Does God get a pass?
I’m reading Job. The book asks a lot of questions but has few answers.
Why do bad things happen to good people?
Who is responsible?
How should we respond?
Does God get a pass for the bad things that happen to us?
This last question is the big one. There are millions of people who reject God, Christianity, and ultimately paradise over this last question. They usually say something like this: “I refuse to accept a God who would let my son die.” I can sympathise……two of my sons have died….. and I have struggled with this for a long time.
Spoiler alert……….I don’t know the answers; but, I’ll make my best guess.
There is evil in the world. It was here before we were. Did God create the evil?….. did he make the serpent? ……..Did he create Satan? I don’t know. I do know that God dislikes evil and told us how to avoid it, how to control it. He gave us guidelines (rules) to follow. Then he gave us free will….. the right to follow or break the rules. This free will, for better or worse, is unlimited. There is no question that much of the evil in the world comes from the exercise of free will…… the other guy’s free will……. and ours. God also gave Satan free will. Even more, he gave Satan permission to attack Job. He also strictly limited Satan’s ability to do evil to Job. In a word, he set up the parameters for Satan’s attack on Job.
So…….Why do bad things happen?
Either God made them happen, God allows them to happen, or they slipped in while God wasn’t looking (the devil made me do it).
I have trouble with the last choice. It speaks to a God who is at least careless and at worst impotent. It allows us to choose anything that we don’t like and blame it on Satan. We give God credit for the good things and we blame Satan for the bad things. This leaves God as a nice guy, but not exactly the Clint Eastwood, superhero type.. I think that the creator of the universe is a little more potent than that.
So…..God either actively orchestrates the bad things or he stands by and allows them.
I think that both of these things are going on. Clearly in Job, God stands by and allows Satan to attack Job. He even dictates the terms of the attack. I don’t know why. Could it be a test of faith? A sign of God’s confidence in Job? Could God have been using Job’s suffering to teach somebody nearby………..maybe me……..a lesson about faith? Job is ultimately restored but the question of why? is never answered. What I finally come to is this: it is easy to love the benign, soft focus, smiling, God in a cloud who gives you whatever you want. That is in fact Satan’s description of the relationship between God and Job before the attack. It takes a much stronger, more powerful and more trusting faith to love a God who allows bad things to happen, and who does things that we don’t approve of.
I think that there are bad things that happen that God actively orchestrates. These are the things that are painful in our short term, temporal world; but, that lead to positive eternal outcomes. This is a bit like the chemo that makes your hair fall out today but cures the cancer that would have killed you. When something undeniably bad happens to me, I say a prayer:
“God, I thank you for what you have given; even though I don’t understand it, I trust your wisdom in what you have taken away; and I praise you for what I have left. ”
Job said a similar prayer in his pain.
So…… why do bad things happen? I don’t know.
Who is responsible? God is….. either actively or passively.
How should we respond? We should recognise that God is smarter and more powerful than we are….. that he is in charge…. that he loves us and in the end will make it right. We should trust him, we should love him, and we should praise him……. even when we don’t understand…….today.
As a friend once said, “I have to believe that he knows what he’s doing.”
So…… does God get a pass? In a way this is a trick question. It assumes, as do many of us, that we get to pass judgement on God….. that we are his supervisor. It assumes that we are wiser and more in tune with creation than God. This is hubris at its peak. This is also the crux of the problem in our relationship with God. Either he is in charge……..or we are. Either God is external to us……..or we are God.
If we are God…..why haven’t we cleaned up this mess. Why have we allowed poverty, disease, war and pain to go on? It’s pretty simple. We haven’t cleaned up the mess, because we can’t, because we aren’t God.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not feeling very Godlike today.
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