Will Of God 14 – 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 next.