Cancer. Divorce. A young life halted in a car wreck. Bad things happen. They tie our stomachs into knots and frighten our children. Then the questions come. “Why is this happening?” “Where is God?” I remember as a child hearing the haunting question of Gordon Lightfoot as he sang about the sinking of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald in the cold waters of Lake Superior; “Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?”1 People seem to naturally blame God when things go wrong.
After hearing me speak, a young man said to me, “Show me why I should not be mad at God and I’ll believe in Jesus.” I asked him why he was mad at God. “My Grandmother died, and we were close.” I asked him how old she was when she died. “98,” he said. I wondered how long his grandmother would need to live in order for him to not be mad at God! Many people reason the same way as this young man. God is supposed to fix bad things and if he fixes things the way we like them, we might think God is good.
But if God is really God, won’t He stop bad things from happening? Not necessarily.
We Live in a Fallen World
The Lord came to earth, stood in a synagogue one day, and read this passage from the Scriptures:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised…” - Luke 4:18
He had all the power to stop those bad things from happening. Yet there stands God, and all around Him are people who are poor, brokenhearted, held captive, blind, and bruised. He was not shocked or in a panic. Pain is common. People who experience bad things are in the majority. The experience of living through bad things might shock us, but the fact that bad things are in our world should not.
This world is a fallen one. It is broken. Broken worlds cannot be fair.
| It is not God’s Responsibility to Fix Bad Things in a Fallen World. |
He does not come along and sterilize all the germs and take away all the mosquitoes and pretend that everything is ok; as if Adam’s sin was a long time ago and God loves everyone anyway. No, no. There are lessons and consequences. When Adam plunged this world into sin, he brought pain to us all. Thistle grows, childbirth is hard, work makes us sweat, sickness is almost certain, car wrecks happen, and death stares at us like a snake. It hurts. And it hurt God too. But rather than pretend the Fall didn’t happen, God joins us in our mess.
Perhaps we have talked too much about the healing of the blind boy and not enough about the day John the Baptist’s head was cut off to please a dancing girl. Yes, David beat Goliath, but The Pit hurt Joseph. His absence at the supper table about killed his Dad. All Jacob had left were the bloody pieces of Joseph’s colorful coat. Almost all the disciples were killed. Paul’s head was severed. John was exiled on a crummy island. These stories are powerfully moving, in part, because these people didn’t blame God for things that Man, in a fallen world, did to them.
If you watch enough “Christian television” you might get the idea that we’re all supposed to be rich and not even get the flu. (I wonder if the guys who teach that have insurance).
Make no mistake; God does heal. He blesses. We do get victories! And prayers are answered! But there is an out of balance expectation that God is a genie in a bottle. He’s supposed to fix everything; and if He doesn’t, it’s because He’s bad or doesn’t exist. This expectation causes wrong conclusions about God. Even Believers can easily get a floating bitterness that cripples their fellowship with God and steals their zeal. Unbelievers may refuse the grace of God offered in the gospel because they can’t trust God because He “didn’t fix it.”
| Jesus Came to be the Redeemer Shepherd of Hurting People in a Fallen World. |
God is busy every day working in this fallen world. He is working in many ways at many levels. But not everyone is healed. The ones who are become examples of His power. They were the “id. badge” of Jesus when He was on earth. But God did His greatest work on the cross. Not in the glow of a spotlight; but under a darkened sky on a lonely hill out back. There Jesus fixed the real problem. The symptoms of a broken world are still around, but the disease of our sin has been healed by His stripes. His death paid for Adam’s sin. And our’s. “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” – II Corinthians 5:21
Spiritual healing is a miracle offered to all. Eternal life is the possession of all who believe in Christ. The “eternal state” of Believers will be a world free of the things that hurt us. But for now we need to accept that God is working in a fallen world, loving people in the tough times, and drawing many people to the truth of His cross – through their brokenness. We need not offer them answers we don’t have, but we must show them Jesus. He is God’s Answer. ♦
Freddie Coile is the President of Focus Evangelistic Ministries, Inc. (www.FreddieCoile.org). This article is copyrighted, but may be reproduced and distributed in any form under condition that the text remains unchanged and the article is properly credited.
