The dramatic events of September 11, 2001 have raised – again – the most important theological question people ever ask, whether they’re religious or not, Christian or Muslim or Jew:

Why do bad things happen?

Around the world we watched CNN; we felt horror and anger and revulsion against the perpetrators; we wept with those who wept (my clients who have suffered most cried the most). From the National Cathedral in Washington we heard Billy Graham say (in what may have been the most watched and listened-to sermon in history): ‘I have been asked hundreds of times in my life why God allows tragedy and suffering. I have to confess that I do not know the answer totally, even to my own satisfaction’.

But first to put it all in perspective.

1. Christians are being dispossessed, tortured and killed by Fundamentalist Muslims in much greater numbers than the 6,000 who died on September 11.

* Today’s Religious Persecution website’s prayer point http://www.persecutedchurch.org/ ):

“Sudan’s Head of State Omar al-Bashir plans to continue with the Islamic course decided upon by his government. He reportedly seized power in order to strengthen the implementation of sharia, or Islamic law. Since 1989, four million people have had to flee their home regions, and two million have met their deaths in the civil war that erupted over this Islamization policy. “

* More than 10,000 have been killed and 300,000 displaced in the Jihad attacks on Christian communities in the Malaku Islands of Indonesia between January 1999 and June 2001.

* As I write, Muslim mobs in Nigeria are killing hundreds of Christians and burning their churches.

2. What fanatical Islam is doing to Christians is akin to what fanatical Christians did to the ‘Infidel Turks’ in the Crusades 1,000 years ago.

3. Back further in history, it’s also what the Israelites did to the inhabitants of Canaan: ‘When you enter the land the Lord your God is giving you, do not learn or imitate the detestable ways of the peoples there… Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord, and because of these detestable practices the Lord your God will drive out these nations before you’ (Deuteronomy 18:9,12). (A key question here: is the God of the Old Testament the father of Jesus? That will have to wait for another time…)

4. Islam has not had a Reformation as the Western Christian Church experienced in the 15th and 16th centuries. So to accuse Islam of being ‘medieval’ is to say it is behaving as Christendom did until just four centuries ago. (Then, as with Islam now, apostasy or ‘heresy’ often resulted in death.)

Back to the Big Question.

Evil is whatever impairs our well-being. Some evil is perpetrated by humans against others. There is also a good deal of evil that has nothing to do with human free will: human diseases, genetic defects, natural disasters, animal pain, etc.

* ‘Evil, then, is most often committed in order to scapegoat, and the people I label as evil are chronic scapegoaters. In ‘The Road Less Traveled’ I defined evil “as the exercise of political power – that is, the imposition of one’s will upon others by overt or covert coercion – in order to avoid. spiritual growth” (p. 279). In other words, the evil attack others instead of facing their own failures. Spiritual growth requires the acknowledgment of one’s need to grow. If we cannot make that acknowledgment, we have no option except to eradicate the evidence of our imperfection.’ (M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie, Simon & Schuster, 1983, p. 74).

* ‘The able bodied men are separated into one group. The weak men, the elderly, the women and children, including a mother and her daugther are put with a second group and ushered into a building. The Nazi soldiers are very powerful, but the simple faith of most of us tells us that God is infinitely more powerful, and yet God does not stop the Nazi soldiers as they force our mother and her daughter to undress and move into a second room with showerheads in the ceiling. The little girl begins to cry and her mother tries to comfort her. The mother loves her daughter very much, yet our simple faith tells us that God’s love is infinitely greater than even that of the mother for her child, and yet God does nothing to save them as the doors of the room are sealed and poison gas begins to fill the air. How could a loving and powerful God exist and allow that woman and her daughter to be murdered? How could a God who loved that woman’s child and who has the power to save her not save her? And yet God did not save her or six million other people during the holocaust. And every day since then the God who supposedly loves all of us, and the God who has complete power over every aspect of the creation, has not stepped in to stop our suffering.

* In Cambridge Massachusetts two men lured a 10-year-old boy named Jeffrey Curley with promises of $50 and a new bicycle. The police said that when the boy refused to have sex with the men, one of them, Charles Jaynes, who weighs 115 kg, sat on Jeffrey and smothered him with a gasoline-soaked rag. Then, according to the police, the men had sex with the corpse and after that bought a 50-gal. container, sealed the body in it with duct tape and dumped it into a river on the Maine-New Hampshire border…

Why do such evil things happen to people?

Traditionally we ascribe to God two very important qualities – complete power (omnipotence), and universal love. One of our favorite hymns says God is ‘Holy, holy, holy, author of creation! Perfect in power, in love, and purity.’

God is all-powerful and God is love. So why do we suffer?

There would seem to be only four logical answers: either God is not loving, or God is not powerful, or ‘evil’ doesn’t really exist, or it is God who doesn’t exist.

Or to put it another way (to paraphrase C.S. Lewis in ‘The Problem of Pain’): ‘If God were good, God would protect us from harm; if God were powerful God could do it. But we suffer, so God lacks either goodness or power or both.’ The late Episcopal Bishop James Pike put the issue bluntly: If God is all that strong, and all that smart, and all that nice, why are things in such a mess? (‘God would if God could, but God can’t. This is inconsistent with God’s being omnipotent. God can, but God won’t. This is inconsistent with God’s being all good. God can’t and wouldn’t even if God could. This is inconsistent with God’s being all powerful and all good’).

The word we give to all this is ‘Theodicy’ (from the Greek words for God and justice). The best-known modern theodicy is Rabbi Harold Kushner’s ‘When Bad Things Happen to Good People’. Kushner was the father of a terminally ill child and a Reformed rabbi.

For some, theodicy is about putting evil into a simple cause/effect box. Like:

1. Suffering is a punishment for sin. In a just world people get what they deserve. The righteous are rewarded – in this life and/or in the next – and the wicked are punished.

2. We are creatures of flesh and blood who are vulnerable to accident, disease, and other destructive assaults upon our existence and well-being.

3. We are free moral beings and can misuse our freedom to cause harm to ourselves or others.

4. Suffering is designed by God to be a part of the world so that by facing the challenge evil poses, we can freely move toward moral perfection, which is God’s aim for us.

5. We live in a world where beings interact with each other. Destructive interactions and consequence are bound to follow.

6. The world has an excellent design within the limits of what is actually possible. Any other design would likely have produced a less favorable ratio of good in relation to evil. The strongest version of this argument insists that this is the best of all possible worlds.

7. Satan (a superhuman angel with free will who went wrong) is the cause of much suffering and evil in the world.

There is some truth in each of these. For example, we know that without freedom, there can be no authentic love. But none of these is the whole truth, or the best truth. Limited theodicies are good ideas that miss the main point. As Nietzsche once said, any theodicy has conscience against it.

The surprising fact is that the Bible is almost silent on this issue. Jesus doesn’t answer the question of theodicy, except in a parable about a field where an enemy sowed weeds among the good seeds in a field. God, said Jesus, will sort it all out on Judgment Day.

About the only place in the Bible that tackles the theodicy question head-on is the ancient Book of Job. It has the best answers I know to the age-old questions: What have I done to deserve this? What could I have done to avoid this? Where is God in all this.?

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away a man experienced an assortment of apparently meaningless, senseless tragedies. The story is gripping and challenging. The Book of Job is a great poem – some have said that it is perhaps even the greatest poem in all literature. It’s an epic drama much like Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. Neal Simon borrowed Job as the setting for his play, God’s Favorite, as did Archibald MacLeish (J.B.), and Robert Frost before him (“The Masque of Reason”). Novelist Muriel Spark again tried to update the plot of Job in a contemporary setting (The Only Problem).

At the beginning we’re handed some program notes that tell us something about the drama – happenings in heaven about which the actors are unaware. God is meeting with the angelic court. The Satan is a kind of spy – the word means an ‘accuser’ – and he asserts that anyone who claims that human beings are loyal to God from a pure motive is deluded. God responds, ‘All right, we’ll test your theory.’ So Job who was ‘blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil,’ a man of great integrity in every way is chosen to be the proving ground.

Is Job upright for what’s in it for him? Or does Job love God for God’s sake? The accusations are directed against the integrity of both Job and God. Satan’s invitation: ‘Stretch forth your hand now against all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.’

Job can’t even know that this is a test, and that God knows he is upright and innocent in all of this.

One by one, tragedies strike. Marauding bandits steal his livestock and kill his servants; lightning destroys his sheep and their shepherds in the fields; his great herd of camels, true wealth in the oriental world, has been destroyed in a natural catastrophe. Then comes the heartrending news that his seven sons and three daughters were enjoying a party when a tornado hit. The house was demolished and they were all killed.

Job’s fortune and future are gone — wiped out in a morning.

His initial response is move back and forth from suffering in silence, saying nothing, to worship. He tears his robe, shaves his head and falls face down on the ground, blessing God, with words I’ve quoted at many funerals: ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return; the LORD gives, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.’ (Job 1:21).

How can Job worship a God who allows all that to happen? How can we believe in God when there’s Auschwitz, Cambodia, Rwanda, September 11?

But ‘In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong-doing.’ Satan is taken aback, so he asks God to change the rules. Satan has decided to attack Job more directly and petitions God for the right to afflict Job’s body. This God grants. Without warning, Job is suddenly stricken with a series of terrible boils, or carbuncles. When I was a boy I suffered from boils, though never more than two or three at a time. Since then I’ve had a deep sympathy for dear old Job. There is nothing more aggravating than a painful boil which is not relieved by any kind of medication. You can only grit your teeth and endure the agony until the boil comes to a head, and heals itself. Job had these from the top of his head to the sole of his foot.

Job’s wife is the one whose faith succumbs. In her depression and anger she turns on him and says, ‘Are you still holding fast to your integrity? Why don’t you curse God and die?’ But Job stands firm, determined to be faithful.

Then comes another test, via three of his friends. They arrive to bring comfort and wise counsel. Approaching from a distance, they do not recognize Job, so profoundly has his affliction changed him. Tearing their robes, covering themselves with dust and ashes, they weep, and sit with him in silence for seven days. Sometimes in these situations silence is the only authentic way to be present — there is nothing to say.

Their discourses with Job then occupy most of the book. Each takes three rounds with Job. Each has three arguments, nine arguments in all. They suggest, ever so tactfully at first, then more and more insistently, that Job should search his conscience to see what he has done to bring God’s wrath down upon him. From their human (very human) point of view the haunting question, ‘Why do senseless tragedies afflict people?’ comes down to one major proposition. If God is indeed just, then the righteous are always blessed and the wicked always suffer. Job must have committed some awful sin. He’d better confess it and God will bless him again.

Now that’s not necessarily wrong. There are tragic events — catastrophes, heartache, pain, and suffering — which occur because we sin. Sin is all/only about violating the laws of God. These include, for example, laws about health. When we break them there’s a physical reaction: a lot of suffering comes back to that.

But Job’s friends didn’t know that this is not the only explanation possible for all kinds of suffering. They ‘darken counsel by words without knowledge’. They are ‘minimizers’, looking for happy endings; they accuse, they lecture: we don’t need such ‘friends’ in a time of grief.

Job moves from slight irritation with them, to anger and sarcasm: ‘No wisdom will die with you’ (12:2); ‘You’ve got all the answers, you’ve solved all the problems, you know everything. So there’s no use talking to you any longer!’ ‘All these pat answers don’t help at all!’ Job can’t confess sin because he is genuinely unaware of anything he’s done that has offended God. Moreover, he can’t believe in justice any longer because their arguments that the wicked always suffer are simply not true: many wicked people are prospering and living in ease, and nothing horrible is happening to them. Furthermore, he says, he doesn’t know what to do because God won’t listen to him. God hides from him and cannot be found. He yearns for an ‘umpire’, a mediator, who can plead his cause with God. Eventually Job rages at these friends in the turmoil of his confusion, bewilderment, anger, hurt, and frustration. He says he is afraid of this God, who is not the God he has known.

A young man, Elihu, has been listening to all this. He’s had a better education and has been taught to argue logically: ‘You are all wrong. You friends of Job are wrong because you accuse him unjustly, and Job is wrong because he blames God for his difficulty. He is accusing God in order to exonerate himself.’ Elihu offers nothing positive either.

The three friends and Elihu rationalize, minimize and theologize. It never occurs to them that a just God would destroy a righteous person. Job also knows that he is not the only innocent victim, and he issues a general indictment of the way God is running the world.

But then the Lord himself answers Job, in a whirlwind. In chapters 38 through 40, God takes Job on a tour of nature. Creation is wonderful, meaningful, worthwhile — yes, even playful. But it’s also a vast intricately intertwined universe which requires a superhuman mind to direct all its activities. In displaying the wonders of creation God puts Job firmly back in his place.

Someone has written: ‘God has not made it thus by the sheer elimination of darkness, wildness, chaos, or evil. Rather, God has drawn them together in a balance of light and dark, civility and wildness, order and chaos, good and

evil to create a world not only of spectacular beauty and power, but one where authentic freedom and love are real possibilities.’ God’s ways are not our ways. God’s justice is not reducible to our conception of it. God will not crush wickedness every time it appears, nor obliterate the dark side of life. These chapters challenge the whole ‘justice-injustice’ approach to life…

Faced with the awesome power and wisdom of God, Job falls down on his face and says: ‘I had heard of you. but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.’ (Job 42:5-6).

God’s essential argument: life is too complicated for simple answers. (For example, God is not bound by our notion of justice — personal retribution). If you are demanding that God come up with simple answers to these deep problems, you are asking God to do more than you are able to understand. Only God can adequately deal with the answers to these kinds of questions.

‘The message,’ writes Philip Yancey (When The Facts Don’t Add Up, Christianity Today, June 13, 1986; p. 19) expressed in splendid poetry boils down to this: UNTIL YOU KNOW A LITTLE MORE ABOUT RUNNING THE PHYSICAL UNIVERSE, JOB, DON’T TELL ME HOW TO RUN THE MORAL UNIVERSE. God criticizes Job for only one thing: his ignorance. Job made his judgments on the basis of incomplete evidence – an insight that those of us in the “audience” had seen all along.’

We too are invited to respond to evil by trusting God. The Hasidic teacher, Rabbi Bunam, said that ‘You should carry two stones in your pocket. On one should be inscribed, “I am but dust and ashes.” On the other, “For my sake was the world created.” And you should use each stone as you need it.’ The experience of the Whirlwind has taught Job to use the first stone. But what we need, and what the book of Job tries to teach us, is how to use them both together.

The last chapter sees Job praying for his ‘friends’, and the ‘compassionate and merciful God’ (James 5:11) restores Job’s fortunes to double what they were before. ‘And Job died, old and full of days’ (42:17).

We humans respond to evil in many ways, as these ancient characters did – with anger, depression, confusion, despair, or with neat rational explanations to deal with problems of cognitive dissonance. Kuschner asks for noble suffering. C.S. Lewis seeks a revelation. Kierkegaard suggests an irrational leap in the dark. And history offers ample evidence that when human beings zealously try to eradicate evil from their midst, they often end up doing more harm than good. Think of the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch hunts, the holy wars, efforts to achieve ethnic cleansing, to purge evil from the land. Think of war itself, in which the innocent are almost always those who are hurt the most. Maybe that’s why Jesus rejected the use of violence, because violence so often destroys the very thing it’s trying to save. It tears up the wheat along with the weeds.

The key lesson from Job is that emotional responses and/or rational answers are understandable but not ultimately helpful. God has perfectly good reasons for the way he has treated Job, and Job shouldn’t expect to know what they are. Did Job get no answer to his anguished demand to know why God had afflicted him? Yes and no. In the end Job says to God, ‘Now I see you.’ In seeing the face of a powerful and loving God, Job has an answer to his question about why God has afflicted him… God allows his suffering for a good and loving purpose, but Job doesn’t discover precisely what the nature of that spiritual good is or how it is connected to his suffering.

We cannot know the whole picture. With raw honesty we concede that life is too complex to be handled by humans alone. And neither pious words nor rituals will help most when the crunch comes. We are here in the realm of mystery. It’s not something we human beings can explain, not now.

In essence the key question in Job is not ‘Why do the innocent suffer?’ but rather ‘What will you and I do with our innocent suffering? Where will we go with it? Who has the power to transform it into good?’ Job has used his suffering to get angry at God — to argue with God. That’s O.K. Anger is not sin – so long as it is verbalized (as it is in about half of the biblical Psalms). Maybe only unspoken anger is sin.

Like Job we are invited to trust God whose creative power can govern the universe without our help; and who cares deeply for all God’s creatures. Suffering sometimes involves bearing bad things innocently – serving a purpose we cannot conceive or understand. Job is not guilty of sin or pride. He has simply been living with a false notion about God. You and I are not saved by our opinions about God — our theology, orthodox or heterodox — but by trust in God, the dynamic we call faith.

Not all suffering occurs because we are bad: it can be the source of some ultimate good. Job’s final faith-affirmation: ‘God knows the way that I take; when he has tried me, I shall come forth as gold.’ (Job 23:10).

The apostle Paul agrees: ‘We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose’ (Romans 8:28).

~~~

Discuss some or all of these:

1. Job’s opening words in his first speech: ‘Damn the day of my birth; God damn the day I was conceived. Better I should have died at birth.’ (Job 3:1ff.) Do you blame Job – or yourself – for uttering curses in this sort of situation?

2. How about this: ‘Though we must abandon our rationality when we let go, it is more precisely an arational leap. It is more like falling in love, if one can compare love and death, for it is the willing abandonment of self for the sake of another. It is the remembered God we see in shapeless void, making all our life but preparation for this last step. That true memory of Him is faith, the falling is hope, His arms are love.’

3. Or this: ‘The opposite of theology is not atheism, but idolatry, the substitution of human aspirations for divine justice. Idolatry replaces God with something patently false, simply to make God more malleable, more manageable, more liveable.’

4. What do you think of the statement: ‘Anger is not sin, provided it is verbalized. Only unspoken anger is sin’?

5. ‘For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh, I shall see God.’ (Job 19:25, 26). When you hear those words said (or sung in Handel’s Messiah) what passes through your mind?

6. Talk about Jesus Christ as the fulfilment of Job’s yearning for a mediator.

7. Discuss this: ‘Yes, the book of Job does have an answer for evil, for pain, for suffering. The answer is as complex as the book itself, for the answer is not a formula, a pill, or a prescription, no, the answer is a person, the answer is God.’

8. Some parents won’t allow their children to attend funerals of loved ones, ostensibly to shield them from grief/evil… What do you think about that?

9. When someone has experienced a massive tragedy, like Job their first reaction is numbed shock. Perhaps they might ask, ‘How long will this last?’ How do you help with that question?

10. Many who had a ‘faith’ and went to war, came back without any ‘faith’. What happened to them?

11. We still have in our churches many who, like Job’s comforters, ‘inhabit simplicity this side of complexity’. They want simple answers and neat formulas. Why?

12. ‘The only way to deal with tragedy is to develop a habit of unshakable gratitude. Life – all of it – is a gift beyond our deserving’ (John Claypool). What do you make of that?

~~~

Prayer (from Ray Stedman):

Our Father, thank you for this look into Job’s heart. Thank you for recording for us the struggles of this dear man as he frankly, openly, and honestly voices his doubts, airs his grievances, addresses you with his complaints. Lord, we hear ourselves, in our irksome petulance crying out to you, blaming you for our circumstances, unwilling to believe that you have a purpose behind them and are able to work them out. Lord, teach us to rest in you through the great and wonderful revelation that in every circumstance we are privileged to be instruments in the working out of victory over Satan; to demonstrate once and for all that the only life worth living is a life lived by faith. We pray in your name. Amen.

Rowland Croucher 15th October 2001.

Note: this material may be borrowed, adapted, circulated and/or preached – with or without acknowledgment.

Shalom! Rowland Croucher http://jmm.aaa.net.au http://priscillasfriends.org/ (Pastors’ wives)