Mark Galli, managing editor of Christianity Today magazine, discusses a
question millions of people wonder about: how can I trust that there is a God
and that this God is good? The wondering
comes out in a sentence repeated countless times daily. “I could never believe in a God who would
_____” and you fill in the blank.[i]
“I could never believe in a God who
would allow children to die.” We know
children die by the hundreds of thousands every day.
“I could never believe in a God who
creates gay people then declares gay relationships a sin.” Every one of us knows someone, probably
someone we love, who is gay. I recently
in a sermon offered what I think are two Biblically sanctioned forms of holy
sexuality – a heterosexual marriage and celibacy.
“I could never believe in a God who
stands by idly while innocent people suffer.”
We know from Hurricane Katrina to the Indian Ocean Tsunami to the Haiti
Earthquake to Japan where there was an earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power
plant meltdown that suffering hits people with full force – people who did
nothing to deserve such suffering.
You could make your own version of
the sentence: “I could never believe in a God who ______” and you name an injustice
of particular interest to you. Galli in
the Christianity Today article points
out the obvious. God’s existence is not
dependent on us believing. Nor is God’s
existence on our sense of justice.
So, the children die, people have
urges and impulses and deep desires that lead to lifestyles the Bible says are
sinful, and the innocent suffer through no fault of their own. The follow-up proclamation is “well, I’d
rather spend an eternity in Hell than worship a God who stands with his hands
in his pockets while children die or a
God who imposes misery by not letting people marry who they want to marry or
who a God does nothing while innocents suffer.”
It’s another version of the same frustration. “I’d rather go to Hell than worship the God
who does that” whatever “that” is.
Really?
It sounds tough when Han Solo or
Dirty Harry or one of the X-men brazenly says to his foe, “I’ll see you in
Hell.” I can just hear Charlton Heston
saying, “They can take my gun when they pry it out of my cold, dead fingers.” I remember the t-shirt from my basic training
days. “God said, ‘Let there be
infantry,’ and the gates of Hell opened.
Really? It sounds fine from Charles Bronson or the
Rock or the Marlboro man, but let’s be thinking people for a moment. If we don’t like what God does, we’ll just do
without him? If we get mad at God and
say, “to Hell with you,” it’s an exclamation.
If he says back, “To Hell with you,” well, then we’ve got a
problem.
We either believe in God or we
don’t, I don’t think goodness is a sufficient reason to believe in God and I
don’t think pain is a sufficient argument to reject the notion of God. Do we believe there is a God? If yes, what do we believe about that God?
In his magisterial work Institutes, the great 16th
century reformer John Calvin writes, “God has sown a seed of religion in all
men.” Furthermore writes Calvin, God has
“revealed himself and daily discloses himself in the whole workmanship of the
universe.”[ii] The way God made us, we are inherently
disposed to belief in Him. So any
atheism is a direct rebellion in how we were created. We’re made to believe in God.
Because of the Fall – Adam and Eve’s
original disobedience and fall from innocence – we do rebel against God’s
creative intentions. But even when we
do, Calvin says that because God is so clearly seen in nature, “[we] cannot
open [our] eyes without being compelled to see Him.” This point comes from the New Testament,
Romans chapter 1. “Ever since the
creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though
they are, have been understood and seen through the things He has made”
(v.20). We are created to believe in
God’s existence. The creation around us
is evidence of God’s existence.
Some continue to hold to atheism,
that there is no God, but if we accept that God exists then we still have to
deal with some painful truths. Children
starve to death. Disasters happen and
millions suffer, including good people.
Young adults in their prime come down with cancer and other deadly
diseases. Cruel dictators inflict
persecution and death on people in their own nations and other nations.
Mark Galli points out that such non sequiturs,
horrible happenings occurring in a world ruled by an all-powerful, all-good God
lead to the Gospel of Job. This is the
opposite of “I’d rather go to Hell than worship a God who allows ___ suffering
of some kind.” In Job’s gospel, Job, the
virtuous man of the Old Testament suffers tremendously and unjustly. If anyone had reason to gripe to God, it was
Job. He loses his kids and is afflicted
with disease and he did nothing to deserve such misfortune.
So, he expresses every emotion under the sun. He complains, wishes for death, wishes he was
never born, and then demands an audience with God. God finally grants that meeting, but in it,
Job never speaks. He meekly listens as
God recounts his creative, omnipotent, omnipresent glory. That means God can do whatever God must do,
and Job is too small to understand.
Job accepts that conclusion. Even though Job suffered unjustly, after God
speaks, Job says, “I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (42:6). Many who go through the paces of (a) belief
in God, (b) refusal to believe because of evil and suffering in the world, and
then (c) resolution to reject God because God is bad. Of those who go through these steps of faith,
many end up here. We end up where Job
is. “I cannot understand things, so I
just blindly worship God and say that God is good and God is love.” If I look around and see pain and see
suffering, I stop looking around because God is good and God is love and I have
to hold to that no matter how much the reality of the world demands another
story. I’ll deny that reality so I can
God is good and God is love.
Fortunately, there is more to the story because
that blind faith is a sure fire way to drive unbelievers away from God in
droves. It’s not that the Gospel of Job
is not true. It is true that people
sometimes – often? – suffer unjustly. It
is true that next to God, each one of us is impossibly small and cannot
understand God’s ways. But, this story,
by itself, is not Gospel. Gospel means
good news. This isn’t good news. It’s fatalism. It’s resignation. It’s the surrender that says, we just want to
survive this world, as bad as it can be. Survive and make it to Heaven.
What’s missing?
Jesus! Jesus is the completion of
Job’s gospel. Job’s defeated submission
before God is not good news until we read the Gospel of Jesus Christ – God come
earth in human flesh. Galli points that
“I could never believe in a God who ____” is a sentence missing something. So too is “God is good and God is love and
I’ll believe that and ignore any evidence that suggests the world is falling
apart.” Both sentences talk of God, but
neither mentions Jesus, and Galli feels and I agree that Jesus is the key.
First John 5:5 – “Who is that conquers the world
but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.” The very next verse states that Jesus came by
water and blood. It makes me think of
His baptism. Like all people who want to
trust in God, he was immersed in the water.
But he’s the only who, when he came up from the water, elicited a remark
from Heaven. “You are my son, the
Beloved. With you I am well pleased”
(Mark 1:11). God spoke when Jesus was
baptized. God was there, a proud father
honoring His son.
To say Jesus came by water and blood also calls
to mind communion. When we take the
juice and are reminded that he said, “My blood that is poured out is the blood
of the New Covenant. Take and
drink.” Water and blood – Jesus truly is
God, and he came for us. In Jesus, God
came for all people.
At the same time, 1st John’s
declaration that Jesus came by water and blood is a declaration of Jesus’ 100%
humanity. When he died on the cross, one
of the Roman soldiers thrust spear into
him, and water and blood gushed from his side (John 19:34). This was a human being nailed to a real cross
on a specific day in history, dying a real death. In 1st John, the confidence of
this telling depends on the witness of the Holy Spirit. Verse 9, hearkening to Jesus’ baptism and the
other moments when God spoke in the gospels adds that God the Father also testifies
to that Jesus is the Beloved Son and the Anointed one. The flow reaches a climax in verse 12. “Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does
not have the Son of God does not have life.”
It’s all about Jesus. When children die, we turn to Jesus. When we feel we are imprisoned in a life that
isn’t fair and imposes on us impossible expectations, we turn to Jesus. When disaster strikes, evil lurks, pain
rises, and we feel like hope is quickly running out, in prayer, with other
believers, in scripture, and in a panicked cry from the depths of our hearts,
we turn to Jesus.
This is not another version of simplistic
surrender to fate. “I just hope Jesus
gets me to Heaven.” Of course we hope
Jesus paves the way for us after death.
In fact, we don’t hope that; we confidently declare that he will go and
prepare a place for us as he has promised.
But this mantra, turn to Jesus, is for living today. First John says, “Whoever has the Son has
life.”
In turning to Him, we see the cross, the flow of
water and blood, and we see that he has suffered. He was betrayed. He was mocked and abandoned. Physically, he was tortured and killed. He knows suffering.
His love is perfect and His vision is
expansive. We read statistic that so
many thousands of children die of preventable causes. In turning to Jesus, we discover he knows
every one of those children by name. He
knows which ones are good soccer player.
He know which ones laugh loudly, which are talented musicians, and which
have scientific genius that would have made discoveries for the good of all
humankind had they not succumbed to malnutrition. We lament the fate of the children. Jesus eternally weeps with a sadness deeper
than we could realize, but we see it when we turn to Jesus.
When someone is stuck in life, we recall people
Jesus met – the woman with the blood flow; blind Bartimaeus; Zaccheus the tax
collector; the woman by the well. These
people turned to Jesus and their lives were unstuck. In turning to Him, we come into a life of
joy, laughter, and fulfillment that completes us the way nothing else possibly
could.
And there are still unanswered questions. Why did the tornado hit my house? And sometimes God still overwhelms people
from the whirlwind as he did Job. But’s
that not the only way God speaks. In
Jesus, in the Holy Spirit, God brings grace, mercy, peace, hope, and love to
all of us. When a question is
unanswered, we look to the character of Jesus.
That has not changed. His
character was loving and merciful and it still is. He loved children, weak people, fragile
people, the rejected, and the lost. He
still does. We can cite all kinds of
rules about who goes to Heaven and who goes to Hell, but a better approach is
to turn to Jesus. We trust His character
and His wisdom about the afterlife. We
turn to Him today because we have to make it through today and we don’t want to
do that alone.
Pain guts us – Jesus help me with this.
Injustice frustrates – Jesus, what I do?
Loss devastates us – Jesus, I need you. And he’s
there. We ask Him to walk with us, and
He does!
My whole case here rests on Jesus’
character. First John is the same
way. The letter’s entire argument rests
on the belief Jesus really is the Son of God, really loves us, and really can
and will help and be with us. Life is
only truly lived when Jesus is at the center of it.
As we conclude five weeks in 1st
John, each of us is welcomed to bring our lives right to the Word, right to the
cross of water and blood, and right to God’s throne room. All our hopes, all our disappointments, our
frustrations and anxieties – we bring it all because he loves us and will guide
us in life so that His joy is in us and our joy is complete.
The final word is similar to what we see in
John’s gospel. This is written to us so
that we who believe in the name of the Son of God may know, absolutely,
confidently know that we have eternal life with Him (1 John 5:13,
paraphrased). Turn to Jesus and receive
eternal life and eternal joy.
AMEN
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