Your Brother Daniel
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Is
God our Enemy
In view of the suffering
that our Lord allows, one “Christian” blogger charged:
· The great judgment of Matthew 25 should apply to
God too. I was hungry and you gave me
nothing to eat. I was trying to take a
flight and you didn’t stop a missile from hitting my plane. I was trying to solve the HIV/AIDS crisis and
you let a missile obliterated my body. I
was on death row and you let them kill me.
I was simply playing soccer with my cousins and you let the bomb kill
all of us. I was cooking for my family
and you let tanks into my neighborhood.
I was going for a hike and you let me be kidnapped and tortured to death. I was walking down the street and you let
people burn me alive. I was raped at my
school and you did nothing to hold back my attackers. I shot myself and you didn’t come to help
me. I died of cancer and you didn’t
bring me a cure. I starved to death and
you gave me nothing to eat. The
tragedies that have taken place today are too numerous to list. What you have done to the least of these you
have done to all of us. What do you have
to say for yourself? Silence…just like
always. In the absence of any defense, my judgment today is that God is our
passive enemy.
Admittedly, we have all
felt like this. However, this charge not only reflects a failure to understand
God but also a failure to understand ourselves. What is it that we fail to see
about ourselves? That as certain plants require frost, we too require suffering
in order to bear spiritual fruit. We have a mistaken conception of what should
constitute the ideal life – a relatively pain-free life of only the simplest,
doer struggles – and when our lives fail to conform to our ideal and
expectations, we indict God.
Frankly, I still require
regular doses of suffering. Without them, I tend to grow proud and arrogant,
and when I do, my God has a way of growing smaller. The Apostle Paul detailed
his painful, teachable moment this way:
· We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers
and sisters,[a] about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We
were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we
despaired of life itself. Indeed, we
felt we had received the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not
rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. (2 Cor. 1:8-9)
If trusting in God is of
such surpassing worth, then anything – self-trust – that interferes with this
needs to be counteracted. And this is not a truth limited to the Christian
revelation. Instead, we find that, in the absence of suffering, we become
self-satisfied, self-righteous, and self—sufficient. We then tend to think more
of ourselves than we ought and less of others. We relegate them to a position beneath
us and deem them unworthy of our compassion.
Also, without suffering
and loss, we become ungrateful and take for granted our lives and
relationships. We all have seen the joy when a loved one is rediscovered after an
earthquake. Perhaps then, we need such tragedies.
Without suffering, we do
not grow. One study revealed that those who reported that they were most
satisfied with their lives grew the least. This truth is also reflected in
biblical revelation:
1. Consider it pure joy, my brothers and
sisters,[a] whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the
testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work
so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. (James 1:2-4)
2. We also glory in our sufferings, because we know
that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character,
hope. (Romans 5:3-4)
We fail to understand
the need for suffering. One bystander saw a butterfly struggling mightily to
emerge from its cocoon, helped it free itself from its cocoon, but the
butterfly died as a result. He didn’t understand that the struggle to free
itself from the cocoon was a struggle necessary for its development. We too
fail to see the necessity for struggling and pain and therefore rush to condemn
God.
Is God our enemy, as the
blogger claims? Perhaps, instead, we think more of our myopic indictments than
we ought. In contrast, those who regard Him as a friend, experience Him as a
friend, and benefit from this friendship. Consequently, we experience
increasingly better mental and physical health, as the surveys reveal. The
benefits even extend to our most intimate relationships, as former atheist,
Patrick Glynn, reports:
· A 1978 study found that church attendance
predicted marital satisfaction better than any other single variable. Couples
in long-lasting marriages who were surveyed in another study listed religion as
one of the most important “prescriptions” of a happy marriage. (God: The Evidence, 64)
Perhaps then God does
have His reasons for allowing suffering, and those who are willing to listen to
them benefit as a result.
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