From this morning’s email newsletter, an article by Dr. Jerry Root. Dr. Root teaches several courses in evangelism at Wheaton College. To learn more about Dr. Root, visit his faculty biography page. To sign up for our free newsletter, click here.
God Works Through Flawed Men and Women
There are many things those who share the Gospel do well to remember. Certainly it is good for us to recall that the message we share is the Good News of God’s love and forgiveness. But, as we carry the Gospel to others it is also good if we remember it is mediated through we who are so flawed and fallen. Have you ever noticed how everyone in the Bible could have introduced himself, or herself, in some kind of recovery group? Imagine it:
“Hi. My name is Abraham. I am a coward and a liar. I would tell a lie to put my wife’s life at risk in order to save my own skin.”
“Hi. We are Isaac and Rebecca and we’re dysfunctional parents.”
“Hi. My name is Jacob and I’m a cheater and a scoundrel.”
“Hi. My name is Aaron. I’m a religious leader; but I cave in to peer pressure.”
“Hi. My name is Miriam. I’m jealous of my little brother Moses and I’m a racist; I’m upset about his inter-racial marriage.”
“Hi. My name is Moses and I’m a hot-head and a murderer.”
“Hi. My name is Naomi and I am bitter.”
“Hi. My name is Samson and I struggle with lust.”
“Hi. My name is David. I am an adulterer and a murderer.”
“Hi. My name is Elijah and I struggle with depression.”
“Hi. My name is Thomas. I struggle with doubts.”
“Hi. My name is Mary Magdalene and I’m a prostitute.”
“Hi. My name is Peter and I let down my best friend when he needed me most.”
“Hi. My name is Timothy. I struggle with paralyzing fears and insecurities.”
“Hi. My name is Paul. I am a Christian killer and I am very difficult to work with.”
As I read about these “heroes of the faith” I see that each one was flawed and yet each did significant Kingdom work. I do not believe that they were rewarded for the flaws; nor do I believe their flaws were unrelated to the good that occurred in their lives. The flaws became grace places; places of humility, which I believe is a synonym for honesty. They came to acknowledge in progressively deeper ways their need of God’s love and mercy. For, to each, in his or her specific need, God came because He loved them; as He loves us. He loves us! He loves us with a love that is not conditioned by our performance…
…In Francis Thompson’s poem “The Hound of Heaven” the hound, who represents God, asks the man who has been running from Him (the man whose live is spent in dissipation), “Human love demands human meriting; how hast thou merited? Of all man’s dingiest clay thou art the dingiest clot. Alas, thou knowest not how unworthy of love thou art. Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee, save me? Save only me. Rise, clasp my hand and come….” The words are very powerful. God’s love is not conditioned by performance and, perhaps, all the men and women listed above, went on to accomplish their greatest work after their hour of crisis because each understood more deeply than they might have otherwise known that God’s love was deeper, richer, wider, and mightier than they ever could have imagined. Furthermore, His forgiveness can go deeper too.
I love C. S. Lewis’s work. But there is a point where I disagree with him. In “Mere Christianity” he wrote that he thought pride was the greatest sin. I disagree. It is certainly bad; and, perhaps we can legitimately say it is at the apex of all sin. But an apex, like that in a pyramid, is always supported by that which is much more substantive at its base. In other words, pride is at the end of a process. When I think about what precedes pride, I come up with insecurity or fear. In pride or pretense, the tendency is to make myself look better than I am because I fear if folks really and truly knew me as I am they would reject me. Fear precedes pride. And this fear is often insipid in most human subcultures; perhaps because it is so deeply embedded in our fallen sense of self. If we marginalize the strugglers in our midst with words like: “Out of fellowship”; “Carnal”; “Backslider”; though nobody would say it explicitly, implied in this is the expectation that everyone should be perfect in our subculture. Since nobody is perfect, this false expectation breeds pretense. Everybody goes about trying to make themselves look better than they are. This behavior is so contrary to real life that it seeks to be rationalized and validated and can only be done so pharisaically. The community moves into grace-denying constructs. Pride as I mentioned above is preceded by fear and insecurity.
The Bible says that the antidote to fear is the love of God. “Perfect love casts out fear” (I John 4:18). I think a corollary to that verse is that imperfect love breeds anxiety. You and me, we’ve never been loved perfectly by anybody. Remember: “Human love demands human meriting.” We are saddled with the burden of anxiety by well-meaning folks who loved us as well as they might but were incapable of loving us perfectly. Of course it gets worse before it gets better; nobody we’ve ever loved has been loved perfectly by us as well. We have also burdened others with the anxiety of our well-intended but deficient love. Only God, from whom we can hide nothing, God, who fully knows us, can love us thoroughly with the transformational love that casts out fear. So, if my analogy is correct, and pride is at the apex of the pyramid, than the greatest sin at the very base of the pyramid is the unwillingness to receive the love of God unto ourselves. He comes to us with Incarnate grace as He came to each of those heroes listed above in their darkest hours to restore them. The true Kingdom of God is made up of broken men and women mended by the love and mercy of God. I do not know much; but I do know this is true. And I know that it is these kinds of people He deploys into the world to spread the Gospel. They are the only kind He has to work with. Andrew’s offering of five loaves and two fish to feed the 5,000 wasn’t much for the work that had to be done. But Jesus took what was offered and did something great with it! So too, with the offering to tell others about Jesus – it is mediated through flawed men and women, eager to tell others of His love and forgiveness which is free for the taking.
In my last post, I raised a difficult question that I’m sure we have all asked at one time or another. If God is good, why does He allow (or cause) suffering?
This is a topic that people who are much smarter than I am have already wrestled with, so in this post, I’ll summarize a few famous responses to “the problem of evil.” In my next post, I’ll share some things God has led me through personally in this area. As always, please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments section. We all grow more through talking about our faith in community!
The following information comes partly from a lecture I heard by Dr. Jerry Root, a Christian Education professor at Wheaton College. At the end of each section, I have added a note about what each line of thinking would mean for the two scenarios I brought up in my last post: the earthquake in Haiti and my step-father’s diabetes.
Attempts to explain “the problem of evil”:
God is powerful, but not good. He is the author of all things – good and bad.
Job believes in God’s omnipotence (all powerfulness) and believes that God is bringing wrath upon him unfairly. He doubts the love and mercy of a God who would cause so much suffering. In Job 7, Job says:
“Therefore I will not keep silent; I will speak out in the anguish of my spirit, I will complain in the bitterness of my soul. Am I the sea, or the monster of the deep, that You put me under guard? When I think my bed will comfort me and my couch will ease my complaint, even then You frighten me with dreams and terrify me with visions, so that I prefer strangling and death, rather than this body of mine. I despise my life; I would not live forever. Let me alone; my days have no meaning. What is man that You make so much of him, that You give him so much attention, that You examine him every morning and test him every moment? Will You never look away from me, or let me alone even for an instant?”
Implications: God was judging the nation of Haiti with an earthquake. God was judging my step-father with diabetes. Either because of specific sins or the general sinfulness of all mankind, God used these sufferings to send a message. The message is that sin has unavoidable, painful consequences. If we want to avoid tragedies like these, we must repent and pray for God to have mercy on us. Disasters should make us tremble with fear, for we are, as the famous Jonathan Edwards sermon says, “sinners in the hands of an angry God.”
God is good, but not powerful. He doesn’t want evil to happen, but He can’t stop it.
Rabbi Harold Kushner advocates this view in his 1981 book When Bad Things Happen to Good People.
Kushner’s believes that God doesn’t have the capacity to deal with evil in today’s world. God is good, but not in control. In a 2006 interview with Time magazine, Kushner summarized his viewpoint by saying, “Given the unfairness that strikes so many people in life, I would rather believe in a God of limited power and unlimited love and justice, rather than the other way around.”
Implications: God did not want the earthquake to happen. He didn’t want my step-father to contract diabetes. But nature is more powerful than God. There was nothing God could do to prevent the tragedy in Haiti, but He is present as a source of comfort to the victims. Outside of God’s direction, natural causes led to my step-father’s diabetes. God will strengthen him now, but it is up to doctors and other natural causes to help my step-father manage his health.
Atheism: There is no God.
Atheists argue that to believe in either of the two types of God mentioned above (a God who is powerful, but not good, or a God who is good, but not powerful) is to diminish God so much that He ceases to be a God worth believing in at all.
Author and reporter Susan Jacoby wrote a 2007 Washington Post article about her lack of belief in God: “If there were a deity responsible for both human evil and impersonal natural disasters, I would hate him. I would prefer to go to hell rather than to make bargains with such a cruel, capricious Master of the Universe.”
Implications: “God” had nothing to do with Haiti or my step-father’s diabetes. Impartial, natural causes and random chance led to these sufferings. We must simply make the best with what we have and not worry about asking “Why?”
Free Will: God is good and powerful. He does not cause evil, but He allows humans to cause evil.
God is love. True love must be chosen, not forced, so for God to truly love His creation, free will must exist. Free will means that we can choose to cause harm, to sin, and to bring destruction into the world. God could stop us (He is powerful enough), but if He only gave us the freedom to do good and to love Him, we wouldn’t truly have free will. C.S. Lewis discusses the implications of a world in which God did not allow free will in his book The Problem of Pain:
We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound waves that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void; nay, if the principle were carried out to its logical conclusion, evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to frame them.
Implications: God did not cause the earthquake. Even creation is affected by the sin of mankind. (Romans 8:18-21) So natural disasters themselves are not a result of God’s explicit judgment, nor are they random acts of nature. Rather, they are consequences of creation’s subjection to the bondage and decay created by sin. A similar earthquake struck San Francisco in 1989, but 63 people died, rather than hundreds of thousands. According to an ABC News report, this is directly related to poverty in Haiti. According to this Christian blog, global injustices are to blame for Haiti’s intense poverty. It’s easy to look at a tragedy and “blame” God for allowing it to happen, but in this case, we can clearly see how the sin of people caused such great suffering. God could have prevented the tragedy, but He doesn’t violate the free will He has given us. Rather, at an appointed time, He will judge everyone for the just and unjust things they have done. At that time, justice will be fully restored. Regarding my step-father’s diabetes, God did not “give” it to him, but choices my step-father made in eating and lifestyle habits probably led to the disease. While many of the bad things that happen to us seem like random acts of chance, our entire world system is corrupted by sin and decay. From our genetics, to the products we develop and use, to the businesses and corporations we create, to the natural world, death has a hold on our world. In His love, God has created a plan of escape, through Jesus’ death and resurrection, but until the entire world is resurrected, we will continue to experience the effects of sin.
Soul Making: God is good and powerful, but suffering is required to help us grow into maturity.
God allows evil and suffering because they develop our character.
James 1:2-4 “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.”
Origen, an early Church father, as quoted in Alister E. McGrath’s 2001 edition of The Christian Theology Reader: “God does not create evil; still, He does not prevent it when it is shown by others, although He could do so. But He uses both evil and those who show it for necessary purposes. . . . Virtue is not virtue if it be untested and unexamined.”
Implications: God allowed the earthquake and the diabetes to develop the character of those who were affected. For people who are willing, suffering leads to perseverance and maturity. This line of thinking is why we like stories with conflict. It isn’t interesting to see “nothing” happen to characters. We like to see development and growth, as obstacles are faced and overcome. For Christians, obstacles may even result in death, but after resurrection, the outcome is still final victory.
Satan: God is good and powerful, but He does not stop Satan from causing evil.
Job 1 tells how Satan came before God and asked if he could test Job’s faith by causing him to suffer. God not only allowed Satan to do this, He recommended that Satan turn his attention to Job because of Job’s great faith.
1 Peter 5:8 says, “Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.”
Even in the Garden of Eden, Eve was led into temptation by Satan in the form of a serpent. Throughout the Bible, we see a theme of Satan as the tempter, the thief, the devourer. He is set against God and wants nothing more than to see human beings turn away from God.
Implications: Satan and demonic powers (Ephesians 6:11-12) were ultimately behind the earthquake, as well as the factors that led to the poverty that caused so much loss of life. Likewise, they had something to do with my step-father’s diabetes. In order to combat suffering, we must be ready to wage war against Satan and his demons. Through prayer, faith, and God’s word, we must rebuke the evil plans of Satan and refuse to give into temptation when he presents it to us.
Have you heard any of these perspectives before? What do you believe? Is there flawed logic in any of these arguments? Are there other perspectives I’ve left out?
