eWillOfGod1 – January 3 – Two things
Thy will be done (Matthew 6:10).
Most theological questions I field from people have to do with one enormously important yet maddeningly elusive subject: the Will of God. Really the Will of God is not just one, but two things, although they are intimately related in surprising ways.
There is the question of What is God’s will for me? What am I supposed to do with my life? or what should I do in the next five minutes? Then there is a second question, which doesn’t look forward to what I’m about to do, but instead looks back to something that happened, usually something awful – but not always. My husband was killed in a crash. The boss fired me. The tsunami destroyed tens of thousands of lives. Somebody offered to buy my business. Cancer was diagnosed. My marriage dissolved. Was it God’s will?
What was God’s will? How do I make sense of suffering and evil if God is good and has a plan? How many thousands of times have we muttered “Thy will be done”? What exactly have we been praying for? And what might the answer look like?
Over the next five weeks we will explore these questions in some depth. Be patient! We can’t just leap ahead to know what God wills for me tonight, or why I have this awful disease. Stay on the road with us. Read, reflect, reply to me, talk with somebody you live or work with, pray, reflect some more. Share the emails with others and converse with them. Together we’ll make some progress on the only question – well, the only two questions that matter.
eWillOfGod2 – January 5 – Mystery made known
God has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will (Ephesians 1:9).
I suspect that, when we explore questions about God’s will, we assume it’s hard to decipher, that God has hidden his will, and I’m like a child poking my head behind bushes trying to find the little eggs God has tucked away with a message of truth inside. God’s over on the sidelines, saying “You’re getting warmer!” or “colder!” – or just not saying much at all.
In Bible times, the pagan religions were all about divination, seeking “signs” to figure out the divine will. They cut open animal cadavers and read
livers, they unleashed birds and traced their pattern of flight, they studied the stars in their courses out in the dark. People were nervous all the time, fearful they had failed to figure out the whims of arbitrary, petty gods.
Israel, and then the writers of the New Testament rejected all this. “God has made known to us the mystery of his will” (Ephesians 1:9). Yes, God’s will has a mysterious element – but God has made it known. In fact, God is bending over backwards to make God’s will known to us. God doesn’t want us to lay out fleeces or gaze about for signs, which are notoriously subjective. God wants a relationship. “Rather than looking for some sort of wrapped spiritual package from the Almighty, I want to rely upon my closeness to Him” (Bruce Waltke).
We can know enough about what God wants us to do. And even when there is grey area and some confusion, we can still keep moving faithfully. We can understand enough to make sense of evil and agony without twisting God into some kind of cruel tyrant.
The very effort to discover God’s will is itself something God wills; the quest itself is fulfilling. To quit caring about God’s will, to do whatever I wish, to decide there’s no meaning out there, is horror and madness. To pursue God’s will, to insist there must be meaning and to grapple with God until we get at least a shadowy glimpse of it, is happiness. “In his will is our peace” (Dante).
eWillOfGod3 – January 8 – What is God like?
God so loved the world (John 3:16).
Before we can say anything meaningful about the Will of God, we have to ask, Who is God? and what is God like? In the intellectual climate in which we have been reared, much like the philosophical world in which Christianity was born, God is defined with lots of omni-, in-, and un- prefixed words: omniscient, omnipotent, infinite, ineffable, unchanging.
The Bible claims God is better than all that. A God who is merely omnipotent is incomplete; high-control, manipulative types cannot love – or be loved. Yes, God is all-powerful, but God’s power is consumed with love – and not some wispy, flighty kind of love, but love that is solid, strong, courageous, enduring.
The phrase “God’s will” feels like cold steel, an inflexible decree etched into time by a mighty potentate. But the will of the God of love is fraught with emotion. God is closer to me than my next breath, and God is determined to have a personal relationship with me. God loves me more than I love myself – and when you love, you will the good of the other person. You have desires for them; you desire love from that person, you long for excellence in them. God has wishes, God has a purpose, God makes choices, God is pleased (or displeased), God promises (and keeps promises), God delights, God grieves.
To know God’s will, we must know God’s heart. As shrouded in mystery, and as occasionally baffling as God can be, we can know God’s heart – and God’s heart was fully unveiled in Jesus, as we will see in our next email.
eWillOfGod4 – January 10 – Jesus is the answer?
Jesus said, ‘He who sent me is with me, for I always do what is pleasing to him’ (John 8:29).
Sometimes we debate God’s will, as if it is a memo God thought up just a few minutes ago. But to know God’s will, we Christians need to go back 2000 years and get as close as possible to Jesus. He is the ultimate embodiment of God’s will: he exhibited God’s will, spoke of it, fulfilled it. The more we know about Jesus, the more we focus on what Jesus did and said, on who he was (and is), the closer we will be to God’s will, the more clarity we will have about God’s will.
If you want to see God, start with your own heart, your own body – for we believe God took up residence in a body, with a heart, in Jesus, who loved, laughed, desired, hungered, yearned, was disappointed, frustrated, and enraged, yet dreamed, wept, and finally leaped for joy.
Hidden in the story of Jesus is the answer to both Will of God questions: What does God want me to do? and Why do bad things happen? Jesus showed us how to live, and you can stay busy for a lifetime trying to get better at imitating him. But notice Jesus didn’t thump his enemies, or call down thunder on those who imitated him badly. He was merciful, open, receptive; his love was resistible, and evil crossed him in cruel ways. How he bore up under evil and suffering is somehow the answer to Why bad things happen – but more on that later.
So in Jesus, we see that God’s will isn’t an ironclad steamroller. You need not fear a mistake or two (or a thousand): God’s will isn’t a long railroad track, and if you get derailed you are unsalvageable wreckage. Jesus joined hands with people who’d lost their way, and loved them, stuck with them, died for them, and didn’t linger in the tomb for long. God’s will is like that.
eWillOfGod5 – January 12 – Is God in control?
Love does not insist on its own way (1 Corinthians 13:5).
God has something God wants you to do, to be. God cares more about accidents, deaths and evil than you and I do. So what kind of God wants, cares, and desires?
God’s will isn’t that of an iron-fisted tyrant who must have his way or heads will roll. God isn’t a manipulator; we are not marionettes down here. Is God in control? Long-term, eventually, yes – but day in, day out, no. At times I do God’s will, but often I do not, and you don’t either. God chooses not to determine everything. “Love does not insist on its own way” (1 Corinthians 13:5). So I can’t simply conclude that whatever happens equals God’s will. God’s will doesn’t happen lots of times. Otherwise we needn’t bother hunting down terrorists or criminals (unless we want to reward them for doing God’s will).
If God loves more immensely than we can fathom, and yet if God does not insist on having God’s way in every little thing, then God’s heart is broken – all the time. “Love bears all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7) – and we see this God of extraordinary grace grieving throughout the Bible, and history.
Leslie Weatherhead made famous the distinction between the intentional and the circumstantial will of God: God causes some things to happen, while God allows other things to happen. There is some wisdom in this, although as we will see it doesn’t solve a few knotty problems. But we can take comfort in the fact that God does not inflict horrors on humanity; evil need not be chalked up to God.
God is not capricious. God’s will is a relationship. God is rouse-able, as in Jesus’ story about the friend banging on the door at midnight for some bread (Luke 11:5-8). If we apprehend God’s will, it is not through intellectual banter, but by prayer. So let us pray these words St. Francis encouraged his friends to pray:
Almighty, eternal, just and merciful God,
grant to us the grace to do for you
what we know you want us to do.
Give us always the desire to please you.
Inwardly cleansed, interiorly illumined
and enflamed with the fire of the Holy Spirit,
may we be able to follow in the footprints
of your beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.
eWillOfGod6 – January 15 – What God has already willed
Since the creation of the world God’s invisible nature… has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made (Romans 1:20).
What is the largest, most illuminating textbook in our course on the Will of God? Just look around. If you want to know what God wills, consider what God has already willed, and from that we can pick up on patterns in God’s heart, the habits of God’s desires.
Look at the world, God’s masterwork. Don’t let the view get blocked by all the phony man-made stuff – which might be evidence of God’s will, but just might be human chicanery. Look at the beauty of creation, the expanse of the galaxies, the delicate petal of a rose, the clouds gathering, the scampering of a chipmunk, the face of your grandmother or the fingers of an infant. Feel the warmth of the sun or the breeze at your back, hear the boom of thunder or the crickets chirping in the dark.
Creation teaches us that God wills beauty, and that God is delighted when your jaw drops over some wonder you hadn’t noticed a minute ago. And God made the world so big that you can never see it all; yet earth itself is barely a grain of sand on the vast seashore of the universe which borders – what? – God? This world cannot be mastered: for all our wizardry and technology, the wind and sea are too powerful; for all our brilliance in medicine, people we love still get sick and die, and they always will.
So God’s will isn’t for me to be able to manage my little world to my satisfaction, God’s will isn’t total security, health and happiness. God made the world with an edge, with some peril built in.
Dante spoke of “the love that moves the stars,” but love never guarantees smooth sailing. If you love, you laugh, but you also weep, and when we probe the hidden plot of the world God has willed we find both delight and agony. Evidently, this is God’s will.
eWillOfGod7 – January 17 – Become a student
Your Word is a lamp to my feet, a light to my path (Psalm 119:105).
The lens through which we understand what God has already willed, and is about to will – in the world, in my life – is the Bible. We get too hung up on whether to take this or that item in the Bible
literally, and we forget that the Bible is something God wanted to happen, and God’s desire is that we read, listen, immerse ourselves in it, and view everything from its perspective.
Why phone up God with some appeal (“God, tell me what your will is on this major decision?”) when we haven’t bothered to pattern our lives earlier today, yesterday, and last year on what God has willed to put right in front of us all along? People who are deeply involved with God via Scripture don’t agonize so much over God’s will, because they are “in shape” spiritually, they sense the grammar, they have strong footings on which their quest for God’s will is constructed. So, you can start planning now to figure out what God’s will might be in the year 2011: become a student of Scripture.
The Bible develops in us mental habits that mirror Christ; we learn to think theologically in the face of tragedy. God is a God who makes and keeps promises, and so God’s will is trustworthy long-term, able to weather any storm. God owns everything, so it’s never God’s will for me to be possessive or grasping. God sacrificed his Son, so God’s will probably involves me making sacrifices. If you notice gifts in you (are you smart? good with numbers? do you cry when children suffer? is there money in your pocket?), their proper use is for the glory of God, not your personal advancement.
The beauty of God’s will is that we have a foil against which to measure what we’re about. Too many spiritual people use the “hunch” method: what is God’s will? Intuitions swirl, then I lunge… but most of the time, to paste God on a hunch is a convenient excuse for carnal living, so I can label my self-indulgence as “God’s will.” But why did God will the Bible to be so counter-cultural, so difficult, so at odds with my cravings? Stay tuned…
eWillOfGod8 – January 18 – Fallen
The whole creation has been groaning in travail (Romans 8:22).
God willed the universe – and you and me – into being. But something is out of kilter. The world’s great beauty is twisted. The glory of the human body is perverted into something tawdry; brilliant minds hack into computers instead of curing cancer; lovely species are snuffed out by machinery belching smoke. Since Cain and Abel, brothers, and then nations, find reasons to stomp on and kill each other instead of befriending and helping each other.
The flawedness isn’t just out there: it’s in me, in all of us. Dark impulses muddy our souls, and even when we strive to do good we exhibit a creepy self-righteousness. The problem with the world isn’t merely the sum total of individual mistakes: whole systems, governments, corporations, and societies become riddled with ungodliness. History hasn’t always been a chronicle of moral progress.
Theologians describe our world as “
fallen.” God made everything good, but we twist and ruin it; we want to be God instead of letting God be God. We mimic Adam and Eve, and find ourselves outside the garden God intended for us (Genesis 3). Evil and the tragic vaunt themselves.
The first Christians were accused of “turning the world upside down” (Acts 17:6) – which is what the world needs. God’s will isn’t just more or an improved version of what we find in our society. God’s will is subversive. We should expect preachers to “step on our toes.” We should develop a taste for the Church that loves enough to provide correction: “Why should men love the Church? She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget. She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft. She tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts” (T.S. Eliot). God’s will usually is detectable as going against the grain of our culture.
Without submitting to the scalpel of God’s surgical procedures, coping with the pain and working through convalescence to a renewed self, and even being drawn to the cross, we remain stuck in the paralysis of the status quo, and we will never know God’s will.
eWillOfGod9 – January 19 – God’s will for me
My food is to do the will of the One who sent me (John 4:34).
So: finding myself in a good but fallen world, what does God want me to do? “The greatest help available in discerning the will of God is reached when we deepen our friendship with him” (
Weatherhead). The practicalities of friendship are obvious, and simple – and the vast majority of God’s will for me is crystal clear, and can keep me pretty busy. “Do not get drunk” (Ephesians 5:18), “Do not judge” (Luke 7:37), “Care for orphans and keep yourself unstained by the world” (James 1:27); “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, self-control” (Galatians 5:22). It is God’s will that we be holy, lift up the poor, reconcile with enemies, avoid gossip, attend worship, clothe the naked, and express gratitude.
Reminding myself of this demystifies God’s will for me, and frankly makes it feel more comprehensive – and daunting! – than merely waiting until a crisis and thinking “Now I need to know God’s will.” For knowing God’s will is a matter of developing holy habits. The more I practice what I know is God’s will, the better prepared I am to improvise in a sticky, less than clear situation.
And I begin to understand that God’s will is something particular that I do, not a vague thought or speculative question I harbor. God wants me to do this with my life, and not that. God wants me to go here, not there this afternoon. God’s will isn’t generalized niceness, but something specific I believe God wants me to do. I’ve practiced what I know God wants, I am sure God won’t call me to do something that is alien to what God has made clear, and above all else, I pray – and not a quickie prayer, but a focused appeal to God, one I make over and over until my receptiveness to God becomes second nature.
St. Francis did this, and we might pray his prayer daily:
Most high, glorious God,
enlighten the darkness of my heart
and give me, Lord,
correct faith,
firm hope,
perfect charity,
wisdom and perception,
that I may do what is truly your most holy will.
eWillOfGod10 – January 22 – I have no idea where I am going
I believe; help my unbelief (Mark 9:24).
On the first page of their enormously popular
Experiencing God: Knowing and Doing the Will of God, Henry Blackaby and Claude King pledge that with their material “you will be able to hear when God is speaking to you, clearly identify the activity of God in your life, clearly know what you need to do in response to His activity in your life and to do it.” Much is clear. But if “clearly” is the dominant mood, then I am lost, for God’s will isn’t always so clear to me, and my ability to do God’s will is compromised. We have to be humble, and merciful with ourselves and others.
One grave difficulty is that, like a juvenile testing limits, I prefer my will to God’s will. A rebel inside jerks me around, and away from God. My intention to do God’s will feels impotent. One of the greatest Christians in history moaned, “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Romans 7:19). Or worse, I do what I want and pretend it is what God would want. “Woe to my rebellious children who carry out a plan that is not mine” (Isaiah 30:1). What did Anne Lamott say? “If you want to make God laugh, tell God your plans.”
To get into God’s will, I need to be converted – not in the sense of responding to an altar call and getting saved, but in the ongoing, daily, hourly prayer for God to bend my desire away from me and back toward God: “Not my will, but your will” (Matthew 26:39). At some point you stop ruminating over God’s will and you do something, you launch out in hope, humble, a bit uncertain, but with a dogged determination to please God: no holding back! “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice… Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God” (Romans 12:1). Prayer, again, is the key – and I am constantly grateful for this prayer from Thomas Merton:
“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I will do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”
eWillOfGod11 – January 23 – Helpers
Encourage one another… admonish the idlers, help the weak… pray constantly, and do not quench the Spirit (1 Thessalonians 5:11, 19).
Knowing and then doing God’s will: seems so very simple and manageable, and then also so very complicated and difficult. How do we sharpen our perception, and become more adept at God’s will? We pray, we get involved in the Bible – and we develop faithful habits when we attend
worship regularly. Sunday by Sunday, we sing hymns, we listen to Scripture and a sermon, we bow our heads, we shuffle forward for Communion – and over time we are reshaped into somebody more like Christ, more attuned to God.
In worship, power comes down on us and we are catapulted out of the place by an energy greater than any we possess to do the will of God, and to cope with the tragic. Without the Spirit’s empowering presence we never accomplish or understand the will of God.
A crucial item we find in worship that we don’t get at home alone is… other people. We need each other to know and do God’s will. God calls us to do many tasks that no lone individual can pull off; it is clearly God’s will for you and me to be part of a Body that acts as Christ together.
We need the wisdom and counsel of others. If you are wrestling with a decision, share your dilemma with Christians who love you and are serious about God, and see what they have to say. Every one of us needs some wise mentors.
God also places some unexpected helpers in our path: the poor, and those who suffer. This isn’t well understood: we think “I’ll help the poor, that is God’s will” – and it is. But the poor also expose our own poverty, and thereby free us up to know we are God’s children, nothing more, nothing less. We think “I pity those who suffer” – and we should. But sufferers sober us up and remind us of what matters and what doesn’t. Spend time with the poor, linger with friends and family who are hurting, and new windows open into God’s heart and will.
For us to pursue God’s will, we need to encourage each other, to value the quest for God’s will in each other. Many of us need some healing, as we may harbor negative self-images that screen out the love of God; a crippling sense of inferiority makes it impossible to dare anything significant for God. Encouragers help others to do God’s will, and thus do God’s will themselves.
eWillOfGod12 – January 24 – Testing whether this is God’s will
Do not believe every spirit, but test to see whether they are of God (1 John 4:1).
So I’m about to do what I think is God’s will – but is it really God’s will? Or, I just did what I thought was God’s will – but was it really God’s will?
In a way, we are freed from fretting too much about this: the very desire to please God pleases God, and we know that doing God’s will is like a toddler getting his legs under him: you wobble and bang your head a lot.
Sometimes we latch onto bogus indicators. We think “If it was God’s will, then it should have succeeded marvelously.” But sometimes God’s will yields no obvious results. We follow God in hope – hope being “the ability to do something because it is right and good, whether it stands a chance of succeeding or not” (
Extremely dubious is what I call the “open door fallacy.” Someone says “The door opened, so it must be God’s will.” But there are many open doors through which you most certainly should not walk; and sometimes to do God’s will you bang on a closed door repeatedly until you crash through.
If I am doing God’s will, then will I find myself busier than ever? – and tireder than ever? God’s will isn’t necessarily a whopping increase in doing, for the devil “often tries to make us attempt and start many projects so that we will be overwhelmed with too many tasks, and therefore achieve nothing” (St. Francis de Sales).
Some say doing God’s will brings peace to your soul. Sort of… But doing God’s will isn’t the end to all your problems; in fact, if we do God’s will we introduce a whole new set of problems, challenges, and difficulties into our lives! Serving God is hard – which is precisely why it is meaningful.
Beyond any question, God’s will isn’t measured by good feelings and sunny results. Doing God’s will may bring suffering in its wake. No: doing God’s will absolutely will bring suffering. Jesus did God’s will, and suffered, as did all his disciples, and countless Christians through history. Mother Teresa speaks of “love in action: God wants us to give, not something we can do without, but something we can’t do without, something we really want” – and only when we feel that ache of yielding something precious do we embrace God’s will for us. In a world that is ridiculously out of sync with God, why would it even be conceivable to do God’s will and not clash with the world and wind up taking a drubbing or two?
What about when I look back with regret? I tried to do God’s will but I failed miserably. The inability to do God’s will isn’t evil. God’s will forever exceeds our reach, so we keep striving, we never get puffed up with pride, and we glorify God who can be glorified even in our infirmities: God’s grace “is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).
eWillOfGod13 – January 26 – When bad things happen
Weep with those who weep (Romans 12:15).
Why do bad things happen? And not just to good people? I hope I never become the sort of person who beams with pleasure when bad things happen to bad people. Why did God arrange the world where there would be disasters? Why did God make you and me with the shabby potential to hurt each other and ourselves? Why did God fashion a world in which mortality reigns? in which weariness bedevils us? Why Katrina? or 9-11? or the ugliness that transpired in my house just last night?
Why? Before we try to answer, we might be comforted to know that God isn’t like a tired parent, wishing the children would stop asking “Why?” God wired us in such a way that we cannot help asking. In fact, God wants us to ask more, never turning off the searchlight probing the mystery of God’s will. We might ask “Why?” not only when we witness atrocities in the news or agonize over the nausea from chemotherapy, but also when our lives seem so cozily arranged and people four miles away sleep under a bridge.
Jesus, interestingly enough, never gathered his disciples to say “Okay, God inflicted evil for this reason…” In the teeth of evil and suffering, Jesus bore suffering and evil: he wept, he grieved, he took evil onto his own body unjustly and was crucified. And, he resisted suffering and evil: he chided profiteers who oppressed, he fed the hungry, he engaged in combat against the devil.
When we hear about a tragedy, or encounter someone’s awful plight, we leap too quickly to declare “Oh, it was God’s will” – which has a way of shutting up the cry, the raging grief, the unanswerable question of the one who suffers. Instead of concocting some divine placebo of an answer that probably feels cruel to someone who’s just lost their child or been slammed by life, we weep, we shudder. We do not rush anyone to “feel better.” We sit together in the dark and just listen to the quiet. Otherwise, with our tidy answers that are too trivial to be true, we cut off the other person from exploring their darkness.
As Christians, can we learn to pray the way ancient Israelites knew how to pray? Read the Psalms: in the face of horror they unleashed an outcry against God, they wept in agony, they demanded harsh vengeance on enemies. Jesus did not placidly die muttering platitudes about God’s will; instead he yelled “My God, why have you forsaken me?” Our simplistic explanations of evil will not only be lies, but we also squander energy we might expend in resisting evil and allaying suffering. More on that, and why evil happens, later… For now, and every time we encounter pain, we let the “Why?” begin, and linger there as a sign that we understand, and that we love.
eWillOfGod14 – January 29 – Why bad things happen
I have come into deep waters, the flood sweeps over me (Psalm 69:2).
Back on January 15 we looked at “What God has willed.” God made the world, and with a complexity of mind-boggling beauty and wonder that you could spend your lifetime exploring and never marvel at more than one-hundredth of it all. But that world God made has a dangerous edge to it. The world is stupendous, but part of what is awesome is the presence of storms, wind, the risk, the peril. You’re safe reading right now – but the world obviously isn’t totally safe, never was, never will be. God’s will was not for us to dwell in a bubble of security – and the beauty and meaning in it all would be lost in such a bubble.
I love to watch the waves rhythmically washing toward me on the beach from the expanse of ocean stretching to a distant horizon; but any beachcomber can tell you that the water is dangerous. So why then are we stunned by floods or hurricanes that wreck homes on the shore? Somehow we have hatched a false view of God as the Guarantee of my safety and well-being – but God made our world full of contingencies. It’s risky down here.
After Katrina, people said God was punishing New Orleans for its citizens’ raunchy lifestyle. But people behave badly in Kansas and Nebraska. New Orleans was dangerous because water is powerful, and storms happen. God did not hurl a storm at anybody in particular, or you and I would be flooded out before we finish reading this email.
God built mortality into the fiber of things. We are troubled by any human death, as we should be. But if you consider nature, death is normal, death is omnipresent, death is the healthy cycle of the universe. “The natural world overwhelms us with its splendor, its beauty, its immensities and fragilities, its incalculable diversity, its endless combinations of the colossal and the delicate, sweetness and glory… But at the same time, all the splendid loveliness of the world is everywhere attended by death” (David Bentley Hart).
The human body is a marvel, but all our bodies have imperfections, quirks, flaws. If I have little hair, people tell bald jokes. But if I have a weak heart, no one laughs – but should we blame God? God does not sow cancer cells in the body of your husband or lace your daughter’s blood with leukemia. Our bodies are rickety, breaking down all the time. Who would learn to trust God or be compassionate if every person lived in sleek health, with muscular agility, until age 100?
To accept that death is normal, that life down here is risky, is only a part of the answer to why bad things happen. What people do down here is another problem, as we will see tomorrow.
eWillOfGod15 – January 30 – Why bad things happen (part 2)
Claiming to be wise, they became fools (Romans 1:22).
God never accepted a job description that dictates that God should always shelter me and make me healthy and safe. God does not manipulate life on this planet, and so we need not be surprised when evil strikes.
C.S. Lewis once estimated that 4/5ths of humanity’s suffering is inflicted by our fellow human beings. Human nature, left free by God to love God and be magnificent, but also to ignore God and be downright ugly, is the cause of unspeakable suffering and evil in this world. Wars, terrorist attacks, extramarital affairs, crime, feelings of being unloved: we do all this to each other. We need not blame God. Instead of asking “Why do bad things happen to good people?” we might ask “Why do God’s children sin?”
Even good things people do wreak havoc. When we invented the automobile, we signed an unwitting contract with death, because it’s just dangerous to hurl tonnages of metal down the highway at high speeds in proximity to other vehicles; driver error, mechanical failure… and you have suffering. God does not cause car accidents. How many human inventions unwittingly cause harm?
The march of science has postponed death, lengthening life – although at times we prolong life, understandably, but you wonder if it might be more merciful to let death take its natural course more often than we do, and allow the dying to say goodbye and bless the living. How interesting: it is only in modern times, when medicine has advanced astronomically, have we come to think of death as a reason to reject God. In ancient times, nobody doubted God if a young person died. Life expectancy was around thirty years; half your children routinely died at birth, as did one-fifth of the mothers. A century ago, infections were dumbfounding, and people died from simple cuts. Smart people devised antibiotics, and now we don’t think twice about infections. One day we will understand why cancer happens, and some medicine will fix it. No one will question God about cancer, any more than we do about infections today. But there will still be new diseases, new causes of our old nemesis, death.
When suffering or evil strikes, isn’t it cruel to chalk it up to God’s will? You say to someone who is reeling from shattering news, “God did this.” You isolate the person from God! Perhaps there is comfort in the notion that evil is God’s will, that God has it under control. But there is a better way to think of God’s presence and power in the hour of suffering…
Sunday’s sermon, the 4th in the Will of God series, may be heard by clicking here – or you can listen via podcast!
eWillOfGod16 – January 31 – Where was God?
Surely he has borne our griefs (Isaiah 53:4).
After his son died when his car plummeted into Boston Harbor, William Sloane Coffin preached a
sermon in which he declared, “When a person dies, there are many things that can be said, and at least one thing that should never be said. The night after Alex died, a woman came by carrying quiches. She shook her head, saying sadly, ‘I just don’t understand the will of God.’ Instantly I swarmed all over her. ‘I’ll say you don’t, lady! Do you think it was the will of God that Alex never fixed that lousy windshield wiper, that he was probably driving too fast in a storm? Do you think it is God’s will that there are no streetlights along that stretch of road?’ Nothing so infuriates me as the incapacity of intelligent people to get it through their heads that God doesn’t go around with his finger on triggers, his fist around knives, his hands on steering wheels. God is dead set against all unnatural deaths. The one thing that should never be said when someone dies is, ‘It is the will of God.’ My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.”
Where was God in 9/11? People wondered how that could be God’s will. Was it divine punishment on New York? No, clearly it was not God’s will, or we should give Osama bin Laden a medal for doing holy work. But where was God? God was in the towers as they fell; God was crushed, just as Jesus was crushed by the evil machinations of history on the Cross.
God is not removed from suffering. It is not that if I am suffering I’d better get away and get back close to God where all is smooth. God is wherever suffering happens. God showed himself most clearly, profoundly, and tenderly, not in a lovely beachside resort where a tan Jesus sips a daiquiri comfortably with his friends. God showed himself on the cross, a gruesome death for someone entirely too young. That was God’s will! so that we would never face evil or suffering alone, that we would take comfort in a God who did not remain aloof in heaven, but came down, bore the worst the world could dole out, endured that kind of pain and agony we all endure eventually.
And even better: God did not merely take our suffering into the body of his own Son. A God who merely sympathized with us, who got down into the lowest depths with us would be a kindhearted God – but we need a powerful God, a God who can take those who suffer horrifically and raise them up at the final resurrection, a God who can judge and even bend the powers of this world who unleash suffering to the eventual good of God’s purpose. What God ultimately does with evil, what God finally wills for the universe and you and me, will be the subject of our final email.
eWillOfGod17 – February 1 – When God’s will is done
Night shall be no more, for the Lord God will be their light (Revelation 22:5).
Is God in control? Is God’s will done? We pray, “Thy will be done,” and this is the one prayer we know (with utterly absolute certainty) will be perfectly answered. In the end, evil will be no more. “God will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and death will be no more” (Revelation 21:4). All will be glory, everything will shimmer with holiness; every person and the entire universe will mirror the brightness of God’s glory.
But until then, in the meantime, there will be evil. The world will persist as a vale of tragedy, sin and darkness in the thick of beauty, goodness and wonder. “Until that final glory, the world remains divided… Life and death grow up together and await the harvest. In such a world, our portion is charity, and our sustenance is faith” (
Charity – and faith. Charity: we love, we care, we anticipate that final glory to the degree we are able. When we pray “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” we seek not just a future, but a presence in which I make up my mind that I will be about heaven down here on earth. If social class, race or background mean nothing in heaven, they will mean nothing to me now. If tears are wiped away then, I will wipe a few away today. If anger and decadence will vanish in eternity, then I will be gentle, and holy today. I will love – not merely because God wills me to love, but because God has loved me, and I recognize the other person as somebody God loves.
Faith: belief is defined in Hebrews 11:1 as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” We live today but with our hearts resident in God’s future. We are invested, not in the things of this place, but in the dawning of God’s eventual victory.
Yes, evil and suffering are having their day. But God is greater – and even now we see God exhibiting the stunning ability to bring good out of evil. Not that all evil must somehow be good! But God does ultimately bring good out of evil. When Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery, God used their misdeed to bring life out of death; to read Genesis 45 and 50 is to explore the grace of God that doesn’t give sinful human beings a second chance, but that transforms evil into something useful, into God’s glory. “The world breaks everyone, but then some become strong in the broken places” (Hemingway).
Evil will finally be the occasion for God’s glory. Suffering will be the theater for God’s grace. Easter, after all, happened in a cemetery, and as Jesus’ tomb was transformed into a chorus of praise by the angels, so the entire universe will no longer be subject to decay and despair and will be a magnificent opera of music, dance, grand costumes, and artistry extolling God, whose will most certainly will have been done.
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