A few sermonettes back, we posed a question: it was not, “Why does God do terrible things”? Some people, as we discussed, think everything is part of God’s master plan. If you inhale a gnat, you were meant to do just that by some great cosmic hand. “Everything happens for a reason,” is heard all the time.
But no, the question we posed was “Why does God allow bad things to happen?” After all, beliebers will tell you God is love at the drop of a hat. They’ll tell you God is all-powerful. Ok then, if he is so loving and powerful, why do bad things happen on a daily basis? Why do landslides kill people? Why do ferries full of school kids overturn and sink? Why do church buses full of Sunday School attenders run off cliffs and burst into flames, turning all those inside to crispy critters? God couldn’t foresee that? God couldn’t prevent that? And please don’t say “God needed more angels.”
I have told this story before, but perhaps you didn’t attend back then. A few years ago not far from Augusta, two little girls were struck by a car and killed. At the funeral, the minister said, as quoted in the Augusta Chronicle, “God looked down and saw these two beautiful flowers and he said, ‘I’d like those in my garden,’ and so he plucked them from us for his garden.” Oh yeah, and he used a hit-and-run driver to do it. What a travesty to try to paint God as the cause of that tragedy.
As has been mentioned before in this space, the Bible’s 9-1-1 verse (Ecclesiastes 9:11) says we’re all subject to unexpected accidents, not the fickle finger of God’s fate.
But the question remains, if God doesn’t do the terrible things some of his own ministers say he does, why does he allow them?
In a nutshell, he’s giving humans exactly what they asked for. In the Bible’s account of mankind’s beginning, Adam and Eve listened to a ventriloquist (a.k.a. Satan… see last week’s Church Chat) who told them they would be way better off without God and his rules. So they did what they wanted, even though only one simple rule had been given to them at that point.
So right out of the box, Adam and Eve rejected God. What would He do? Zap them and start over? What would that prove? Nothing, other than that God is more powerful – and maybe that he didn’t want their experiment in independence to be carried out. Really, the only way to settle the issues raised by The Talking Snake once and for all was for God to step back and say “Alrighty then, have it your way.” And not just for ten or twenty years. Centuries would be required and many forms of human government tried. Rural societies would give way to industry and advanced technology, perhaps the saviors of the day. But even those things would prove to be ineffective in solving mankind’s fundamental needs, as we can readily see every day.
The Bible said right from the start that God would eventually intervene and put things right again. The Bible even promises a resurrection. How’s that for undoing the damage? Jesus said in the famous Lord’s Prayer that people should pray for God’s will to be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” Do you picture people in heaven getting cancer? No. Being killed by terrorists? No. Crashing their cars? No. Dying for any reason? No. One more question: Do you think God’s own son would teach people to pray for something that would never happen? No.
So think about it. God loved humans enough to allow them to completely reject his guidance and advice. It was the only way to settle the question once and for all time. But he also has promised – in writing – to reverse and undo all the effects of mankind’s disastrous experiment in self-governance.
Think that’s a ridiculous hope? All I would say in rebuttal to you is this: Tell me one significant problem – just one – for which mankind has a workable, iron-clad, complete solution.
Now whose hope is ridiculous?