Greentree Community Church

I’m always amazed but never surprised at the fickle nature of the human heart.  As Americans we fully and firmly reserve the right to change our minds, commitments, and/or allegiances whenever the situation calls for it.  For instance, just consider how many people had decided to vote for GOP front runner Rudy Guiliani and Democratic front runner, Hilary R. Clinton.  Just a few short months ago, they held impressive double digit leads over their opponents.  Within only a few weeks, many once-committed voters have switched allegiances to other candidates, forcing Rudy out of the race and making Clinton’s exit all the more probable.  Now, I’m not here to talk about political allegiances but ultimate allegiance, that is allegiance to the central reality of the universe, the One we often call God.  As we consider suffering, pain, and evil in the world, my question is, wouldn’t it just be easier to give up on God, to walk away, to stop believing, to recognize that an all powerful, loving God is simply contradictory to all the events in my life and in the world?  The question then, is does the absence of God help explain our pain and does it provide any comfort for us in our pain? 

When Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail, he remarked that the only way to know that a law is unjust is if there’s a divine, higher law from God that tells us so.  If there were no divine law from God, then how could anyone know if a human law was out of accord or not?  With what would it be out of accord?  If there is no God, someone could say that a law was unjust but that would be according to their standards or their feelings.  Let’s take it a step further to say that if there is no God, then there is no way to say that an historical situation is unjust.  If there is nothing but nature, what is more natural than violence; it’s how you and I got here—natural selection, the strong eating the weak.  Dostoevsky wrote, “If God is dead, then all things are permissible.”  If there is no God, then on what possible basis could you object that the natural order of violence is unnatural?  On what basis do we ask for a better world?  Without a God, what we have is what we should expect, namely suffering and pain.  Without a God there would be no reason to construct any concept of injustice or suffering or pain, for on what would it be based?  The better question to ask is if there is no God, why do I (and apparently all humans) have an innate sense of justice, right, and what “ought to be.”  It’s hard to get those feelings and desires unless a personal God made us like Him to desire those things and unless a personal God created a world intended to be pain free.  So suffering and evil is a problem for the existence of God but an even bigger problem for the absence of God!

Nobody could say this better than the one time atheist C.S. Lewis:  "My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying that it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist--in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless--I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality--namely my idea of justice--was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning."

In the end, I believe we must force ourselves back to the beginning question of fickle hearts, namely does my concept of God really center on me and not on Him?  In other words, do we believe in God only when He is granting our desires and functioning after our model of God like a genie in a bottle or do we believe in a God who is bigger than our own small perceptions of Him, a God who is big enough to have perfect reasons for allowing suffering to continue?  Indeed, if you have a God who is big enough to be angry at for not stopping suffering, then you have a God who is big enough to have very good reasons beyond our comprehension for allowing it to continue.  You can’t have it both ways.