This
week's "thought" comes from Tim Keller's blog
( www.Redeemercitytocity.com ) in an entry
dated August 6, 2012. It is a little lengthy, but who can honestly deal
with the question of why there is suffering in the world in just one or two
paragraphs? If you have ever asked, or had someone ask you the question, "Why
Me?" it will be worth the time it takes for you to read
this entry. Obviously, I offer it to those earnestly interested in
knowing how to respond to such a question since those who aren't truly
interested will not take the time to go through it. Keller (as usual)
offers some very good insights. Enjoy.
Four Wrong Answers to the Question “Why Me?”
When
I was diagnosed with cancer, the question "Why me?" was a natural
one. Later, when I survived but others with the same kind of cancer died, I
also had to ask, "Why me?” Suffering and death seem random, senseless… As
a minister, I’ve spent countless hours with suffering people crying: “Why did
God let this happen?” In general, I hear four answers to this question—but
each is wrong, or at least inadequate.
The FIRST answer
is: "This makes no sense—I guess this proves there is no God." But
the problem of senseless suffering does not go away if you abandon belief in
God. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,”
said that if there was no higher divine Law, there would be no way to tell if
any particular human law was unjust or not. If there is no God, then why have a
sense of outrage and horror when suffering and tragedy occur? The strong eat
the weak—that’s life—so why not? When Friedrich Nietzsche heard that a natural
disaster had destroyed Java in 1883, he wrote a friend: “Two hundred thousand
wiped out at a stroke—how magnificent!” Nietzsche was relentless in his logic.
Because if there is no God, all value judgments are arbitrary. All definitions
of justice are just the results of your culture or temperament. As different as
they were in other ways, King and Nietzsche agreed on this point. If there is
no God or higher divine Law, then violence is perfectly natural. So abandoning
belief in God doesn’t help with the problem of suffering at all, and as we will
see, it removes many resources for facing it.
The SECOND answer
is: “If there is a God, senseless suffering proves that God is not completely
in control of everything. He couldn’t stop this.” As many thinkers have
pointed out—both devout believers as well as atheists—such a being, whatever it
is, doesn’t really fit our definition of God. And this leaves you with the same
problems mentioned above. If you don’t believe in a God powerful enough to
create and sustain the whole world, then the world came about through natural
forces, and that means, again, that violence is natural. Or if you think that
God is an impersonal life force and this whole material world is just an
illusion, again you remove any reason to be outraged at evil and suffering or
to resist it.
The THIRD answer
to seemingly sudden, random death is: "God saves some people and lets
others die because he favors and rewards good people." But the Bible
forcefully rejects the idea that people who suffer more are worse people than
those who are spared suffering. This was the self-righteous premise of Job’s
friends in that great Old Testament book. They sat around Job, who was
experiencing one sorrow in life after another, and said, "the reason this
is happening to you and not us is because we are living right and you are
not." At the end of the book, God expresses his fury at Job’s
"miserable comforters." The world is too fallen and deeply broken to
issue in neat patterns of good people having good lives and bad people having
bad lives.
The FOURTH answer
is: "God knows what he’s doing, so be quiet and trust him." This is
partly right, but inadequate. It is inadequate because it is cold and because
the Bible gives us more with which to face the terrors of life. God did not
create a world with death and evil in it. It is the result of humankind turning
away from him. We were put into this world to live wholly for him, and when
instead we began to live for ourselves everything in our created reality began
to fall apart—physically, socially, and spiritually. Everything became subject
to decay. But God did not abandon us. Of all the world's major religions, only
Christianity teaches that God came to earth (in Jesus Christ) and became
subject to suffering and death himself—dying on the Cross to take the
punishment our sins deserved—so that someday he can return to earth to end all
suffering without ending us.
Do you see what this means? Yes, we don’t know
the reason God allows evil and suffering to continue, or why it is so random,
but now at least we know what the reason isn’t—what it can’t be. It can’t
be that he doesn’t love us! It can’t be that he doesn’t care. He is so committed
to our ultimate happiness that he was willing to plunge into the greatest
depths of suffering himself. He understands us, he’s been there, and he
assures us that he has a plan to eventually to wipe away every tear…
Someone
might say, "But that’s only half an answer to the question 'Why?'"
Yes, but it is the half that we need. If God actually explained all the
reasons why he allows things to happen as they do, it would be too much for our
finite brains. Think of small children and their relationship to their parents.
Three-year-olds can’t understand most of what their parents allow and disallow
for them. But though they aren’t capable of comprehending their parents’
reasons, they are capable of knowing their parents’ love, and therefore capable
of trusting them and living securely. That is what they really need. Now the
difference between God and human beings would be infinitely greater than the
difference between a thirty-year-old parent and a three-year-old child. So we
should not expect to be able to grasp all God’s purposes, but through the Cross
and gospel of Jesus Christ, we can know his love. And that is what we need
most.
In
Ann Voskamp’s book, One Thousand Gifts, she shares her journey to
understand the senseless death of her sister, crushed by a truck at the age of
two. In the end, she concludes that the primary issue is whether we trust God’s
character. Is he really loving? Is he really just? Her conclusion: "[God]
gave us Jesus... If God didn’t withhold from us His very own Son, will God
withhold anything we need? If trust must be earned, hasn’t God
unequivocally earned our trust with the splintery wood on the raw wounds, the
thorns pressed into the brow, your name on the cracked lips? How will he not
also graciously give us all things He deems best and right? He’s already given
the incomprehensible.”
In
the Service of Jesus, Pastor Jeff
