Why Does a Good God let Bad Things Happen?

In my last blog post about I answered a question from a friend about why I believed in God. I then expanded that to explain why I believed Jesus is that God. A comment was left on that blog that goes like this:

 A lot of people have asked me not why is there so much evil in the world, but why is God letting it happen? Why is He letting people suffer? What would your response to that be? I can answer it but it seems a very uncompassionate answer. One thing I suddenly think of is what you moved on to talking about - Jesus. Before Jesus, God seemed to mostly worry about what the Israelites were doing, as the people of God. But when Jesus came, God in human form, he started to heal people and talk them through stuff in a way I don't think God had so much, BC. It was the human that went out and started the process of 'healing the world' and giving that example of what we should be doing.So it appears to be our duty to be the change we wish to see in the world (together with others).
I still don't get where cancer comes from, though. It doesn't make enough sense that 'God is with us through the suffering'. It's almost like a parent saying, 'oh whoops, you got hit by a car and got paralysed. But it's okay, cos I'll sit with you in hospital'. 
I am kind of thinking that one's faith cannot be based on knowledge alone, but as you say, a personal encounter with Christ, which cannot be scientifically proven, or completely falsified, because it is each person's experience. Even when people have experienced miracles, others will not believe because, well, maybe because those miracles have not happened to them. Maybe their friend died of cancer. Maybe they themselves still haven't been healed. Sorry about the rant but I am putting stuff out there that probably lots of people are thinking. The kind of questions that don't go away..

There are so many things I want to respond to in this comment that it took me a couple of days to get my head in order! First off, thank you for leaving this post and asking the questions that are difficult and that Christians and non-Christians alike struggle with. The problem of suffering is a HUGE issue that often we are too afraid to speak about in case we sound stupid or whiny or because we are afraid that the answers (or lack thereof) will hurt our faith. So thank you for your bravery and you 'rant' haha.

Secondly, I think the only way I am gonna be able to tackle this is to state from the get go that there is a lot about God that I don't know (shock! haha) and that anything I say are my opinions and not necessarily the Truth about the situation. I have only my biblical study, my opinions, my experiences, and my community to draw on. These are big questions that I more than likely will not resolve but maybe I will help add to the discussion, clarify it, or even just point people in the direction of where to look to wrestle with these sorts of things. In other words, this blog post is not going to attempt to solve the issue of suffering in the world, and I am ok with that.

So I am gonna break this down into sections with what I believe are the big issues being talked about here. If I have read this wrong please feel free to redefine and get me to answer the actual question :p

Ok, here it goes.

I see three big topics in this comment:

1) Why does God allow suffering to happen?
2) What is the relation of the OT to the NT in terms of suffering in the world?
3) What is the role of Christians in the face of the suffering we see? How do we respond to it?

1) Why does God allow suffering to happen?

In order to answer this question I actually want to start with the second one. So...

2) What is the relation of the OT to the NT in terms of suffering in the world?

The reason I want to start with this question is because the only way we know the truth about who God is and how God acts is through Scripture. It's the starting point from where we can judge all experiences of God in our lives, or the theology we are taught in churches, and figure out what is God and what is not by seeing if it is compatible with the God in the Bible. For example, if someone says "God told me to steal that person's wallet", chances are God didn't actually tell them that because we know that God in the Bible was really against people stealing. Comprende? 

So by looking at the OT and the NT we should be able to answer question 1) a little better (hopefully....fingers crossed).

It is true that in the OT God seems a little preoccupied with Israel as opposed to the rest of the world. Remember that these books were written by Israelis for Israelis about Israel and Israel's God. They aren't gonna talk a lot about the rest of the world. BUT, in amongst this history of a chosen people, there are whole sections dedicated to people who weren't part of Israel and yet are called Godly people and are seen as saved by God!!! This is pretty mind blowing that they were included in the story of a people who thought God's salvation was for Israel alone!

Let's start with Abraham. He is what we call a pagan (a worshipper of many manmade gods) when God calls him and tells him to go to a 'land which I will show you'. So Abraham (at this point called Abram) goes. Talk about a leap of faith! Leaving everything you know to follow a God you have never heard of and can't see! Like Noah before him, Abraham was seen a a solo righteous man among many unrighteous men. Noah and Abraham were both called and they both followed. Both are really messed up!! Noah gets drunk and naked one night after the flood, and Abraham lies about his wife (calling her his sister) in order to save his own life. Not exactly perfect men but God still used them.

Abraham meets a man called Melchizedek on his travels. This man is outside of the covenant God formed with Abraham, so he isn't part of the nation that will spread God's word. He appears from nowhere, no history of him, and is called the King of Salem (translated as the King of Peace). He is recognised by Abraham as a righteous man and yet not part of the 'elect'.

Jonah is sent to Ninevah, the ENEMIES of Israel who God said were outside the elect people of Israel, and God saves their lives because the repent!

Job is not from Israel, he is not a Jew. Yet a whole book is given over to him as a holy man who God cares about. He suffers greatly and dares to address God and God ANSWERS him. Trust me, in Hebrew literature for God to answer a pagan is a flippin big deal.

When the Jews leave Egypt they also take with them, as part of their number, Egyptians who wished to follow them and they become part of Israel when the land is given to the Jews. So does Rahab, a Moabite prostitute, and Ruth, a Moabite pagan. Both these women are great, great, great....grandmothers of Jesus.

What I am trying to get at here is that God in the OT wasn't just concerned with Israel. Through Israel God is forming a great plan (Jesus) that will save the world, but in the mean time he is also working outside of Israel to save the world also. Jesus acts in the same way. He purposely shows up the Jewish religious leaders by acting in a way that says "God cared about these people, the people you rejected, and always has. It is YOU that has read the text wrong, not God asking you to reject them".

In this the OT and the NT line up. God doesn't act differently. In both he is concerned with the care for the poor, alien, widowed etc (check out the laws in Leviticus, there are heaps of these). God is not only focused on Israel. They are a people that he is making in order to send his Son, but he is at work with love and concern for those not in Israel too.

I hope that answers this question.

That said, let's go back to number 1.

1) Why does God allow suffering to happen?

I think I need to clarify three different forms of suffering here. There is suffering from natural causes (earthquakes, tsunamis etc), there is suffering at the hands of others (rape, child abuse, name calling), and there is suffering through illness.

Suffering at the hands of others is the easiest to answer. In these cases God has given everyone the free will to act as they chose. Though this means that we will all act in a bad way at some point in our lives, some people will chose to act in a way that is purposely harmful to others. It is their choice. It sucks for the person who is at the hands of perpetrator (and as a sexual abuse survivor, I know what I am talking about) but God has chosen, out of love for us, to let us make our choices, even when they hurt others.

Now I know people out there are gonna say "but why doesn't he stop them? What if they are hurting a child?" I get that, I really do. Nothing makes my blood boil like child abuse and I would quite willing castrate anyone who lays a hand on anyone else in violence. But if we would let God take away free will there, when do we say stop? What about stealing? Cheating? Lying to your parents? When does intervention actually start meaning no free will and we become robots made to serve God, instead of people who can chose to love him? When is it ok for God to intervene and it not ok? As someone who has been through it I would say God did intervene in the fact that he gave me a choice to either live on in anger, or to give it to him and learn to forgive. He didn't have to do that. 

Suffering from natural causes is a little harder. The bible tells us in Romans (I think chapter 6?) that the earth is groaning with birthing pangs. In other words, when death entered this world it didn't just affect us, it affected the whole of creation. Everything started breaking down. Global warming is an example of where things are breaking down and it is from our choices. We haven't treated this planet well and it is feeling the affects. And when laws of nature come into affect then these things are going to start affecting at least some of the millions of people who live on this planet. It sucks. It is awful and sad to watch it happen. But God created this world to work with certain natural laws. Unfortunately, those laws work really well and cause catastrophes at times. 

Illness is the one that gets me every time. I don't know why God doesn't heal everyone. I don't know why Jesus at times heals everyone who comes to him and then the next day it is only a few. I don't why I was healed and others haven't been. It can make me angry, thinking of the people I know who get sick, and it makes me feel survivors guilt that I escaped and others have died from their illnesses. Perhaps it has to do with choices (ie lung cancer from smoking) and to do with creation breaking down and our bodies going all wrong. 

But what I do know is that in the face of all this suffering God has said "this ISN'T it!" He sent Jesus to die for us and to rise again to show us that this life isn't just "life's a bitch and then you die." There is healing to be found, if not in this life then in the next. There will be miracles for all who believe. That when a friend dies of cancer we can grieve but also be glad that they are free from their suffering and made whole with Jesus. There is HOPE. And that is a wonderful thing. Because God will heal everyone, and he will stop all natural disasters, and we will live without fear of what others can do for us. So God HAS done something about suffering, he HAS intervened. It is just not on our timeline.

And this leads to,

3) What is the role of Christians in the face of the suffering we see? How do we respond to it?

We are to tell others that this isn't it! That there is hope. That they don't have to only experience life this way. We are to sit with them and grieve with them and pray with them and hold them. And we are to love them as people who are worthy of love, people who are worthy of attention. We don't ignore them like the rest of society does. We aren't to put sick and suffering people away where we can't see them. We are to embrace them as children of God and invite them into seeing themselves that way. Because we love them we will want them to know the truth, that God has intervened, that he has a time limit for suffering and one day it will be finished. That this life with these broken bodies in this broken world is not forever but life and joy can be. 

We are to live in such a way that we point them to the one that will heal their suffering and give them peace.

That is my hope. 

That is my joy. 

I am honoured to share it with you.

Manipulating the Spirit

I posted the other day this article on a social networking site about Benny Hinn, the infamous televangelist. Apart from his extremely suspect theology (seriously, research him one day) he is also widely known for his healing conferences and for people being 'slain in the spirit' (which basically means falling over under the overwhelming presence of the spirit) when they are around him.

When I posted this article I got a very interesting response. Someone said to me that we shouldn't, as Christians, be putting down other Christians if their ministry is working and healing people.

Well, I tell you, this set off some MAJOR warning bells in my head for several reasons.

1) Do Not Judge.

It is a common thing in this postmodern (pomo) Western world that we live in that we are told that all people's views are of equal value and we should never judge anyone. As there are phrases like 'Do not judge, lest you be judged' in the Bible, the church has adopted this policy hook, line and sinker. But the church as a people that claim the truth are, by their very nature, laying down a line that claims that on one side is the truth and on the other is not. Throughout the history of the church that line has had to be argued, researched, and reclaimed as new beliefs and practices came to the fore and challenged the way the church worked. Sometimes these challenges changed the church (for example when the Protestant church formed out of the Catholic church in the Reformation). At other times the challenges have been rejected by the church as anti-gospel and labelled a heresy.

IT IS OUR JOB TO JUDGE TRUTH CLAIMS.

It is our job as people of the Truth that we judge other claims to truth. It is essential that we are analysing and holding to account the people who claim Jesus name as their motivating factor for their ministry. It is vital for the faith that we discuss what we see happening in other churches, that we research it, and that we weigh it up against Scripture.

If we don't do this, if we fail to hold each other to account, to judge ministries by Scriptural truth, then the Truth of the Gospel gets distorted, cults form, and we have no backing to say that Mormonism, to take one example, is not Christian.

I am not going to go into the theology of Benny Hinn here, but if you hear people you know saying that such and such a preacher is dodgy, then do your homework, engage in debate, and don't shy away from saying "But what they say here is totally against the Bible..." when you know that the Truth is being distorted.

2) When 'the spirit' is not The Spirit.

Benny Hinn, as I said before, is widely known as a faith healer and a man who works in the ecstasy of the Spirit. What this means is that at his meetings there will always be prayer times where people fall over, convulse, and in other ways appear to be under the control of some other power. I knew a young woman who was healed at a Benny Hinn conference. She was my flatmate for a year and was healed 2 years before I meet her from a brain tumour. Unfortunately in the year I knew her the cancer came back and she died at the age of 22. I know her story was genuine. I also know that she was a Bible believing Christian. I don't doubt her faith or that God healed her.

But here is the crucial difference. God healed her. Benny didn't. As someone who has also experienced a dramatic healing, I can testify that God can, and will, work even in experiences where people weren't praying for healing (as in mine). If God is gonna heal, it is gonna happen.

But back to the point.

The Bible says in Matt 7:21-23:

 21“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.

Jesus doesn't say that they won't be able to do miracles, these people who didn't know him. Moses in Egypt faced sorcerers who could do many of the things that God told him to do. When Jesus talks about the end days (also in Matthew) he says that many false teahers will come in his name performing signs and wonders and yet will not be from him. 

What we can see here is that there are people who will be able to do stuff like healings and deliverance ministry in the name of Jesus and yet still not be ok in their ministry.

So how do we know the difference between them? How can we spot the preachers who do miracles for God and those that do them for themselves?

That brings me to my next point.

3) Misunderstanding the Spirit.

Something I notice about Christians in NZ is that a lot of us have no understanding of who the Spirit is. We don't think of the Spirit as a person on equal footing with Jesus and the Father. We don't really talk about the Spirit well, making it sound like it is something we 'plug' into when we pray for the 'Jesus hit'. And it is this misunderstanding of the role of the Spirit that I believe has lead us to be afraid of speaking out when someone is manipulating it because we don't know when that is happening. (Let me just qualify that I don't think someone can actually manipulate the Holy Spirit, but rather they manipulate our understanding of it.)

The Holy Spirit is as much God as Jesus and the Father are. It is not some strange force that floats around us and we have to say the right words or go to the right church to 'feel' it as it moves among us. It isn't manifested through the right words or the right musical chord or anything else. 

Rather, it is the Spirit of the living Christ that dwells within us! It is what gives us faith, and peace, in our walk with Christ. It is what connects us with the risen Christ and makes us holy in the eyes of the Father. We don't 'recharge' on the Spirit, we live in it. Being in Christ and Christ in us is all about the Spirit and it's work within us. Sometimes this can be shown through moments of ecstasy and prophecy and healings and the like. But it isn't hovering waiting for us to plug in before those things happen, it is with us all the time and sometimes decides to move through us in strange and mysterious ways.

I am tired at the misunderstanding of the Spirit being used by churches and preachers to convince people that what is being done is from God and not humans. 

We can know whether or not it is the Spirit moving by the fruit that is produced by the people 'working' in it. Is that person, like Mother Theresa, self-sacrificial, loving of all people, have a heart for the broken, giving all they have, recognised for their love? Are they humble and always pointing to God rather than to themselves? Or is that person, like Benny Hinn, preaching that God will give you all you want, money, possessions, etc? Are they living in a humble manner or are they taking the glory?

We can know the difference between people who are working for God and those who are working for themselves. We can tell in the way the preach, and whether it stacks up with what it Bible actually says. Miracles may still happen, but Jesus told us to watch out, to be smart, and to know our Bibles well enough (with the help of those who have gone before and our communities) so we can recognise and speak out against this stuff.

Don't be suckers, be on guard.

Act of Murder

I just walked out of a movie.

I don't do this often, as I usually am interested in what a movie has to say, even if I don't agree with it.

The one I walked out of however made me so angry that I couldn't stand to watch it anymore.

The movie is called "Act of Valor" and is about real life situations that the Navy Seals have found themselves in. Though I respect the fact that the Seals are the elite of the elite and they have fine tuned their craft until it is an artwork, the fact that their artwork is that of death is something that I find hard to swallow.

In the movie one of the situations is an extraction of a CIA agent that has been captured and is being tortured. The agent is a young woman and will no doubt be tortured until death. The Seals have to infiltrate and extract the woman.

They efficiently get the woman out but in doing so kill many of the workers on the other side. Do I agree with the fact that they were torturing a woman? No at all! But do I think that somehow the Seals are justified in killing people for one of their own people? No!

I find war, or violence between countries, the height of hypocrisy. We tell someone that they are not right in hurting our people so we spy on them. They say we have no right to spy on them so they capture the spy. We say they have no right to capture our spy so we kill untold numbers of their people to get our spy back. They retaliate to the killing of their people...and so it goes on.

Martin Luther King Jnr said once that you cannot murder murder, you cannot stop violence with violence. Darkness cannot put out darkness, only light can do that. 

Too often the ideas of 'an eye for an eye' are taken to the extreme on a world stage to the point where even Christians think that it is noble and right to fight and kill others for the sake of the ones they love and protect?

What about the family of the person you are killing? What about the fear/anger/passion they are fighting with/for? How can you justify their death if it means saving your own?

Jesus taught us to forgive our enemies. If we take that from not just in our own lives but to a global stage, then forgiveness and love cannot lead to violence! They cannot co-exist! How can you shoot someone whom you love and whom you have forgiven? Even if it means the death of those you love? Even if it means your own life?

No one life is better than another, even if that life has been used to hurt and manipulate and destroy. Even if that person's actions are evil, who are we to judge whether or not they should die? Is that not for God to decide? Is it not good enough to live out of Jesus' words to love and to forgive?

As I watched the movie I was struck by the amount of money and effort that is put into making machines that sole purpose is to seek and kill people. It made me think about how that money could be used to support countries where most terrorists are made. If there was nutrition, schooling, safety then maybe less children would grow up with so much hate that they needed to kill. Maybe their parents would teach them to hate others but to love those that helped them.

I see no justification for money and people to be used to kill others. I see no justification for war of any kind. I see no correlation between the story of the Bible and violence. I would give my life to stop others being hurt, but I would never take another's or kid myself that by doing so somehow I would achieve peace through violence.

God has left the Temple

When I was a young girl, maybe around ten, I started what can only be called an obsession. I don't know what triggered it but I can say that every time from that age on when I saw articles or pictures about this topic I would collect them. My mother worried about my fascination, thinking it wasn't healthy for a young girl to be so interested in something so complex, and at times dark, but I kept going. To this day I follow what I can. My obsession is with

The Israel/Palestine Conflict.

I know, not really a usual interest for a young child but something about the fact that no one could agree on what was happening or who was right capture my mind and I have found it only more interesting as I have aged (though I am now aware of the fact that propaganda plays a major part).

The thing that I never really understood was the rest of the world getting so involved in the issues of this small country. America was the mediator (many times) between the two states and tried to help them come to peace. I always have thought, what business is it of theirs?? It isn't their land so why do they butt in an expected the two warring countries to listen.

The thing is, this conflict is so much bigger than just the war within it's boundaries. It has everything to do with Zionism, or the belief that Israel is still the Holy Land, Jerusalem is still the Holy City, and as good Christian countries (so the thinking goes in America) we need to protect the land of God from the heathen Arabs, or at least stop it imploding. There is also a direct correlation for Zionists between the return of Israel to the Jews and the return of Christ. To speed up one is to speed up the other.

I have simplified this somewhat as Zionism is far bigger than just this issue, but I am surprised at how many people I met who don't even realise that they are Zionists! There are so many Christians that seem to just accept as fact that the Israelites are in the right and the Palestinians are evil and deserved to be corralled in concentration camps on the Gaza strip.

There are also many who have sympathy for the Israelites after what they went through in WWII. Granted, the making of a Jewish state on the same soil that their religion comes from seemed to make sense after the senseless slaughter of millions of innocents. The world was trying to do the right thing by a people who had been left to die by the very same people. The problem was, in their guilt, the West didn't ask permission from the people who were living there happily; namely the Palestinians. As a result of their land being taken over and the borders continuously shifting against their favour, the Palestinians fought back.

Were they right to? I don't know. I don't agree with war in any case but if someone came into your home and told you you had to clear out because people who hadn't lived there for centuries were coming back to take over, I might be a little put out too.

But putting aside the rightness or not of fighting back, I want to look at the reasons as to why the West generally supports Israel and vilifies the Palestinians.

The idea that the return of Jerusalem to the Jews and the return of Christ are linked is from Revelation. Now I don't know about you, but I don't know anyone since Revelation was written that truly understands what it is talking about in full. Jerusalem can look like a heavenly city, the renewed earth, and at times a bride (!!), and so taking what it says literally without any proper understanding of the text is dangerous.

The Jews themselves tried to hurry along the Messiah. After their temple was destroyed and they were taken to Babylon in exile (at the end of the OT before the NT), they were allowed to return to Israel and rebuild their temple. This they did but the Messiah did not come. So they tried to be ultra Holy and keep all the Sabbath's because somehow that would get the Messiah to show up. When Jesus finally did come (400 years later) he proceeded to tell off those people that had helped evil doers by thinking that their actions made them holy while they did not love or care for people. I look at Palestine now and ask, is the West trying to bring back Christ through their actions in Israel but by doing so are not loving or caring for the Palestinians and letting evil happen??

I believe that the promises that God made to the Jews are true and still stand. But I believe that they are fulfilled in Christ and have also gone out to the ends of the earth. At the death of Christ, the temple curtain that separated God from the people was ripped. This signified that God left the Temple to dwell in them. This in affect means that Jerusalem, while holy from a historical and biblical view, is as holy today as any piece of land where believers stand. The city itself will always be significant to believers but it is not somehow more Godly than anywhere else.

I am sickened by what happened to the Jews in WWII. Nothing will rectify how most of the world stood back and let that happen. But building walls around slums to keep the Palestinians and Jews separate, or putting fences up and making Palestinians walk through check points, or putting them in massive camps where disease spreads, is not justifiable just because this happened to them. Two wrongs do not make the past ok.

I had a friend go to Israel last year and when they came back they told me that they saw "no holiness in the holy land." There was only fear and hatred, pain and anger.

Bombing people who you believe have done you wrong isn't going to stop their actions. It is going to breed a new generation of children who grow up in fear and who are taught to hate. As they grow older they are going to want answers, revenge, meaning to their lives. And they will take it out on the people who they see to have caused the suffering.

People, if you are Christian or not, there is no justification for anything that is happening over there. There is no one who is acting well, there are none that can claim that they are acting more holy. As people who love others, Christians should be the last to try and justify or support a war where the victims are children and innocents.

God has left the Temple, let's all stop fighting for an empty house.