PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: A GENERATION QUESTIONING GOD.
(By: Ron Woodrum)
Disappointment with God: Three Questions No One Asks Aloud, is the name of a book written by the amazingly able and influential Christian writer Phillip Yancey. What are those questions? Number one is, Is God Unfair? Number two is, Is God Silent? Number three is, Is God Hidden? The book was the product of Yancey’s discourse with a student named Richard, a graduate student at Wheaton College. Richard had approached Yancey and asked him to read a term paper he had written on the Book of Job. That term paper was only his presenting problem. It was actually a launching board for him to uncork, from his life, how he was disappointed in romance-he had loved, and it didn’t work out. How in his vocational life he had experienced only shattering dissapointment. His religious life he had found to be filled with “heaven’s silence“. His physical life was filled with illness and suffering. He looked to Yancey to find some support for his premise that he had GROUNDS TO BE DISAPPOINTED WITH GOD! Richard’s experience is not an isolated experience. All of us, if we are honest, have experienced things in our lives that have caused us to ask those questions, even if not out loud, concerning the nature of God. Jonah too experienced such disappointment. He to belonged to the club that found the actions of God bewildering. He would have been glad to run for president of that club! After warning Ninevah of the coming judgment of God, and sitting down with his hourglass, waiting for the fireworks, only to be told they had been cancelled!, Jonah was angry with God. He felt God had acted unfairly. In fact, He had acted unjustly. Indeed, He had acted beyond what Jonah thought God could ever do.
Today, that same kind of bewilderment with God is very prevalent. After all, we live in an atmosphere of what I call “Insurance Company Theology”-i.e. An Act of God is Defined as a Calamity no one else but God is responsible for! Such a view is often seen on two fronts-both poles apart in their world views. Modern day athiests, like Christiopher Hitchins, sees the evil in the world as evidence that, if there is a God, He is certainly not Great! (That by the way, is the Title of his recent bestselling book). His thesis is, if God is great, (morally good), then He must not be “all-powerful”, for if He was, He would do something to eliminate evil from His world. Conversely, if He is “all-powerful”, and does not eliminate evil, then by anyone’s standards, He cannot be considered “good”. (This is faulty logic, failing to take into account that God will do something about evil once-and-for-all, but on His, not our timetable, and any delay in so doing is indication of what a Good, Compassionate, Loving, Long-suffering, Gracious God He really is, grace that allows Hitchens, Dawkins, and other athiests the freedom to write, and live in luxury from books that denigrate his Goodness). But athiests are not the only ones struggling with this issue. On the other end of the spectrum, even Christian authors and apologists, like C.S. Lewis, knew what it was to grapple with these divine complexities. After his wife Joy died an untimely death, due to cancer, Lewis, though he had long written Christian truth, and defended the faith, found himself in the twilight zone of doubting the goodness of God. In those dark days of grief he wrote,
“Meanwhile, where is God? When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, if you turn to praise Him, you will be welcomed with open arms! But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A DOOR SLAMMED IN YOUR FACE, AND THE SOUND OF BOLTING, AND DOUBLE-BOLTING ON THE INSIDE! AFTER THAT SILENCE! YOU MAY JUST AS WELL TURN AWAY.”
Two Books of the Old Testament discuss these very perplexing issues about God. One is quite monumental-The Book of Job. The other is quite miniscule-The Book of Jonah. Both, in the end, declare the great, glorious, and gracious nature of God. Both Job and Jonah, I believe, came to that conclusion, after all was said and done! Job shows that although sometimes we as humans are caught in the cross-fire of a cosmic conflict, and sometimes suffer extensively, that we serve a sovereign God who will eventually bring us the victory, crushing the enemy, and bringing to us such results, that we will in the end, wonder why we ever questioned God. The other, the Book of Jonah, presents a Holy God, who has set boundaries for both His creation, and His children. When they cross those boundaries, He has promised that there will be consequences, and that He is no respecter of persons. The poet has described this truth so aptly,
“There is a time, we know not when, a point, we know not where,
that leads to glory or despair
There is a line, by us unseen, that crosses every path,
The hidden boundary between God’s patience and His wrath
There is a path, though by men unseen
That once it has been crossed
God Himself, in all His love,
Has sworn that all is Lost!”
-Joseph Addison Alexander (1809-1860)
That being true, the Book of Jonah clearly declares, with Ezekial, that “God has no delight in the death of the wicked”
(See Ezekial 18:23). Jonah discovered what the New Testament would later clearly affirm. “God is longsuffering, and not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” ( II Peter 3:9). “For this is good in the sight of God…who will have all men to be saved, and come to the knowledge of the truth” (I Tim. 2:4). The Book of Jonah is not about a Prophet; a Whale; A great city-Ninevah. It is about a Great God who, though Holy, is more than that, He is Good, Glorious, Gracious in Compassion, Longsuffering, Kindness. His Name is greatly to be praised!