Recently, I got asked a very interesting question and I decided it was such a great question that I would answer it on my blog because I believe it is one that everyone has to wrestle with. It’s one of the biggest questions the church faces in our world. I’ve heard it answered wonderfully and not so wonderfully. So here’s my crack at Theology and I’d love to hear everyone’s view on this topic as well.
Here’s the question: How have you remained so strong in your beliefs despite everything you have seen in the world?
I’m not going to sugar coat it, the world sucks. Horrible things happen every minute (every second possibly). War, genocide, human trafficking, natural disasters, hunger, rape, terrorism, and more are nothing short of our reality. The hardest thing for people to digest in my opinion is when bad things happen to good/innocent people. How can a loving God allow such things to happen? This is the heart of the problem.
To answer this question, I believe we need to go back all the way to the beginning (or at least our beginning) and take a deeper look. In Genesis, we get an account of the creation of our world and universe by God. This is before humans, and before the dreaded fall of humanity. The creation follows a formula.
And God said “Let there be _____” and there was ____ and it was good.
I always found it interesting how the Bible always included that what God created was good. What interests me is that in the beginning there was a concept of good. If something can be described as good then, to me, that implies that there is a concept of bad already in existence. Good cannot exist without bad. You wouldn’t even describe something that way because nothing would be bad and therefore nothing would ever be good either. So therefore, before the world was created, whatever was out there before us was already caught in the balance between good and bad.
So what made the world so good? I believe it was God’s presence. God is innately good, He is never bad and He created us in His image. So we have a universe that is neutral that now contains a world that is nothing but good. It was pure and hadn’t been tainted yet, and because of that, God was present in the midst of all of it.
I like to view this with the analogy of light and darkness. Darkness just exists; it doesn’t need to be created. It encompasses everything and you can’t escape it. However, you can remove darkness by creating light. Darkness by definition is the absences of light. The wonderful thing about light is that you don’t even need very much of it to overpower darkness.
Anyone who has been in a cave and turned off of their lights knows true darkness. It’s so thick that it almost pulses on your eye balls. You can’t even see your hand right in front of your face. Then someone simply lights a single match, and the entire cave lights up. It’s magnificent! Just one spark and you can see everything again! Light is truly powerful. Darkness can’t overtake it, it’s impossible. If light is present, it wins every time.
When God created man, He created him with the unique ability to decide for himself what is right or wrong. This is the concept of free will. We each have a personal choice as to whether or not we love and follow God. This makes sense to me because who wants to force someone to love you? That’s not real love. God wants us to choose Him.
Now enter the famous story of Adam and Eve eating the apple. This is the fall of man. It was the deliberate choice to disobey God and turn away. They chose to run away and hide from God’s presence (the very thing that was keeping the world good) and through their sin, brought evil into this world.
Mankind was left to its own accord. Now this isn’t a good thing because, in my opinion, people are inherently bad. I know this is a huge debate among people, but I strongly believe that we are. You don’t have to look farther than children to realize it. This is why you have to teach children to share, and not to steal from or bite people. We’re prideful, selfish and impatient, and those three things lead to us doing some slightly bad to horrendous things if left unchecked.
Add in the fact that God allows us to choose no matter how horrible our choices are, we are faced with awful natural consequences. Most of the horrible things that go on in our world can be traced back to this. Almost all of the things I mentioned above (war, genocide, human trafficking, natural disasters, hunger, rape, terrorism) can be traced back to selfishness, although natural disasters are a stretch. These are the work of human beings, not God.
One of the strongest arguments I hear about that claim is in relation to hunger and how God allows people to starve in many areas of the world. I hear what people are saying and I understand their heartache, but honestly, it isn’t God allowing them to starve, it’s us. The truth is, we have more than enough food in the world to feed everyone, and we just don’t do it. Just think of all the food you personally throw away at your house because it spoils. I was really enlightened by this when I waited tables. The amount of food people didn’t eat on their plates that I had to throw away could have fed several families each day, and yet it was destined for the trash can. I would hate for anyone in the third world to see how wasteful and unconcerned we are.
However, there is hope in this, and I want to continue with the example of hunger to demonstrate it. You see, while Satan may be the ruler of our current world, God is still the light and is destined to win. He already has. Because of this, amazing things happen every day in the fight against inequality and injustice.
While I was in Haiti, I had the pleasure of visiting Grace Village, a compound for orphans in Port Au Prince that was created by the organization I was working with. The compound also held a free school and clinic for the community. It also contained the future of agriculture in many third world countries. It has an aquaponics system.
Here’s my very uneducated explanation of an aquaponics system. You have huge tanks that contain hundreds of fish. The water from the tanks are dispersed by tubes into a garden giving nutrients to the plants that wouldn’t normally have access to (the nutrients being fish poop, yum). Then the water is circulated back to the fish tank which is good for the fish for some reason. I know, I’m super smart, right? Here’s a link for the Wikipedia page explaining it for those of you who really want to get nerdy about this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaponics.
You see, science has brought us a long way, and we’re able to now create aquaponic systems all over the world to fight against hunger! I’m all about donating food to the third world, but I strongly believe in giving locals the agency to make change in their own lives by teaching them how to create their own system.
We’ve also made leaps and bounds scientifically with the purification of water as well. While I was in Papua New Guinea we taught the locals how to build functioning water filters using things they could find in their village. They now not only have access to clean water, but they also have the ability to create it and teach the surrounding villages how to do so as well.
I share all of these things because God is moving, and He’s doing it in unexpected ways. He’s using science to reach out and strengthen people who were helpless before. Heck, even think of all the cures and vaccines we have to diseases today due to the hard work and research many people have done for the cause. God uses us to be the light carriers in this world. We have a choice to destroy it, but we also have the choice to put it back together again. This is what gives me hope. This is what carries my faith the distance in the face of destruction and evil. It’s the fact that God wins, and as more people join the cause, we make more advancements and improvements in the fight against inequality and injustice.
The world isn’t all bad. The most beautiful thing I see in it is the people who don’t settle for how it is and instead, fight to not only make it better, but to restore it to how it was intended to be. I want to be one of those people. I want to be a light carrier.
I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of this topic! I could go on and on about ways in which God intervenes in our world but that could take hours! My main point in this is that I believe we are casting the blame onto God and taking it off of ourselves when we ask this question. Why is the world so messed up? It’s because of us. God is perfect and He is nothing but love. My hope from writing this blog is that those who are reading it and are wrestling with blaming God will stop debating and get up and start being the change they want to see in the world! Search for the hope in these issues and do whatever you can to jump on board with what you are passionate about! Stop sitting in the dark and turn a light on for crying out loud!
