Well we’ve seen the tsunami hit Japan and how its effects threaten the country with an impending nuclear disaster (at the time of this writing).
Hours later and days later tweets and social networking statuses change to reflect how the disaster has affected them in actuality and vicariously. Many thank God for sparing their own countries from the disaster. That is all and fine as a believer would be the first to admit that every breath is a gift from God. What got me writing in this blog regarding this matter at the risk of sounding callous is the juxtaposition of God sparing people’s lives, to God is good.
First of all, I’m a believer, and God is indeed good. Make no mistake about where my faith stands.
But in putting them together in one sentence, “I thank God for sparing the Philippines God is indeed good. While I believe God is good, and that yes your country was spared. Running them together in the same sentence has serious implications.
If God is god for sparing your country, is God therefore evil in allowing or, in the minds of some people, sending the tsunami? While yes I believe in the principle of Sowing and Reaping, is it correct to generalize the calamity of a country due to a specific wrongdoing? “Oh that country was hit because it has these practices, oh that country was spared because this group has done a lot.”
Making such statements to me does not actually put God on the witness stand or shift the burden of proof on Him, rather it tells me that the person making such statements presume to know the mind of God and his reasons and the exercise of his divine prerogatives.
How do such people answer godly people that were swept away with the calamity of the tsunami? “There’s a reason for everything.” Is that the cop out answer we will give this people? “If you’re good you’re blessed if you’re bad you’re smitten,” is the exact kind of reasoning Job’s three friends had. “Job you must have been a bad boy to have all these things happen to you, c’mon now fess up and say sorry.” And Job’s replies might seem to be so arrogant but he correctly answered, “I did nothing wrong but still I got these things.” And while at the end of the story God put Job in his place for uttering things to which he had no clue, in the end God declared Job’s statements as correct and his friends as the erring ones.
Why? Simply put Job kept asking, “I don’t know what goes in your head God it can’t be as simplistic as rewarding good actions and punishing bad actions, but I wish you’d tell me what’s going on because my suffering doesn’t make sense to me. How I wish we had an arbitrator who can cross examine you because surely I can’t.”
And his “righteous friends” were told to go to Job and have him apologize on their behalf before they get forgiven for assuming to put God in a box, by simplifying God’s mind into simplistic rules made by their finite minds.
