Who in the world are we?: problem of evil

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

If God is gracious and loving, what about the suffering?

God is gracious and loving; he is also sovereign and just. Too often, we await his grace and love, while ignoring his sovereignty and justice. We bifurcate God's attributes into pleasant and unpleasant because we do not want to be confronted with a God who has the right, will, and capacity to command all and to discipline or punish whomever he deems fit. Somehow we assume a disciplining and punishing God is unfair and his purposes unjust.

We only want his love and grace; we want heaven NOW! His answer is, Not yet.

But what about the suffering?

There is real suffering in the world and something ought to be done. If God is loving and gracious and has the capacity to provide relief, then he should respond. Yet, we do not see his direct involvement in the relief of suffering. Why? I suggest that God expects us to respond.

I see at least three alternatives to direct divine response: theological clarification, human compassion, and human action. Theological clarification provides a conceptual context in which suffering might be better understood. Proper theological clarification keeps in mind those who are in the midst of suffering, for whether deserved or undeserved, their suffering is real and its presence in their lives hurts us, whether we know it or not. It hurts us whether the sufferer is our friend or our enemy. No suffering is good in itself, even if deserved. Suffering requires compassionate theological clarification through word and deed.

But clarification and compassion are not enough. Those in undeserved suffering deserve relief. Rather than waiting for God to swoop down from heaven, let us assume he wishes to deliver relief through us. For those of us who trust and follow Jesus, let us assume (and rightly so, I believe), that he has blessed us by calling us to be his partners. Let us do his work, share his life, and show his compassion to a hurting world. Let us put our backs and our pocketbooks to the work.

It may well be that those searching for hope will see his hope in us.

Related Post: This world is a mess. Why doesn't the Creator intervene?

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Tuesday, March 03, 2009

This world is a mess. Why doesn't the Creator intervene?

Jiffy Lube worker charged with rape
Burglary suspect caught in Hawthorne
Man cited for stuffing cat in his bong

Our world is a mess; it has been a mess for millennia. Whether due to natural causes or personal choices, whether on the front page or hidden in the darkness, evil runs amok with restraint running behind, playing catch up. A theist of any honesty whatsoever must wonder, even if silently, what the Creator is up to while the world slowly self-destructs.

Genesis 1 says that the Creator made humanity in his own image (imago Dei). While we struggle to understand what this means, it at least means that by design humanity is glorious and responsible, just like God. Looking around at culture or listening to the daily news, humanity as imago Dei seems a far-fetched dream, for we are a mess and years of trying have not solved even our basic problems. We need help from the Creator, but he so often seems far away.

Some think that the Creator, because he has the power, should swoop down and magically fix us, yet he has not done so. Why? If we assume the Creator is good and has our good in mind, then there must be a just cause behind his apparent inaction. In this post, I offer a cause for your consideration: such a bold, unilateral intervention would violate his creative design of humanity as imago Dei. If it is true that the Creator made humans responsible beings by giving us real choice--the choice to trust him or to trust ourselves--then humanity justly bears the burden of that choice.

As a race we have chosen to trust ourselves and that has caused no end of trouble. When we trust ourselves as if we were gods, we willfully, intentionally set ourselves off from the Creator, the only source of life and good. In trusting ourselves, we offend him, the Sovereign Ruler of the Universe, and make ourselves his enemies. Now, a sovereign must deal with enemies; they cannot be patted on the head and told, "There, there, you're not that bad are you?" No! Either enemies must become friends or they must be removed. If they are not willing to become friends, then they have chosen, by their own will, to be enemies, disconnected from the Sovereign. Since life is in the Sovereign Creator, to be disconnected from him is death.

There is a truth here that we hesitate to admit: in the Creator's mind our having real choice is more critical than everything here being pleasant. He created us for relationship and true relationship requires the willing participation of both parties. The Creator honors humanity by giving us the choice to participate in relationship with him. In choosing self over him, we choose to rebel against the Sovereign Creator.

As a race and as persons, we have chosen rebellion. Because the Creator is just, our willful rebellion cannot simply be forgotten. Because he is love and acts for the good of the other, he has made a way for humanity to return, trust him, and have life. The Sovereign Creator, the only one with the capacity to fix humanity, has fixed it, all the while maintaining human responsibility.

We can get angry and frustrated that he does not fix us the way we want him to. We can rant about and pant about and shake our fists at heaven, and in his grace, he allows us to do so without being smashed. But the truth is, without him, we are dead and as corpses, we have neither right nor capacity to demand how life is given to us.

An accurate view of our circumstances depends on an accurate view of the Creator. We all bring our assumptions with us and those assumptions can distort our perceptions. With a more accurate view of the Creator, are we able to magnify and deepen our understanding of and emotional response to his grace. Grace, understood in the context of his sovereignty, glory, and justice, brings us to our knees in gratitude because we finally realize that it did not need to be so. We realize that he had every right to crush us all and start afresh, but he chose to rescue, over and over and over, and then finally and fully in Messiah.

Humans who do not trust the Messiah and the way that he has made, are disconnected. Those who are disconnected from him have no life. Trust in the resurrected Son of God, Jesus the Messiah, is the only way for humans to return to the Creator and have life.

"This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved."
Acts 4:11-12