“Cosmic Carnival” or “Stairway to Heaven”?
In the aftermath of the horrific earthquake that recently rocked Japan, one journalist posed the following question to a prominent minister: “Either God is All-powerful and doesn’t care about the suffering people of Japan OR He does care about the people of Japan, but he is not all-powerful. Which is it?”
I have a sneaky suspicion that Jesus would have answered the challenge (not question!) posed by the “newscaster” (not “reporter”) something like this:
“First, I have a question for you. If you answer it,
I will tell you which statement is true. ‘Do you beat
your wife because you enjoy it, or because you
think she enjoys it?’ Which is true?” [pause][pause]
The newscaster’s question is an intentional setup that rules any other option out of court, leaving the responder with only two pre-selected and carefully framed options, either of which will have him or her admitting to something she or he decidedly rejects.
Just as the newscaster should rightly object that neither of those options is true, because he has never beaten his wife, so also should Christians respond to the newscaster’s challenge by objecting that “neither of those options is true, because God is both all powerful and all loving!”
The crux of the problem, of course, is human suffering, or perhaps what we might label “innocent suffering.” It is the question underlying the oldest book in the Bible (Job): “Why do bad things happen to good people.”
The argument runs on two assertions: (1) If God is all-powerful, He COULD eliminate evil and suffering; (2) If God is all-loving, He WOULD eliminate evil and suffering. Both of these assertions betray a fundamental naiveté.
In the first case, an omnipotent God surely could have eliminated all evil and suffering from the world, but consider the resultant world. No one could commit evil acts. Sounds great! But the natural concomitant doesn’t have the same sweet ring, namely, that everyone would be forced to do good.
That God allows humans to act in ways contrary to His nature and character and will is an astounding marvel of God’s grace. The alternative is a race of robots or automatons. But a world devoid of human freedom is also a world devoid of the experience of love, for true love is always a voluntary commitment, never a forced enterprise. In my judgment, no one put the matter better than G.E. Ladd who argued that evil was the price God paid for human freedom. The very instant that God gave humans the choice of obedience, evil became a recognized possibility. (I’m speaking here of moral evil).
This understanding also calls into question the second assertion, namely that an all-loving God WOULD eliminate evil and suffering altogether. “Pain” and “bad” cannot be put in simple equation; they are not tautologous concepts. Sometimes pain is a necessary path to gain.
Of this we can be certain: God no more delights in human suffering than loving parents delight in the suffering of their children. More than any human being, God truly suffers with those who suffer. More importantly, He is able to deliver anyone from suffering. He Himself paid the ultimate price for humanity’s sin in the death of his own Son. The voluntary sacrifice of Christ demonstrates the love that drove Him to it.
The didactic value of human suffering is clear: our world is not some kind of cosmic carnival where humans drift aimlessly along eating popcorn and enjoying the rides. Life is not always a pleasurable ride. But God is there!
Not a single human life is untouched by sorrow and tragedy at some level. Some even seem to experience more tragedies than others, for reasons that are rarely self-evident. But God is there!
Again, the lesson is clear: God did not create the cosmos strictly, or even primarily, for our entertainment. He created the cosmos as an arena in which we could learn about Him. And some things about God could not be known apart from the struggles of life in a world touched by both moral evil and “natural” tragedies.
Have you noticed that the depth of compassion we feel for others is directly proportional to the depth of intimacy we share with them? This time-tested theorem carries with it a profound corollary: If we who are evil have even a modicum of compassion for (earthquake-terrorized Japanese) people we have never met, how much more does our Heavenly Father have compassion for those he knows to the fullest and deepest possible extent!
Experiencing God’s comforting presence in the valley of the shadow of death—in the midst of the buffeting storms of life—and experiencing his subsequent delivering power brings an awareness that God did not design this world as our final destination; it brings the confident expectation that He has a much better place prepared for all who put their trust in Him.
