Addendum to Yesterday's Post

Well, in the light of day, yesterdays summation of what happened actually made coherent sense. Kudos to me who was drifting in and out of consciousness, wrought with fatigue while writing.

Anyway ... I still have a little more to say because in the past couple of weeks, I've really wrestled with this question.

First, evil is a real force in the world. Evil is what incites people to wreck havoc on others. And while God could stop it (and I'm not sure why He does not already), often he just lets it happen. Sometimes evil attacks a person's body, riddling it with disease, or a person's mind, driving them into despair and depression. Evil is a force in this world that still exists, and still torments us. Evil (via the Satan/the Adversary) is what caused Job's problems).

The question, then, is why does God allow evil to continually have power? After all, if Jesus' death and resurrection are the acts which conquer the forces of death and evil, should that not bring an end to their tyrrany? Well, yes and no. Evil and death will meet their end when Christ comes again to judge the world, and to establilsh His eternal rule in glory (Rev. 20). In the mean time, God has basically put a limit on their power - that is to say, they cannot finally destroy us in terms of our eternality. Although hard to understand, the Bible speaks of the fact that God has delayed Jesus' return for the purpose of our salvation, meaning in my opinion that it will not come until God has gathered His children back to Himself (2 Peter 3:15).

Now that may not fly with some, and that's fine - it's probably not a fully adequate answer. I guess I still feel the need to defend God - and then again I don't. God is, as we say "a big boy" (a very omnipotent one at that), and He really doesn't need me to defend his ways. If there are those who wish to either question His existence or reject Him based on what they believe is unjust suffering, that is their perrogative and their right. Faith is not faith if a gun is held to one's head until they submit to it. But faith is neither blind or ignorant - often it is a way of making sense of a person's experience of God, and the shared experiences of many people. More than that, we hold that the content of our Christian faith is something passed down to us from those who were eyewitnesses to the acts which won our salvation (2 Peter 1:16-21).

But that doesn't abate the feelings of hurt and suffering that people face, and the lack of trust that insights toward God. That's fair too, I suppose. But I want to suggest (as someone young who admittedly has not experienced a great deal of suffering or pain in my own life - but has experienced a time of great doubt and a sense of God's absense in my life) that sometimes, the only thing we can do is to do something like what Job did - wrestle with God, be angry at God, question God - but never really loose our faith in Him. Trust in the face of doubt - hang on to God in the hopes that someday, we will trust and praise Him again with joy, and experience His presence again (Psalm 42).

This reminds me a little of St. John of the Cross, and his Dark Night of the Soul. If I recall correctly, the "Dark Night of the Soul" is when we feel God's absense, as well as the absense of joy and spiritual fulfillment. We find that prayer, worship, meditation, etc. do not hold spiritually fulfilling to us. It seems like God is absent from us. This can lead us into a time of great despair and doubt, without actually rejecting our faith. Yet this process is one which actually is a part of our journey from the world to union with Christ (which is the goal of Christian life - will explain another time). Yet many of the mystics who talk of this (and those persons who have experienced it) know that the goal of such moments (when we truly experience them) is to deepen our faith in and love of God. It allows us to be stripped of the sensation of the spiritual rewards of our faithfulness to God (peace, joy, etc), and begin to practice our faith purely out of selfless love toward God (not seeking the emotions it brings, but seeking God's being, Himself, alone). And in doing that, we learn to love God above all else, and see that whatever comes to us on earth is nothing compared to the glory yet to be revealed (Romans 8).

I think this is hard to imagine on some level - because we associate love with the feelings we get; and when the feeling we get disappears, "the love is gone." But love is not a feeling; love is action - more than that, love is a Person (1 John 4:16). When we look at Jesus, he gave up everything because of His love for the Father and His love for humans like you and me. When we love God, we too are called to abandon everything and follow Him - or maybe better put, consider everything rubiish in comparison to the surpassing greatnest of knowing Jesus Christ (Philippians 3:8). I think with Job, we see how Job had everything taken away from him, and although he wrestled with God and got very angry with God, he never lost His trust in God. And I hope (although I don't know for sure) that what the end of chapter 42 indicates is that Job learned to love God above all else in a more deep way, and that in the end, Job found out that all he really needed was God. Maybe in the midst of our own suffering, instead of letting the question "Why?" plague our minds, we view suffering as an opportunity to strip ourselves of everything that we think matters to us, and truly cling to that which really matters - the Almighty and loving God who created us and never lets us go.

Maybe that's reading into it. But I find it unnerving when people just assume that Job followed God because God forced Him to or left Him without an answer. "God's just a miserable tyrant" they assume. But could it be that because Job still trusted God, and while God didn't reveal His actions, in the face of overwhelming evidence for His power and providence, Job simply knew there was no reason to question God's justice? In the end, God is who God is, and God does what God promises to do (the New Testament never promises that bad things will not befall us when we come to faith, or that life will always be fair, by the way - I would say the same is true for the Old Testament, but am always willing to be proven otherwise). Could we just find a way to accept that we don't understand God, and while it may seem unfair, maybe I just don't understand what's really happening when I suffer? Could we just say, "God, I trust you anyway because I see your love in Your selfless suffering, death and resurrection for my sake. I am hurting and broken, and my trust is hurth, but I will continue to trust in your promise that whatever is going on, you're going to work for the good somehow. And I'm going to trust that whatever I experience now pales in comparison to the glory and the gift of my eternal home that you promise." To me that's true faith - trusting God even when it's hard and doesn't make sense. Some who are more cynical may call it idiocy - but then who ever said faith was completely rational?

Well, I've rambled on. I don't know if that makes sense, but that's just what I do with all this stuff. Although God seems unjust in this book and in life at times, we have to recognize that if we're going to get mad at God, that doesn't change the fact that He exists. It also doesn't change the fact that God's ways are higher than mine. His knowledge and His love are more infinite than mine. So I admit that I, like Job, don't really understand, and I just submit to God. Call me weak, call me stupid - but that's the only thing I feel I can do. To reject the God who has encountered me in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, to reject that which gives strength to me and enables me to not only love others and work for good in the world, but to get up every day, to reject the claim Jesus has on my life that I believe will keep me in eternal life would be about the most foolish thing I could do. Why would I throw all that away because I can't fully grasp the magnitude of it, or even some aspect of it? The power of what God promises to do in the midst of and through our suffering seems to make up for the lack of understanding I have about what role God plays in its cause and the threat it may or may not have against His justice.

So it goes. Here I stand, I can do no other. God help me. Amen." Criticize, comment and whatever else.

Hope you have a blessed day!

In Christ,
Pastor Nathan

P.S. I will get to the Exodus readings later... I have to work on my PIF (Resume) first.