A Fresh Perspective - 04/25/08
Author Philip Yancey recalls getting a phone call from a television producer shortly after Princess Diana died in an automobile accident. He wanted to know if Yancey would appear on his show. He said, "We want you to explain how God could possibly allow such a terrible accident." Without thinking Yancey replied, "Could it have had something to do with a drunk driver going ninety miles an hour in a narrow tunnel? How exactly was God involved?"
Some years ago Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a very popular book entitled, "When Bad Things Happen to Good People." Some think that bad things shouldn't happen to good people, or at least, they shouldn't happen to God's people. Of course, the cross of Jesus stands in diametrical opposition to that notion.
Bad things do happen to good people. And no one is immune to the sufferings of life - common sufferings as well as tragic and horrendous sufferings. Believing in the sovereignty of God is not to be equated with believing that God predestines or controls the events of our world. God is over the world and "more" than the world, but God is also "part" of the world - God's life sustains, supports, and animates creation. According to Luke, Paul expressed this idea in a talk with the philosophers of Athens: "The God who made the world and everything in it . . . gives everyone life and breath and everything else . . . he is not far from anyone of us. For in him we live and move and have our being. As some of your own poets [Greek] have said, 'We are his offspring'" (Acts 17:24-28, TNIV).
God experiences the world - the joy and sorrow, the pain and pleasure, the suffering and laughter. God has bestowed upon the world - both the natural world in its evolutionary processes and the human world of individuals made in the image of God - the gift of freedom. God does not control earthquakes and floods, any more than God controls human behavior. But God is such an immanent part of life on earth that God experiences the good and evil and knows intimately the questions we have, the contradictions we encounter, and the agony and ecstasy that is human life.
This is what the Christian teaching of the incarnation should help us see. Jesus of Nazareth is for Christians the quintessential representation of God connecting, identifying, engaging, and taking on the experience of human life. The fullness of God was present in Jesus in a unique sense. But in another sense, the fullness of God is present in all of human life. In God "we live and move and have our being." That means that God is present in and with every person, feeling what we feel, understanding our deepest doubts and most perplexing questions. God knows the pain of human suffering due to natural calamities and humans doing evil to one another. God also knows the sheer delight of creation's beauty and humans feeling and expressing love to one another.
God is not aloof, distant, or separated from us by time and space. God is in us, with us, around us, and most importantly of all, God is for us. And as Paul states so elegantly in Romans eight, there is nothing that will ever sever us from God's love that has been revealed to us in Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Chuck Queen is Pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church, Frankfort (CBF affiliated). You can access his sermons and past articles at www.ibcfrankfort.com. He welcomes your comments at cqueen@fewpb.net
Chuck