I don’t claim to know the mind of God. I do know, however, that the humans often mistake the responsible party in mankind’s misfortune. The question of why bad things happen to good people was addressed in the Old Testament with Job. God essentially says that humans lack the capacity to understand Him (Job chapters 38-41). Because God doesn’t answer in absolute terms about why good people get afflicted, mankind feels free to indict Him.
My purpose is not to answer this vexing question in its entirety. First, when the question screams out from the agony of a person who is freshly grief-stricken, no one should enter into a rhetorical discussion; empathy demands that we grieve with them. Therefore, I address this question with regard to those people who are genuine in considering this longstanding question about God; as well as the people who use this question to justify their atheism.
First, we must remember the doctrine of free will: the God-given option of choosing between good and bad. When humans screw up and schedule a war, it is not God who throws down the gauntlet. God is likewise not responsible for the horrors of that war.
As for the statement that God should intervene in cases of catastrophe, you can’t have it both ways. Mankind loves the idea of freedom and God has granted it; the capacity to dream and to make those dreams come true. Sadly, when humans use free will to hurt others, God must still abide by this doctrine. When a North African country uses famine and starvation as a domestic policy of select genocide, people ask the wrong question: where is God in all this? Rather, they should be asking ‘where is mankind in all of this?’
It also has been an evolving reality that afflictions previously attributed to God are now known to be from the ignorant behavior of humanity. Believe it or not, there was a time when people did not know that cigarettes caused lung cancer. In that era, who got the blame for that affliction? Everything from rabies to tooth decay has, at one time or other, been blamed on God. As we get smarter (or at least better informed), the list of horrors blamed on God gets progressively shorter.
Still, there are categories deserving our assessment. We have occurrences in which the involvement of humanity is vague. God has been blamed for the Indonesian Tsunami. The natives in the outlying islands knew what the large retraction of the surf prior to the killer wave represented and had the instinct to seek higher ground. Tsunami warning systems had been in place in the Pacific since the 1940’s. The nations that were struck by the 2004 Tsunami had no warning systems, such as existed in all of the other Pacific countries.
Still other events confuse all of us. Timmy was a little boy who was horrified when a man took his little sister from his parents’ arms, carried her away and stuck a knife into her. She was returned to her parents, but her life was changed forever. What horror! Except: that man was me and I had removed a cancerous kidney from Timmy’s little sister, prolonging her physical life. Timmy lacked the capacity to understand. To Timmy, I was an ogre.
A little boy born to a poor sharecropper family in Georgia loses his sight by age seven from a probable infection. This is a definite tragedy, but I wonder at the subsequent reality. Who does not feel a glow in their heart and goosebumps in their soul when they hear Ray Charles sing ‘Georgia on my Mind’ or “I can’t stop lovin’ you”?
Then there are the heartbreaking occurrences, like a child dying from cancer. I know that all our hearts grieve at the very thought. It seems schizophrenic to believe that God shares in that grief. In the Bible, Jesus wept upon learning of Lazarus’ death. He didn’t weep over the death- after all, he brought Lazarus back to life. He wept over the suffering of the loved ones left behind after a death.
If I read the Bible (and the Torah and the Koran) correctly, God loves these victims and those grieving. It might help to observe that death is humanity’s artificial endpoint. To God, the last breath of a person’s physical life is followed by their first breath of eternal life. Further, our grief is proportionate to the joy provided by this person we have lost.
From Whom did the exquisite gift of this loved one come? God does not take our loved ones; He takes them back. We humans need to get our act together, at least appear to be more mature in judgment, and a little less inclined to abandon gratitude.
– Dennis Garvin
