currently lie under real, if subordinate and ultimately illegitimate, spiritual authorities rather than functioning in a spiritually neutral vacuum, then large-scale historical evil — idolatrous empires, entrenched societal injustice, the very corruption Psalm 82 condemns, where the earth's foundations themselves are described as shaken by it — has a supernatural, not merely sociological, backdrop. That is not a smaller category of evil than personal sin. In some ways it is larger, because it explains patterns of injustice that outlast any single ruler or regime, patterns that look, from the ground, like something more than the sum of individual bad choices.
This reframes both the scale of the conflict and its eventual resolution. Christ's death and resurrection is not simply the forgiveness of individual sinners; it is the beginning of the reclamation of every nation currently under wrongful spiritual jurisdiction. "Go and make disciples of all nations" (Matthew 28:18-19) is not only an evangelistic strategy. It is a declaration of territory being reclaimed, one nation at a time, exactly along the lines Deuteronomy 32 and Psalm 82 first drew and the whole of Scripture has been waiting to see undrawn.