3/3/20 Iver
(see our conversation HERE)
It can be intimidating reaching out with the Gospel as a Christian and not knowing what questions people will have for us. We have to face the fact that we don’t have all the answers. One reason I write about my conversations is to at least help other believers to be aware of what questions people are actually asking rather than worry about all the hypotheticals.
Probably the hardest and most common question to face is the
“problem of evil”, especially when the people we talk to have suffered the
effects of evil personally. The “problem
of evil” asks why we have evil in the world if God is great and good, because people
reason if God WON’T get rid of evil, He can’t be good, and if God CAN’T get rid
of evil, He must not be great or all-powerful.
One of the hardest examples of evil to deal with is the
Jewish Holocaust, and one of the hardest people to answer would be a Jewish
person who has lost family members during that horrible time. That would describe Iver, whom I found myself
trying to answer during an outreach conversation at our local grocery store.
Iver believes that a loving, all powerful God can’t exist because
of the evil in the world, and in our conversation he brought up his own
experiences with the holocaust as his main example.
What to say?
I think that while it may be true that we don’t and can’t
have all the answers, even more so in a brief outreach conversation, we can ask
some good questions about the conclusions people reach. When it comes to the problem of evil, I
almost always hear it being expressed from a position of moral superiority,
even outrage, toward God and those who claim to follow Him. I see a lot of fingers being pointed in
judgment, but rarely do I see any fingers being pointed back toward oneself.
So eventually I asked Ivan, “If God were to eliminate all
evil in the world, would you exist?”
Now, I don’t see this question as the ultimate “zinger”, and
the problem of evil and especially a tragedy such as the holocaust deserves far
more than a soundbite. Surely, people
reason, the sins and “mistakes” in our own lives are nothing compared to the
evil exposed in something like the holocaust.
Or is it?
How many of us have averted our eyes and closed our wallets
when “we know the good we ought to have done and don’t do it”? (James 4:17) “This too is sin” it says. How often do we fail to speak up and fail to
take a stand for the smallest reasons, usually having to do with our own level
of comfort? Then we presume to judge God
for not acting to do good, when all too often we don’t lift a finger ourselves.
We must remember that God, “so loved the world that he gave
his one and only Son”. If it seems that
God is withholding the good that he could do, the reason must not be that he
doesn’t love the world, but that He in his infinite wisdom sees the bigger
picture and works for the greater good.
Can WE really judge the people of Germany who failed to take
a stand when their own children were trained to turn them in for criticizing
the government, and when people were taken away in the middle of the night by
the SS, never to be heard from again. Do
we really want to be the ones to throw the first stones at soldiers who were
following orders? At what point does one
speak up against a growing threat and a campaign of fake news? It’s so much easier every step of the way to
hope for the best and to keep silent, especially when it isn’t just our own
safety at stake but also that of our friends and family.
This doesn’t justify the actions of the millions of people
complicit in the holocaust, but it should help us realize that neither is our
own condescension justified. We can look
back in judgement at what happened in Germany, or we can look at ourselves and
ask if we would not have done the same if we were in their shoes. History may allow us the luxury of looking
back, but life must be lived forward.
Will history judge us one day for our complicity in the abortion
holocaust, or the wars we’ve helped pay for, or our role in climate change or
global poverty?
Horrible as it was, the holocaust would have been worse if
Hitler had been allowed to carry out his worldwide conquest. Did God really withdraw and watch helplessly,
or was He actively involved in helping people fight Hitler’s campaign of terror?
Could it be that God had a lesson for all of humanity that
only a tragedy as large as the Jewish holocaust could illustrate? Maybe the holocaust was necessary to put a
check on the growing popularity of Darwin’s theories of “survival of the
fittest”. Maybe we need to see just who
we are without God’s intervention, and what evil we are really capable of. Maybe we just need to learn to say “There,
but for the grace of God, go I.”
Or maybe, and very likely, we don’t have good answers for
why God allows such evil in the world.
Maybe the best we can do is try to learn to ask better questions.
Thanks, Iver, for allowing me to record our
conversation! It can be seen HERE at
https://youtu.be/fkX10Dv0uV4
No comments:
Post a Comment