The truck just fell out of the sky and crushed that man. One
minute, he’s walking along, no thoughts to his imminent demise, the next he’s a
body on the way to the morgue.
I don’t know what kind of guy he was. Maybe he was a
wonderful, church-going, wife-loving, kid-hugging saint. Maybe he was a jerk.
The kind of guy you want to drop a
truck on. Maybe he was somewhere in the middle.
For the sake of this blog, here’s the question: why didn’t
God stop that truck?
I’m not here to debate predestination, free will, or
anything like that. I’m just thinking of the time when I was asked, along with
an elder in the church where I served as minister, to pray over a woman who had
cancer. She’d already been diagnosed with it and it was bad. She was to
see the oncologist the next day and find out how much time she had left,
presumed to be something along the lines of “a few weeks”. So we anointed her
head with oil, prayed over her, and the next day she went to the doctor and the
doctor couldn’t find any sign of cancer. Not a one. The woman lived several
more years.
I can think of another time when the story is almost
identical but the believer in question went to the doc the next day and found
that their cancer had spread. A week later, they were in a coma and a week
after that they were dead. Maybe a month later. I don’t remember exactly, I
just remember that—in spite of the whole church family gathering at the church
building and holding a prayer vigil, the beloved believer died.
Someone might say the first person had more faith, or that
the second one didn’t really believe. What about the people who laid on hands?
Were that elder and I somehow more pure than the elders and I from the second
story? Not that I could tell.
This question has caused a lot of people to abandon their
faith: why didn’t God ___________ ? [fill in the blank] “Heal my son?” “Get my
cousin out of that war?” “Stop [fill in another blank]?”
I’ve asked this question myself. Sometimes about people I
have known, and sometimes just about that stranger I heard about on the news
who had a truck fall on him. Why didn’t God stop it? He could have, right? So
why didn’t he?
Besides not knowing the whole picture (to say that God is
working even when the circumstances seem evil to us is true, but it doesn’t ameliorate
the fact that what happened was still just flat-out evil). Why didn’t God stop it?!?!
OK, I said earlier this wasn’t going to be about free will,
but I guess now it is, because the question that keeps coming up in my mind is,
“How much could God do about this situation and still leave us with free will?”
[If you don’t believe in free will, you might as well stop reading now because
I take both free-will and predestination as givens.]
Here’s what I mean: a lot of factors went into that truck
falling on that guy. The man’s choice to be walking down that sidewalk at that
moment, for instance. The truck-driver’s choices—which may have included such
things as texting while driving, drinking while driving, driving while upset, a
surprise flat tire, etc.
So, saving that guy from that truck is more than just God
catching the truck like Superman and depositing it somewhere else; it’s
negating a lot of choices that free-willed people make/made. Even if we take
the case of, say, a five year old girl with an incurable disease, why doesn’t
God heal her? Sometimes he does! but not every time, right? Why not?
I don’t have a complete answer for that, maybe not even a
partial one, but I’m still back to my question of, “How much can God do in
these situations and still leave us with free will?” So God heals the little
girl today, praise God!, does that mean she will never die? Does God also step
in and protect her from cancer 30 years hence and heart disease 40 years after
that?
“But I’m not asking for that! I know we all gotta go
sometime, but why can’t my grandma just have five more years now? Five good years, I mean. Not five
sucky years in the care home. Why can’t grandma have five—even four! more good
years?”
Maybe my heart’s in the right place when I ask for healing
for that little girl. Good motives and all that. Except that maybe, way deep
down inside, the real issue is not just that I don’t want to let her go.
I’m praying that she’ll get better because I don’t want to lose her.
Maybe I’m even throwing in, “And God, heal all these other kids in the children’s
wing, too,” so I’ll look magnanimous and pious, but deep down inside I may not
really care about them. I may not
even care about her as much as I care about getting things my way.
I’m not saying this is unnatural, or that praying for our
children’s health is unrighteous. I’m just saying that we’re looking at one
tiny piece of a million-piece puzzle and thinking we are qualified to tell the
puzzle-maker what it all looks like. Maybe we’re even trying to tell the
puzzle-maker what it should have
looked like.
No comments:
Post a Comment