"I believe in God the Father, Almighty..." Do you now? Is this the same God that the folks down in Colombia believe in, the folks who have just lost homes, health, and loved ones in that devastating earthquake Monday? The same God to whom prayers are directed from those trying to survive the ethnic slaughter in Kosovo? The same God to whom the family of Tiffany Long [a local 10-year-old found raped and murdered] prayed for her safe return from school? "God, the Father, ALMIGHTY...?" Right!
In Russell Baker's book, Growing Up, he talks about being five years old and losing his 33-year-old father to an acute diabetic coma. His mother had still not returned from the hospital, but with what had happened, young Russell was taken over to the home of one of the neighbors, Bessie Scott. He writes:
Poor Bessie Scott. All afternoon she listened patiently as a saint while I sat in her kitchen and cried myself out. For the first time I thought seriously about God. Between sobs I told Bessie that if God could do things like this to people then God was hateful and I had no more use for him. Bessie told me about the peace of heaven and the joy of being among the angels and the happiness of my father who was already there. This argument failed to quiet my rage. "God loves us all just like his own children," Bessie said. "If God loves me why did He make my father die?" Bessie said I would understand someday, but she was only partly right. That afternoon, though I couldn't have phrased it this way then, I decided that God was a lot less interested in people than anybody in Morrisonville was willing to admit. That day I decided that God was not entirely to be trusted.(1)
Young Russell is not alone. Some of you may feel that way at this very moment. We hear these wondrous claims of a world in the care and keeping of a loving heavenly Father, then look around and see one catastrophe after another. Still, we stand together and say, "I believe in God, the Father, ALMIGHTY..." Really?
Lots of folks do not. Of all the barriers to belief, none are quite so strong as this one: if this almighty God is so loving, why do so many terrible things happen? Earthquakes in Colombia that kill hundreds, ethnic terrorism in Kosovo, devastating diseases that destroy families, the murder of little children walking home from school? Is a loving God in control of this world?
The orthodox answer is YES. In our Westminster Confession of Faith we affirm, "God...alone [is the] fountain of all being, OF whom, THROUGH whom, and TO whom, are all things; and hath most sovereign dominion over them, to do BY them, FOR them, or UPON them, whatsoever himself pleases."(2) God is in charge...of EVERYTHING! The sovereignty of God has always been the bedrock of Reformed theology.
There is an oft-told story of a little boy who offered up this simple prayer: "God bless mother and daddy, my brother and sister; and God, do take care of yourself, because if anything happens to YOU, we're all sunk." That is a child's way of acknowledging the sovereignty of God.
In a way, it may seem like whistling through the graveyard to continue with that affirmation. Awful things constantly happen. Some years ago, while we were living in south Georgia, our town was stunned at the crash of a small plane that took the lives of a father, a mother, and their young daughter. I did not know the parents, but I did know Beth. She was a sixth-grader, one of my David's classmates. She had performed with Erin in the local Community Theatre and had become my daughter's good friend. Beth was a gorgeous and vivacious child, one of those who would, as the years progressed, be certain to make many a young man's heart flutter (a process which, I am told, had already begun).
I remember Erin being particularly devastated by the news. She sobbed and sobbed as the terrible truth sank in. It made no sense to her that something like this could occur. In the middle of her pain, she began to feel angry. Sunday School theology had taught her that God rules this world, which meant that God controls all that happens - even plane crashes. As she sat on my lap, she lashed out through her tears in a way that only an eight-year-old could: "God is not very POLITE!"
Later that night, as she lay in her bed and talked with me before saying her prayers, the weeping began again. I tried to explain that even though Beth was no longer here, she was with Jesus - no crying, no pain, a wonderful place. She responded, "God may be happy now, but I'M NOT!" I replied that God was not happy about this. God did not make the plane crash. God does not do things like that. It was a terrible accident, but now God had picked up the pieces and brought Beth and her mommy and daddy home to heaven. Erin was not mollified - good theology, but cold comfort. Erin missed her friend.
I remember David telling me that one of the class assignments he and Beth had for English was to keep a journal, and one of the reflections was to deal with those things of which they were afraid. Beth had written that she was afraid of dying young. How ironic!
There are too many ironies in this world for my taste. Bad things happen to good people, and I do not like it. Then how can we continue to preach and teach the sovereignty of a God who loves us more deeply than the most devoted parent..."I believe in God, the Father, Almighty"...with any intellectual or philosophical or even theological integrity?
This is not a new question. In fact, there is even a three-dollar word attached to it - THEODICY. It refers to our attempts to show that it is possible to affirm both the "almightiness" of God and the love of God when we are confronted with so much that is awful in the world. There are lots of answers.
Some want to say that what appears to be evil may not be evil at all; for example, an aborigine from the wilds of the Australian bush who is suddenly transported into a modern operating room may see a masked man with a knife about to slice into a helpless patient's flesh and presume this is TERRIBLE...but we know it is not. Perhaps you and I are in the same predicament with some of the things we see. Perhaps.
Some want to say that the evil we experience is God's way of keeping us from even greater evil. For example, we might be upset that we were injured by a car while crossing Old Chapman Street, but this was God's way of preventing us from being run over by a truck at that moment on Holden Road. Uh-huh.
Some want to say that suffering is an inevitable piece of the human condition - God cannot be blamed for that. It is human to love, and love is wonderful...but love can also cause great pain (ask any teenager). Yes, bad things come, but only because we encounter them in pursuit of the good. OK.
Something wonderfully appropriate to this discussion this morning came to me this week. It came from my wife, this wonderful lady who is, at most, a few feet away from me at meals, often only inches away in the course of a day, and who is snuggled up close as we sleep. Even now she sits in the choir loft, not twenty yards away. She did not tell me the story and hand it to me on a slip of paper; she sent it by e-mail from her home computer to her Juno mail server, which then shipped it through cyberspace through wires and switches and hubs and routers to my PresbyNet mainframe in Kentucky then finally back to North Carolina, a journey of who knows how many thousands of miles. Ah, technology! That has nothing to do with this sermon; I was just fascinated, that's all.
What she sent me was the story of the only survivor of a shipwreck washed up on a small, uninhabited island. He prayed feverishly for God to rescue him, and every day he scanned the horizon for help, but none seemed forthcoming. Exhausted, he eventually managed to build a little hut out of driftwood to protect him from the elements, and to store his few possessions.
But then one day, after scavenging for food, he arrived home to find his little hut in flames, the smoke rolling up to the sky. The worst had happened; everything was lost. He was stung with grief and anger. "God, how could you do this to me?" he cried.
Early the next day, however, he was awakened by the sound of a ship that was approaching the island. It had come to rescue him. "How did you know I was here?" asked the weary man of his rescuers.
"We saw your smoke signal," they replied.
Good lesson. Remember it the next time your little hut is burning to the ground - it just may be the smoke signal that summons your deliverance.
As I say, there are lots of ways people try to understand the existence of evil in a world we say is in the control of God, the Father, Almighty, some of which make more sense than others. For what it is worth, folks have been struggling with the issue for thousands of years. The Bible has one whole book that deals with the subject - Job. It is one long poetic compendium of the questions people raise when confronted with catastrophe: Why? Why me? Why him? Why them?
Job's story, of course, you remember. Here was a successful and prosperous man, a man whose life had always been right side up, suddenly confronted with the destruction of his property, even the death of his children as their house collapsed on them (sounds like Colombia). Soon Job lost his own health - more suffering in a short time than most of us ever endure in our entire lives. And he and his neighbors raised those questions. Why? Why you? Why me?
Finally, after Job and his friends had talked enough, the voice of God broke in. "Tell me, Job, where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Who hung the stars in the sky and how did he do it, Job? Who tells the dawn to break and the night to fall, and how does it happen, Job? How does the wind work, Job? How many clouds are there, Job?" One unanswerable question after another with our hero finally responding, "Uh, uh, uh...Gee, Lord, I guess are lots of answers I don't have." And the Lord says, "BINGO, Job! And there are some answers you will NEVER have."
I like the way Dr. Albert Winn, a wonderful pastor and former President of Louisville Seminary, deals with this issue.(3) He notes that at the heart of biblical faith we do not find air-tight arguments sealed with a "therefore" - all is right with the world, therefore, let us have faith; therefore, let us praise God. Rather at the heart of biblical faith we find things that do not logically follow at all, sealed with a "nevertheless." Much is wrong with the world, the mystery of evil is great, NEVERTHELESS let us have faith, NEVERTHELESS let us praise God. Perhaps we can better understand the miseries of life if we remember NEVERTHELESS.
A little boy in Sunday School prayed fervently, "Dear God, please bless everybody but my brother Tommy." The teacher replied that God did indeed understand that little brothers are sometimes hard to live with, but that God LOVED Tommy. "Then He's a mighty funny kind of a God," the little boy said. In our own way and for our own reasons, we understand.
"I believe in God, the Father, Almighty..." God is sovereign. God is in control. We continue to preach it, teach it, and confess it. But the question remains: Are we just whistling through the graveyard? Are we like little children, trying to affirm what we are afraid is not true by tightly closing our eyes and trying to make our dream real by endlessly repeating our hope? Is this a great collective self-deception? Not at all.
When I need a reminder, I look at the calendar. I see the first day of the week and I remember what happened one Sunday so many years ago...that first Easter, the day of resurrection. What preceded it had been awful. There was that illegal midnight trial, the taunting and torture. The trek through the city streets under the weight of the wood. The thud, thud, thud of the hammer and the blood that spurted from nail-pierced hands. The agony of the cross being elevated and then dropped with a cruel thump as flesh was torn from the shock. There was even a moment when a casual listener heard Jesus mumble what at first blush sounded like a cry of utter despair: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
Was it despair? Or was it an affirmation of confidence? You see, the words "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me" are the opening phrases of the 22nd Psalm. The words would have been as well known to Rabbi Jesus as "The Lord is my Shepherd" or "For God so loved the world" are to you and me. Just as those passages are so familiar to us, Jesus knew not only the beginning of the Psalm but the rest of it as well. Yes, it starts off in the depths of despair..."My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"...but quickly acknowledges, "In you our ancestors trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them. To you they cried, and were saved; in you they trusted, and were not put to shame," and then finally soars to,
For dominion belongs to the LORD, and he rules over the nations. To him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down; before him shall bow all who go down to the dust, and I shall live for him. Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord, and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that HE HAS DONE IT.
YES! This was Friday, but SUNDAY was coming, and it was that day that guaranteed for time and all eternity that "the wrong shall fail, the right prevail." Remember, as we believe, so we behave. I STILL cannot adequately explain why bad things happen in a world in the control of a good God, NEVERTHELESS I finally let my faith take over and sing,
This is my Father's world
Oh, let me ne'er forget
That though the wrong seems oft' so strong
God is the ruler yet.(4)
"I believe in God the Father, Almighty..."
Let us pray.
O God, there is much we do not understand, try as we might. Help us to be content with the knowledge that where OUR understanding fails, yours is only ready to begin. We make our prayer in the name of Jesus. Amen!
1. Russell Baker, Growing Up, (New York, New American Library, 1982), p. 61
2. "Westminster Confession of Faith," The Book of Confessions, (Louisville, KY: Office of the General Assembly, Presbyterian Church, USA), 6.012
3. Albert Curry Winn, A Christian Primer, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990), pp. 79-80
4. Maltbie D. Babcock, 1901