Good God! (2)

A good and loving God intentionally created a world that would result in the eternal suffering of uncountable billions of people so he could parade his magnificent glory for those few plucked from the catastrophe through the torturous death of his son

One anonymous American wrote this nonsense, “Accidents and terrorist attacks that result in death are terrible events, but they are all part of God’s mysterious plan for our lives. No person dies unless it is part of his divine plan, as hard as that is for us to understand and accept.”

That is ridiculous.

It is unthinkable for me to accept the idea that the goodness of God has somehow permitted every terrible event and planned every death as some incomprehensible facet of his love for us. Perhaps this notion is unfathomable because it is untrue. A better explanation is that the world has gone wrong by its own hand, with no help from God, either by design or by desire. The world we live in is the one we’ve freely created.

God may have had high hopes for me that morning in junior high when the stage was set to snare my best friend. Maybe he hoped I would resist the lure to be silent, that I would defy the boys who reveled in degrading others, especially those who were different, and that I would show Mike what my devotion really looked like. If only I’d been fearless to face physical injury or spit. If only I’d been impassioned to defend a friend’s honor.

My freedom set in motion a whole array of effects, all of which were negative, and blocked an entirely different set of effects that could have been positive. God didn’t intervene in Mike’s world that morning because he needed me to do it. When I refused, Mike suffered.

God endowed humanity with perfect and absolute freedom, and observed that freedom with perfect and absolute foreknowledge in the eternal past in such a way that his knowing had no effect on the freedom or its outcomes.

As a young believer I saw the absurdity of the Christian theology that ineptly tried to explain how this awesome God had permitted such an awful world, especially when he possessed complete foreknowledge of everything that would ever transpire long before he created the universe. I spent a decade studying the doctrine of divine foreknowledge and concluded God’s knowledge of the future was limited and uncertain, thereby allowing for the unhindered exercise of human free will.

I cleared God of the mess we were in and placed all the blame on the human race, the only collective power in the universe capable of obstructing his will. While I believed he could constrict my freedom so that his goodness was never frustrated, I also believed that for him to do so would require a huge moral cost. Less freedom did mean less evil, but it also meant less goodness. If I weren’t free to choose the wrong, then I wasn’t free to choose the right. It appeared to me that my freedom was prized more by God than all the good he could compel me to do or all the evil he could force me to end.

I believe God used his infinite wisdom to create a perfect world of inconceivable beauty, one that was ideally suited for the human race, in which it could flourish physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Yet, our original parents quickly forgot the life purpose God had given them, which was to walk in obedience to truth, as God revealed it, in order to experience first-hand the supreme joy that comes from living in absolute love, or selflessness. They chose to follow their own selfish interests, and in the process plunged this world into a rebellion of insanity. For what could be more insane than rejecting the wisdom and love of God to live in stupidity and self-centeredness?

Selfishness is madness, and it’s this very madness that denies, rebuffs, and even thwarts the goodness that comes from a holy God. Even in our warped and wicked world, God is not absent or silent or still. He is present and actively engaged in adding momentum to every act of human kindness, to every selfless deed that has as its end the happiness of others. He is always doing everything he can to mitigate the often-calamitous effects of human freedom, even though at times, like the 911 attacks or the Columbia disaster, it may look like God hasn’t lifted even a finger to change the course of events.

In this world of moral self-determination, God cannot violate our sovereignty by making us do one thing or stopping us from doing another. At the same time, he seeks to create the highest possible good to come out of the misery we set in motion. These divine decisions constitute a worldwide spiritual influence that responds continuously to billions of human choices executed every second of time. The hand of God moving moment by moment across the entire globe and around every single human heart is the expression of God’s disposition, whenever and wherever it’s possible, to save what is lost, to heal what is broken, to restore what is faded, and to give life to what is dead.

Long before September 11, 2001, God witnessed every hour of contemplation, deliberation, and decision-making that went into the world’s worst terrorist attack. In the midst of this treachery, which would lead to the deaths of thousands and the suffering of tens of thousands of others, God was doing all that could be done to ruin the plan without contravening the freedom of those to blame. The complete story of all he attempted will never be known until it is fully revealed in the world beyond, but I am certain we will witness an account of remarkable love and compassion, even to those wholeheartedly committed to destruction and death, on a day when the world thought God had turned away.

When the natural forces of gravity and heat combined to destroy the Columbia space shuttle, had God forgotten about the prayers made only the night before, prayers that committed for safekeeping the precious lives of loved ones into his very own hands? No, God did not forget, but he also could not answer these pleas without suspending the laws of physics. Human error led to human tragedy and God’s goodness could not prevent the agony that would come into our hearts or even his own. If there had been a way to intervene, God would have done so, because he is, by nature, lifegiving and lifesaving.

Then there’s the six-month old baby boy whose parents were killed by a tree falling on their car. We don’t know how human freedom impacted this event. We don’t know what the driver was doing or how other drivers nearby were operating their vehicles. We don’t know how human freedom affected the condition of the tree, or how human freedom affected the condition of the road and whether that played a role. We cannot begin to see how the freedom from so many converged in a single moment in time to create such misfortune. Yet, God saw the intersection of all this human action, and did all he could do to avert the disaster within the limitations he faced.

Every person who has ever lived was created to know God and live in his presence and love forever. This is the ultimate meaning of life; it is the highest life purpose for all of us. Unfortunately, this marvelous destiny can become so clouded by the adversities we face that we stop seeing much, if any, of his goodness. When life is hard we don’t feel much goodness anywhere, let alone from God, and before long, through disappointment, anger, and bitterness, we accept the lie that he is the source of our unhappiness, that he alone is responsible for why we are the way we are. At the end of our lives our hearts have become so calcified from accumulated grief that we feel absolutely nothing of God.

A long time ago, I wanted to make the world see and feel God again, to awaken it from this self-induced trance in which all of reality has been smeared by one long stream of stubborn denial about our culpability. I wanted to show the world that God is innocent of the insanity that surrounds us, that he is the only one in the universe who strives continually for our highest good despite all of the hindrances we throw up against him.

So much has changed since then. My life purpose now seems focused on the wellbeing and dignity of one profoundly disabled human being. His faded life is now my life and in that union I am once again fully awakened to the innocence of God.