Faith in the face of tragedy
Proverbs 3:5 "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding;"
What happened in Connecticut last Friday is something everyone is grappling with and trying to make sense of. The killing of 26 people, mostly first graders, is exactly the type of event we struggle to make some sense of so that we can understand why it happened and try to prevent something like this from every happening again.
This is also the type of event that can shake the faith of Christians and embolden those who are unbelievers. We who believe will lean hard on God and recite the verse above to ourselves and others. Those who don't believe will ask a question such as "What type of god would allow something like this to happen?" Truth be told, in the deep recesses of a believer's heart and mind, we ask the same question.
Non-believers love to use events like this to pin a Christian in a corner and force them to explain this in light of their faith. As Christians (whether spiritually mature or not), we are expected to have all of the answers for questions about how and why God does things or allows things to happen. When an answer is not readily available and we have to fall back to a verse such as Proverbs 3:5, non-believers feel as if they have won the argument and presented the conclusive evidence as to whether our faith has basis.
Here is what I know, in this situation and all others:
1. God is who He says He is- He is all powerful, all knowing, and ever present.
2. God is in control- God is the authority over all things in the natural and spiritual world.
3. God was not caught off guard by this- we were (and still are) shocked by the events of Friday. God was not. God didn't rush to the scene in a panic, quickly assess the situation and go into damage control mode. If He did, then points 1 and 2 above would not be true.
4. God's ways are higher than our own- we have no idea (even when we think we have something all figured out) what God's full purpose is in orchestrating events as He does.
5. The next most popular idol behind money that competes with God for our worship is logic- if we are unable to wrap our minds around something and understand it, then we tend to conclude that it must not be true. We worship our brains and our own understanding to the exclusion of God. He never promised us a clear, logical explanation to everything. And to think that He owes us anything, much less an explanation of His ways, is arrogant and laughable.
6. I ask a lot of the same questions non-believers ask- to think that the presence of God in my heart causes me to not struggle with things that I would like to understand and just don't is as wrong as saying that a Christian doesn't continue to sin.
7. I don't (and never will) have all of the answers- we encourage people all the time to be "lifelong learners". To never lose that intellectual curiosity and thirst for knowledge that we had as a kid in school is seen as a positive virtue. But somehow the concept of lifelong learning is not supposed to apply in our spiritual lives? I, and everyone else who walks this earth, will go to our death beds not knowing all of the answers to life's questions. There is a reason they call it "faith" and not "knowledge".
There are a lot of misconceptions about Christians among non-Christians. One of those is that we think we have all the answers. Another is that we think we are better than those who don't believe. Tragedies and the ensuing questions that arise out of them can solidify those misconceptions or serve to break them down. The divisions will grow wider if Christians dismiss the questions by robotically reciting Scripture and giving a "Sunday school answer" to a real question. And we will look all the more self-righteous if we dismiss questions as coming from those who "just don't get it".
If I get the question of how a God of love could allow something like this to happen, I hope I can acknowledge the question as legitimate. I hope I can also admit that the same question has entered my mind. Ultimately, I will have to admit that I don't have a complete answer for it. If this causes a non-believer to claim some sort of victory in the argument for why God doesn't exist, then I guess that is how it will be. But they might walk away with a slightly different perspective on how a Christian (or at least THIS Christian) views the world.
Just like I can't explain how quantum physics works or how an acorn turns into an oak tree, that doesn't cause me to say it isn't real and it doesn't exist. If reality was limited to what I had straight in my own mind, most of this world would not exist. And that is why I have faith. I take it on faith that all of those things written in a history book that I didn't actually observe with my own eyes and ears did, in fact, occur. Everyone has faith- it's just a matter of what you place your faith in. I place mine in the God of the Universe, whether I understand and can explain His ways or not.
What happened in Connecticut last Friday is something everyone is grappling with and trying to make sense of. The killing of 26 people, mostly first graders, is exactly the type of event we struggle to make some sense of so that we can understand why it happened and try to prevent something like this from every happening again.
This is also the type of event that can shake the faith of Christians and embolden those who are unbelievers. We who believe will lean hard on God and recite the verse above to ourselves and others. Those who don't believe will ask a question such as "What type of god would allow something like this to happen?" Truth be told, in the deep recesses of a believer's heart and mind, we ask the same question.
Non-believers love to use events like this to pin a Christian in a corner and force them to explain this in light of their faith. As Christians (whether spiritually mature or not), we are expected to have all of the answers for questions about how and why God does things or allows things to happen. When an answer is not readily available and we have to fall back to a verse such as Proverbs 3:5, non-believers feel as if they have won the argument and presented the conclusive evidence as to whether our faith has basis.
Here is what I know, in this situation and all others:
1. God is who He says He is- He is all powerful, all knowing, and ever present.
2. God is in control- God is the authority over all things in the natural and spiritual world.
3. God was not caught off guard by this- we were (and still are) shocked by the events of Friday. God was not. God didn't rush to the scene in a panic, quickly assess the situation and go into damage control mode. If He did, then points 1 and 2 above would not be true.
4. God's ways are higher than our own- we have no idea (even when we think we have something all figured out) what God's full purpose is in orchestrating events as He does.
5. The next most popular idol behind money that competes with God for our worship is logic- if we are unable to wrap our minds around something and understand it, then we tend to conclude that it must not be true. We worship our brains and our own understanding to the exclusion of God. He never promised us a clear, logical explanation to everything. And to think that He owes us anything, much less an explanation of His ways, is arrogant and laughable.
6. I ask a lot of the same questions non-believers ask- to think that the presence of God in my heart causes me to not struggle with things that I would like to understand and just don't is as wrong as saying that a Christian doesn't continue to sin.
7. I don't (and never will) have all of the answers- we encourage people all the time to be "lifelong learners". To never lose that intellectual curiosity and thirst for knowledge that we had as a kid in school is seen as a positive virtue. But somehow the concept of lifelong learning is not supposed to apply in our spiritual lives? I, and everyone else who walks this earth, will go to our death beds not knowing all of the answers to life's questions. There is a reason they call it "faith" and not "knowledge".
There are a lot of misconceptions about Christians among non-Christians. One of those is that we think we have all the answers. Another is that we think we are better than those who don't believe. Tragedies and the ensuing questions that arise out of them can solidify those misconceptions or serve to break them down. The divisions will grow wider if Christians dismiss the questions by robotically reciting Scripture and giving a "Sunday school answer" to a real question. And we will look all the more self-righteous if we dismiss questions as coming from those who "just don't get it".
If I get the question of how a God of love could allow something like this to happen, I hope I can acknowledge the question as legitimate. I hope I can also admit that the same question has entered my mind. Ultimately, I will have to admit that I don't have a complete answer for it. If this causes a non-believer to claim some sort of victory in the argument for why God doesn't exist, then I guess that is how it will be. But they might walk away with a slightly different perspective on how a Christian (or at least THIS Christian) views the world.
Just like I can't explain how quantum physics works or how an acorn turns into an oak tree, that doesn't cause me to say it isn't real and it doesn't exist. If reality was limited to what I had straight in my own mind, most of this world would not exist. And that is why I have faith. I take it on faith that all of those things written in a history book that I didn't actually observe with my own eyes and ears did, in fact, occur. Everyone has faith- it's just a matter of what you place your faith in. I place mine in the God of the Universe, whether I understand and can explain His ways or not.
posted by Robert Jory Allen at
3:30 AM
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