Many of us are familiar with the
so-called "Problem of Pain." If God is all
good and all-powerful and all-knowing,
why is there pain in this world?
For those seeking a philosophical answer, the
challenge for the Christian thinker is
to show that a good God has good reasons
for allowing pain to exist. The most
common reason that we give is this: God
ordered the universe such that there
would be free will for humankind. With
free will comes the ability to choose
evil, therefore evil. And that Springs out
into all kinds of pain and suffering we
experience in this world.
Now, there's a
lot of value to this, and we could spend
a while cashing out this response. The
problem is that on its own, this response
address evil, and evil doesn't line up
so easily with every kind of pain we
experience in this world. For instance,
what do we do about natural disasters?
There's no evil human intention to
create natural disasters! If God is good,
and God is all-powerful and—oh yeah, he's
the maker of our world!—Well, then what do with this??
In the Old Testament, we see God using
natural disasters to warn or destroy
sinful people. You have the locusts of
Joel, the storm of Jonah... There's other
more supernatural things like the flood
of Noah, Sodom and Gomorrah, the plagues of Egypt.
And so some people will look to
these natural disasters today and say
"Aha! See, God is judging that city!"
Be careful of that.
Be careful playing prophet in these situations. In Old
Testament judgment narratives,
God makes a habit of protecting the righteous. Compare that with today. When a tsunami
hits a city, everyone is affected! Is
that really the judgment of God??
Look back to Jesus in Luke 8:24. A storm shows
up, the lives of the disciples are
jeopardized, Jesus rebukes the storm. In
this case, God was at odds with nature's
threat against human life. It seems to me
that the vast majority of natural
disasters are merely... natural! And the
duty of the church is to provide hope
and relief however we can to those who
are suffering. In doing so, we send a
message to this world that things are
not the way they are supposed to be, and
the people of God are determined to do
something about it.
So why do natural disasters happen? I don't know everything,
but I think a good place to start
is to connect these horrible things not to God
but to something else. Some would say
that they have demonic origin. It's
really not a theological stretch to
suggest that these kinds of things could
be the result of spiritual influences.
We see the possibility of demons being the
reason behind other things like
disabilities and sickness. Maybe the same
can be said for natural disasters.
Another possible solution is to look at
the Fall. It's interesting to notice that
when God created the world, "God saw
everything that he made, and behold, it
was very good."
God made a good world!
But then in Genesis 3, Adam and Eve
sinned, and everything went awry.
It's hard for me to imagine that if they
never sinned, that there would still be
occasional natural disasters in the
Garden of Eden. Some might even point to
Genesis 3:17, when God says "cursed is the ground because of you." Now to be fair,
this is in the context of it being hard
to gather food from the earth.
But regardless, in Romans 8, Paul seems to
understand the effect of sin on a cosmic level.
He says that creation is subjected
to futility, bondage, corruption, and just
like us, creation longs for the day of
salvation, when Christ returns and makes
everything new. But we're still left with
the question: Why does God allow this to
happen now? To be honest, I really don't
have a great answer. We could speculate,
and that can be helpful, but at the end
of the day I think it's unrealistic to
expect a perfect answer on this one. Some
religions attempt to do that.
The Bible doesn't. What the Bible does is it teaches
us how to pray when we experience
unexplained suffering.It models prayers
for us when we wish God would just make it stop.
It doesn't sugarcoat this, it
doesn't belittle the difficulty,
but it tells us how to relate to God when we
experience the pains of this world, and
it tells us that God became man and
experienced the pains of this world
himself so that he could relate to us.
And so we admit that there are
difficulties when it comes to why God
would allow these kinds of things to
happen in our time. The best we can say is that this period of
waiting and longing and groaning and
trusting is building up to a proper
moment in God's story of redemption. How
this all plays out is yet to be seen.
Until then let's take good notice of the
frailty of life. We do not know how long
we have to live. We don't know!
Every natural disaster is a bleak
reminder of this. But God can save the
soul, and every day he calls us to be a
part of his kingdom where we trust and
find comfort in him.
