Previous post, Part 3: History and Faith
Back to my college-age self, I felt a boost of confidence in the idea that faith could be supported intellectually and not merely with feelings or intuition, not that the latter are unimportant. I read James Sire’s The Universe Next Door, which compares all the major worldviews with each other, such as deism, naturalism (atheism), existentialism, and others, and then F.F. Bruce’s classic The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? And of course, C.S. Lewis’s masterpiece, Mere Christianity. These books and others set me on a course to think about faith as well as feel it. As a youth, I never knew this combination was possible.
Now approaching the 50th anniversary of my high school graduation with all my treasured classmates, I detect in the mirror a man who is well past his prime. An important question at this stage of life is where to invest my time and resources. Secular culture assures me that I deserve long-delayed rewards such as cruises, cars and boats, a second home, and five-star golf. I would love these amenities, and there’s nothing wrong with them per se. They just aren’t enough. A more meaningful level of investment is in family and friends, such as grandchildren. The two oldest in our family, Isaiah and Joshua, are just approaching the teen years and seem more settled and mature than I ever was at their age. We’ve begun a series of discussions together called “Apologetics for Kids” that walk through some of the most difficult questions of religious faith, such as why one might trust the history of Jesus (mentioned above), why God doesn’t make himself more obvious to us, why the stories of the Old Testament are so violent, how to respond to misconduct in the church, and the hardest question of all: why a loving God would allow so much suffering in the world, especially among the innocent.
As of this writing, a horrific flood in Texas has recently left some 150 dead, including many young girls attending a summer camp where they were learning about God. To think of the trauma and pain they suffered in their last minutes of life is unbearable. I can only pray for the surviving families in their grief, not because I think prayer brings automatic healing or protection or resolution of problems, but because prayer is God’s call to participate in his work. God asks, in essence, “Do you care about the world’s problems? Join my team. Pray, act, speak. You are my hands and feet. I’m not going to snap my fingers and fix things. I’m not a philosophical entity subject to the criticisms of finite human beings. I made you. I gave you life. Life is hard, even tragic, in a fallen world. Together, let’s repair what is broken. But that means we must work together. We must become partners.”
On a Zoom call one day, I asked Isaiah and Joshua (nicknamed Zay and Josh) in one of our Apologetics for Kids sessions why God allows so much hurt and harm in the world. They speculated a bit with their almost-teen minds that hardship develops character, that God uses adversity (my word) to teach us lessons. Not a bad start. Then we set up a thought experiment. Pretend, I said, that you are the creator of a video game, and your main character is a boy about your age. Zay and Josh each named their characters. Then, the critical question: Inside your video game, will you script the behavior of your characters, or, conversely, allow them to make their own choices? Will it be determinism or free will? Robots programmed to do right, or, unscripted characters who might just go bad, might just do the wrong thing – and keep doing it?
Both Zay and Josh opted to give their characters free will. Better to create life with the risk of failure than not to create at all. And that’s the story of the first few chapters of the Bible. Whether one believes in a literal “Adam and Eve” or takes them as literary symbols, the point is still clear. God created human persons to enjoy a close family relationship with them, a relationship of mutual love. But love cannot be forced. The possibility of rejecting the family of God in favor of divorce was always there. And that’s what happened. Humankind deserted its maker, and the world fell apart. Someday in the future of that same story, God would come to earth to oversee a rescue operation in person. Jesus would enter the world, dispense upside-down teaching and wisdom – such as loving one’s enemies – and ultimately die a criminal’s death so that everyone could be saved. Everyone who accepts his love, that is.
I think my grandsons got the point. Suffering and evil are the fault of humanity, not God. We caused the problem. God responds by solving the problem… but not in the way we’d expect. God is not a wand-waving utopian. Instead, he uses human instruments to bring healing and reconciliation to his creation that’s gone far off the rails. My atheist friend, Tom, is so disgusted with God for allowing suffering and evil that he disbelieves in God. Or at least he disbelieves in the God of the Bible. But the Bible fights back. It protests that a careful reading of its texts reveals a Divine Being of deep sorrow, one who enters the depths of suffering with and beside us, above and below and all around us. God resists being reduced to a set of philosophical properties such as “all-powerful” and “all-knowing.” Rather, he’s a person. He walks alongside the broken, the discouraged, the frightened, in their darkest valleys – valleys in which the author of Psalm 23 is assured, “You are with me.”
My friend Robert lost his wife Sheri in middle age. He had nowhere to turn. Nothing in life made sense anymore. Grief overwhelmed. He could have rejected God for negligence of duty, but instead, he embraced the Lord as his only hope. The valley was too dark to walk alone, and he knew that bitterness toward heaven would only make his days on earth darker and harder to navigate. Even today, I hear Robert claim the promise, “You are with me.” Additionally, when his wife passed, he took hold of a dream: now in a better place, Sheri would await patiently the future arrival of her beloved husband. They would be reunited in the everlasting arms of the One who drew them together in the first place. Nor was Robert’s dream merely fanciful. Down payment on it was made two millennia ago on the famous “third day” in which the Man of Sorrows, so intimately acquainted with agony and grief, rose from the dead. I remember the potent line from a hymn of my boyhood: “Up from the grave he arose!” And my first Easter Sunday as a full believer, age 19, walking the neighborhood around James Avenue, Bible in hand as I pored over the Easter story with fresh eyes that required every few minutes a sleeve to dry. Christ had ruptured the tomb. Death was not the end. The postmortem Savior would lift the hand of Sheri and usher her into glory. Of this future, Robert in his present grief can catch only small glimpses, as though in fleeting portals of light. Someday in the life to come, everything will make sense. Recently, he said to me on the golf course, “I just want Jesus. Nothing else matters. I’m so happy right now, even in my grief.”
“You still cry,” I said, sort of as a question. “All the time. Losing Sheri still feels raw. But God is with me.” And then Robert hit a magnificent drive off the 12th tee that went down the fairway 75 yards past my ball.
