Conditions Apply

A long time ago I had a command of the Holy Bible that would have impressed most even if privately I wasn’t convinced that what I had was altogether valid. I seemed to pride myself on my unwavering (i.e. unmatched) commitment to the literalness of the book. If it said it, then it was as certain as a certainty could get.

For example, the Bible says if you train up a child in the way he should go, later in life he won’t depart from it. Therefore, if you rear your kid right – church, 4-H, scouting, easy-listening music, and once a year watch Charlton Heston being Moses – then you’ve got an ironclad guarantee your son will become a beacon of godly light in his prime. Any other outcome is an impossibility.

However, in real life everyone knows that sometimes roads take turns that are never anticipated. Despite these wholesome influences early in life the son turns a corner to decadence and dissipation and the parents are left wondering what in the hell happened to our boy?

A pastor friend recounted all the good he had done for the entirety of his son’s short life, and it was all for naught. He lived every day in the deep grief that his son refused every spiritual overture he was ever offered, rejected everything about Christianity and the Bible, and ridiculed every element of his father’s stout faith, all for the intention of dying in his sins and spending eternity in hell. The father lost his son and he could not understand how.

A few days ago, a woman confessed her faith in God’s superintending benevolence even though she faced tremendous challenges. She lost her job as a social worker because she wouldn’t get the Covid-19 vaccine. (She has Lupus and heart problems.) Now she’s waitressing without any hope of making ends meet for her and her two sons who are quite autistic and require a great deal of care. She’s afraid her next event will be homelessness. She added her husband is in heaven. Against the backdrop of all things going wrong, she maintained the belief that God would do something for her soon.

I’ve never met a Christian who didn’t know that ultra-popular, quasi-fatalistic verse in Romans 8 – All things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purpose. The U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey shows that there were 4,558,150 rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults in 2020, and the FBI reported 21,570 murders. Certainly, there were lovers of God among all these victims, and hazarding a guess, I doubt any of them would have considered their victimization as something good.

In my own life there’s the gnawing sorrow that comes with hopelessness. Twice in one week I was reminded of the earnest promise of Psalm 147:3 – He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. A Facebook friend posted the verse and reminded his friends that if any of them had broken hearts, they didn’t need to stay broken. I replied Always? He wrote back Not always, bro. Sometimes we have to wait until heaven.

Heaven is the great caveat of Christianity. Take any promise in the Bible dealing with protection, prosperity, deliverance, health, intervention, strength, provision, guidance, and whatever else is unmentioned, and when it doesn’t match reality on earth it can always be alleged that its primary application is in the afterlife. Cancer diagnosis? You’ll be cancer-free in heaven. Facing bankruptcy? You’ll be debt-free in heaven. Home invaded? You’ll be safe in heaven. Confused about what to do? You’ll talk to God face to face in heaven.

Jesus approached the outskirts of Bethany, a tiny village a stone’s throw from Jerusalem, and was met by sisters Mary and Martha, bereft over the death of their brother Lazarus four days earlier. Jesus told them Your brother will rise again. The sisters acknowledged this fact, but that’s not what their hope in Christ had expected. They looked for far more. Imagine Jesus asserting that sometimes more can be expected and at other times not so much – and this is one of those times for not so much. Then he adds I am the Resurrection and the Life. No one who believes in me will ever die. But the qualification is IN HEAVEN. There’s no death in heaven, but you have to die to get there.

Talk about a letdown of supernatural proportions. Mary and Martha would have been stunned. What good is the promise of God that comes with a proviso? Then after Lazarus is raised from the dead, visualize all the onlookers thinking of their loved ones and friends who have died without Jesus ever bringing them back to life. They’re left wondering if Lazarus’ warranty was different from theirs, or why their warranties came with a rider in small print that said Conditions Apply - Not valid for all deaths everywhere.

American Christian theology has been tainted by the astounding standard of living produced by the unprecedented convergence of self-government and civil liberty. We look at the prosperity surrounding us and see evidence the Bible verses promising such affluence are true. We lounge on our decks sipping lemonade thankful the Bible verses promising divine protection are true. We attend grandma’s 100th birthday party convinced the Bible verses promising robust physical health are true. Everything in our world confirms these many and varied Bible promises are as true today as the day they were penned.

The world outside of America is not so rosy. Tens of millions are trafficked into slavery every year. Diseases long eradicated here strike down untold millions everywhere else. Poverty, malnutrition, and meager healthcare are hallmarks of everyday life in much of the rest of the world. (The UN estimates that 345 million people face starvation today.) Civil war, terrorism, and state tyranny inflict a measure of social instability, anxiety, and suffering Americans can’t begin to comprehend.

The Christians living in the parts of the world providing an existence that could be considered a polar opposite of the standard American lifestyle read the same Bible and embrace the same promises we do, but the effect of those promises appears to be different. They apparently come with warranty conditions to remind these faraway Christians that sometimes the promises don’t always apply.

A divergence of perspective exists between the well-heeled brethren in the first-world church and the rest of the faithful elsewhere. The expectation of divine favor so prevalent in America conflicts with the reality of life in vast sections of the world even though Bible verses promising all this goodness are universally true for all peoples and all times. How can a unitary global theology become so bifurcated? How can the Apostle Paul’s Christian experience with beatings, shipwrecks, and deprivation be so diametrically different from my own daily life?

My preliminary stab at understanding this difference in worldview is to draw a distinction between presumptive and contingent theology. The presumptive approach to Bible promises suggests they are always true because they are plausibly absolute. Since the promises come from God, and God is absolute, the promises take on a heft they otherwise wouldn’t have if they were simple isms posted on Facebook. They have to be unconditional because God, who isn’t one to mince words, doesn’t moderate most of them with if-then modifiers. Promises of divine goodness mesh well in a culture known for the good life. It’s a self-fulfilling cycle – I’m living the dream; God promises the dream; I’m living the dream some more; God keeps on promising.

The contingent approach to life recognizes that unfortunate things happen to everyone everywhere, even for those holding their Bibles with every single promise of goodness underlined and bookmarked. With this view the promises of God are nuanced by contingencies that cannot be easily controlled or dismissed, like the freewill of others, unforeseen consequences from our choices, or the predetermined plans of God himself.

A Christian evangelist in China was imprisoned for preaching the Gospel. While in prison he was tortured by having his fingernails pulled out one by one. After the third nail was removed he passed out from intolerable pain. After his release he looked back at the experience and never thought God failed him by withholding the protection and strength promised in the Bible. He considered his suffering normal and expected with the life he had chosen to live for God.

The contingencies in life color these many Bible verses with a single stipulation – God will if he can. If God can protect that Chinese evangelist without counteracting the freewill of his tormentors, and do so wisely without any regard for partiality, then he will. God can do a great deal in this world if he can do it impartially and without neutralizing human freedom. It’s easy for him to give sun and rain to the righteous and unrighteous together, but the releasing of anything from God to the righteous alone is much more complex. God does nothing without a sufficiently intelligent reason. He doesn’t do anything in conflict with free moral agency unless he suspends that agency and its attendant guilt or innocence to further some providential end.

Admittedly, there was a time in my life when I would have declared that all of God’s promises in the Bible were Yes! and Amen! without giving any rational thought as to why the outcome of those promises was not always realized. I lived in the sublime obliviousness of presumption that didn’t require logic. Indeed, it didn’t require any degree of mindfulness. The promises were there for the taking and only the fainthearted or doubtful were foolish enough to let them sit unused on the shelf.

Yet, life has a way of bringing us back to the kind of reality that strips away pretentious applications of divine pronouncements that we may not fully understand. Nell was as happy as she could be when she disclosed she was cancer free after a battle that lasted years. She knew her faith was the reason she’d been healed, along with daily confessions of God’s Word and taking an assortment of supplements that boosted her natural defenses. A few years later her cancer returned and this time she lost the war.

Nell was confident in the absolute certainty that the God who had promised physical healing had touched her, too. Her life was rock-solid proof of his disposition to heal in response to the simple exhibition of faith. And for a season Nell’s testimony remained unchanged until the day arrived when she was told her old adversary had returned. Now Nell had to decide if her faith had faltered or if his promise had been placed on pause. Or perhaps a third option was now viable. Neither her faith nor his promise was deficient. Her faith had been unquestionably steadfast and his promise had been unequivocally clear. If God could heal her a second time, he would. And if he couldn’t, then life would take its course.

I won’t set in cement this notion that God will if He can. For the time being it seems to be a reasonable explanation of why actual everyday life doesn’t completely correspond to the many promises in the Bible. At least it goes a long way to helping me understand that the healing of the brokenhearted is not an unqualified truth. Both God and I wrestle with Matt’s unreachable soul while recognizing that if and when all the contributing contingencies involved in Matt’s miraculous recovery finally resolve then perhaps God will heal my son because finally he can. Until then, my life advances without any unconditional assurance that all things will work together for good right now even though my God and King is closer to me than my next breath and watches over every step I take.