Dear TEAMS,
My last post to you began the discussion of Why Does God Let Bad Things Happen? In it, I counseled you to really get at the
heart of what your hurting friend is really dealing with. In the end, they need to know you care.
As for the theological/academic answer to that question, I
have found it to be brusque and hard but nonetheless Truth. God does not need to be defended. I am reminded of the movie A Few Good Men and the dialogue between
characters in the courtroom:
Col. Jessep: You want answers?
Kaffee: I
think I'm entitled to.
Col. Jessep: You
want answers?
Kaffee: I want
the truth!
Col. Jessep: You
can't handle the truth!
The Truth is that
God didn’t mess up this world, we did.
He created us with the ability to make powerful choices, and every
choice we make in life either creates life or it doesn’t. Choose to smoke 20 cigarettes a day, and
you’ll probably get lung cancer and die from it. Even if you’re a nice guy, the life of the
party, the best friend of everyone you meet.
God, who created magnificent lung tissue that extracts what we cannot
see from the air we take in and a body that then distributes those elements all
around without our having any control or knowledge of it, entrusted that lung
tissue to us for care. But somehow, the
smoker is absolved of all blame when they didn’t hold up their end of the
bargain?
God entrusts a
person with financial or property wealth and the person thinks of nothing else
but to spend it on his own pleasure, so much so that at the end of life, the
surplus is gone. Three generations
later, his young, widowed, great-granddaughter who is the sweetest person
anyone has ever met would love to be able to buy a house for her children but
cannot, and laughs at her situation, wondering what it was like for this
unknown ancestor to have enough to get through a day. And God is blamed that this good woman is in
her situation?
Hundreds of years
ago, an ancestor wandered into a place of higher naturally occurring radiation,
or was incapable of eating a balanced diet, or was a cussed son-of-a-gun and
drank himself silly and caused genetic mutation that was carried and built upon
throughout time. Perhaps even more
descendants of his made terrible choices as well, adding to the likelihood of
DNA damage. And a young boy born to
lovely parents contracts brain cancer at 12 months. But all of a sudden, there is no anger at
stupid choices that there is no proof of, but anger at a God who there is proof
of?
Just what exactly
ARE we responsible for, if not our choices? And when we are a victim to one or more
person’s bad choices, why aren’t people really focused with their anger at the
people who made the bad choices? And why
is it that the people who generally ask these questions don’t entertain the
possibility that there have been thousands upon millions of things that they
have been spared from because of the very nature of God that they are now
calling into question?
We cannot have it
both ways. We cannot get angry at God
for not stopping the drunk driver that killed the newly graduated, responsible
high school student but then dismiss away the times we made the bad common
sense choices and believe we “got away with it” because we saw nothing bad
happen. Nothing bad happened because of
God’s Mercy, not because you are God and made it that way. Why is it deciding to have unprotected sex
that didn’t result in pregnancy or STD (if only that was all there was to it!)
is seen as us dodging a bullet, and not an act of God’s mercy?
Make no mistake; God
set up the world to be a place of beauty and compassion and about Him. Not because He is a self-absorbed,
self-centered SOB, but because He has always been, always is, and always will
be. He spoke one word, and life and our
world was created, full of mysteries and wonder and beauty that we cannot
fathom with our merely human brains. He
set up the laws we live by, both legal and unspoken. He is the ultimate authority. But to blame Him, when He is the originator
of all we find good in the world? Is
that even logical? Again, if it’s God’s
fault, do you really believe you are walking through this world completely
innocent and absolved of blame?
So, how do you
reconcile the fact that children get cancer (or insert whatever you wish that
is tragic), through no fault of their own?
Well, truly, I think that is the wrong question. Just think about it logically:
- Will answering this question keep children from getting cancer ever again?
- Will answering this question heal the child of his/her cancer?
- Will you accept the answer if you don’t like it?
Because the answer
to the question of why there is evil in the world is that there just is. We Christians frame it as “we live in a
fallen world.” I defy you to tell me
there is not, because I’ve got a whole lotta tangible proof around me. I have found as I see more of life that the
most successful people in life acknowledge the existence of evil, but choose to
focus on the abundance of blessings they DO have. Hence, the Facebook status that realizes the
luxury that the worst thing in your life right now is bad traffic, or that
people disagree with you politically.
What I finished in
my message to my friend on Facebook:
All I know is that God
weeps with us and cares and is walking beside us. He made us strong, and I
believe He delights to see us rely on that gift in these hard,
character-refining times. He is more there than we know, protecting us from far
more than we can see or imagine, and showing new mercies to us every morning.
Love,
