“Answer me when I call to you, O my righteous God.
Give me relief from my distress;
be merciful to me and hear my prayer.” (Psalm 4:1)
The Book of Job has shattered any clean or neat theology on
“Why” God allows evil or suffering.
If I look at the Book of Job honestly, I can think of no sound reason to
justify God's treatment of an innocent and loyal servant. Is Job an isolated
incident, a slip of the divine hand?
I think if we are to ask the questions today of “Why does
this happen?” and “Where is God?” we need to fist explore more of our
Scriptures (as much as a blog allows), and also reflect a little on history.
This problem of suffering and evil goes far beyond our mortal lives or our
current time; it has been with us since the times of Job. So let us be willing to be stripped away from our certainty of who God
is...our ideas of what we want God to be; and let's look at those passages
and events we can't ignore. Let us continue down the road of these dark and
foggy questions; we won't have to go far to hear the cry of God's people:
“My disgrace is before me all day long,
and my face is covered with shame
at taunts of those who reproach and revile me,
because of the enemy, who is bent on revenge.
All this happened to us,
though we had not forgotten you
or been false to your covenant.
Our hearts had not turned back;
our feet had not strayed from your path
But you crushed us and made us a haunt for jackals
and covered us over with deep darkness
If we had forgotten the name of our God
or spread out our hands to a foreign god,
would not God have discovered it,
since he knows the secrets of the heart?
Yet for your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to the slaughter.
Awake, O Lord! Why do you sleep?
Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever.
Why do you hide your face
and forget our misery and oppression? (Psalm 44: 15-24)”[1]
Here we see another incident of an innocent cry to God. Did
God cause this suffering? We don't know, but we do know God is allowing the
suffering and shame of his chosen people. To what end? Again, the Scriptures do
not say. Their case is similar to Job; they
have not sinned against the Lord or abandoned the Covenant, and yet they are
oppressed and shamed by their enemies, while the God who promised to be present
appears to be absent.
I think this definitely echoes in our day, in our own lives.
I think these passages are beneficial to those of us who suffer; if nothing
else it is encouraging to know that these feelings of abandonment; this
apparent suffering in the silence of God is a part of our faith tradition. God
has done this before! We see in Scripture that God does appear to abandon the
innocent in their plight. But what of the guilty? I think that answer depends
on whether they are chosen or not; and in this case, it is better if you are
not chosen.
What of the people of the Covenant when they broke the Law?
Did they get the punishment they deserved? In the Book of Jeremiah we hear of
awful things the people did in their worship of other gods (did they do it
because of God's silence in troubled times past?). “They have built the high places
of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as offerings to Baal—something I did not
command or mention, nor did it enter my mind. (Jer. 19:5)” It appears
that humanity managed to shock God in the horror of its actions. But, before we
get over the shock of our ancestors’ murderous conduct, God retaliates with
horrific promises of His own: “I will make them eat the flesh of theirs
sons and daughters, and they will eat one another's flesh during the siege
(Jer. 19:8a).” Did the people deserve that? And if they did deserve it; did the
children? Why are the children always to suffer? We find out this prophecy did
come true:
“Look, O Lord, and consider: Whom have you ever treated like this?
Should women eat their offspring, the children they have cared for?
Should priest and prophet be killed in the sanctuary of the Lord?
Young and old lie together in the dust of the streets;
my young men and maidens have fallen by the sword.
You have slain them in the day of your anger;
you have slaughtered them without pity. (Lamentations 2:20-21)”[2]
These are not the fulfilled promises of God we talk about in
Sunday School. In the prophets before the exile (Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah)
we read of the horrible things that the people of Israel and Judah did.
Particularly they trampled the heads of their poor, mistreated the foreigners,
oppressed the widows, ignored the cause of the orphans, participated in all
sorts of outlandish rituals in honor of other gods. These actions led to a
system (particularly in the Northern Kingdom) of a major disparity in wealth
and privilege. Some starved, while others had numerous houses. Because of the
rampant injustice, violence increased (it always does without justice), and the
prophets called on the people to turn from their wicked ways. Was the Babylonian
takeover of the Northern Kingdom and the sacking of Jerusalem the answer to the
prayers of the victims? And if so, is it not a cruel justice to be delivered
from their oppressive homeland just to be met by a sword? Is this God's
justice? Let us take a temporary break from Scripture...
If we look at the world around us we continue to ask the
same questions regarding God’s justice we ask when reading Scripture. Natural
disasters happen all the time, are they necessary? Must there be earthquakes?
Tsunamis? Was God there to answer the screams of terrified children as the
waves of the 2004 tsunami swept their lives away? Could not God cure childhood
cancer? Innocence still seems to be a choice victim for the Universe. As
Christians we have a lot to reconcile in our theology. “The Creator God of this
Universe is Love;” “Nepalese Cities Flattened by Massive Earthquake, Thousands
Dead.”
So what do we do with this knowledge? To be honest, we
always had this knowledge, but I think Christianity evades it; we evade it. But
why do we evade it? I believe we evade it because it forces us to see a side of
God and a side of life we don't want to see. I believe we evade it because it
exposes how little we know, how inept the answers we learn at Church are in the
light of so much suffering and pain. But
if we choose to look at the pain what do we learn about God and this world?
To reflect on these questions as Christians we are
eventually going to have to go to Jesus of Nazareth. But before we get to him,
I think it is important we take one more stop in this disturbing journey...we
are going to a place in history where our worst human terrors meet the cold
divine silence...we are going to go to Holocaust.
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