Anyone who thinks walking with God is easy is either dishonest or disillusioned.   For the God we deal with is not entirely consistent from the seat of our limited perspective.
He miraculously heals one person.  Another dies and leaves behind young children.
He blesses one with great abundance.  Another one somewhere in the third world starves.
He gives to one immediate guidance and clarity. Another pleads and pleads, and yet feels as if he is wandering without purpose.
Oh it is easy to judge that the latter in each of these cases is suffering from some deficiency in faith or zeal, but experience casts that aside, as do the narratives of scriptures. It is often the faithful who struggle while the evil flourish. And at other time is is the one faithful one who is blessed and another equally faithful who is cursed.
The truth is this. From our perspective, God is quite inconsistent. And I suppose that means that God is not nearly as concerned with consistency as we are. He is more concerned with his ultimate purposes even as he works them out in those ways we note as inconsistent.
But he is the God we must deal with. Because he is the only true God.
And I suppose that those that watched on Good Friday who had followed the Christ figured God had really messed that one up as well.
Hey Phil,
I’m glad you wrote this.
As I get ready for trip number two to Haiti, I feel like everything I see and hear is filtered through Haiti lenses. A few months ago, we were in a bible study and the whole “Don’t worry about what you’ll eat or drink” theme came up… and more recently, “Give us this day our daily bread” and Luther’s “God gives us daily and richly all that we need to support this body and life.” The tough thing is, I know kids in Haiti whose dad starved to death, or whose hair is turning red from malnutrition, or whose parents abandoned them because they didn’t have the means to feed them.
The dogma response would be that we don’t need to worry because even if we die, our lives are in God’s hands… and that God will use their sufferings for the good somehow. I believe that, but it still feels like a broken promise.
It’s difficult to know absolutely and completely the goodness of God…. and reconcile that to the images of people whose prayers for food and clothing and life and health are answered with a “no” from God.
Sometimes I feel like the most theological answer I can give is a shrug.
I often ask my students, when studying Greek tragedy, if the gods can ever be moral? And the answer they give is no. We operate by a system of supposed fair play and equality of outcomes that God can never ever be good.
It makes one wonder how our Lord’s Crucifixion and Resurrection negate all these temporal “misfortunes”.