In the newspaper today I read a comment from a man who had lost everything to hurricane Ike. He said, “How can you pray to something that allows this?”. Its a good question and one which deserves a better answer than Christian’s often give. Is God the god of suffering and chaos or is he the God of love that he says he is? Why do bad things happen to good people?
From the perspective of the Christian this is the wrong question to ask. The better question is, why does anything good happen? Why, in a world of occasional random destruction and bad people, does any good thing happen at all? Now, there is a question that deserves an answer. We find the answer in the book of Genesis.
In the bible good things happen in a bad world because God’s response to chaos and tragedy is to restore his created order. In the story of the flood we found the beginnings of covenant. We saw that this means God binds himself to Noah and promises him an outcome far beyond his imagining. Furthermore, God’s promise is unconditional. God will make it happen – it won’t depend on Noah. So, the creation is saved – Noah and the animals – from the tragedy that mankind would have brought upon it. Good things happened to the creation because God chose to make it happen. The same thing happens in the story of Abram. It is the same story, different chapter. Again God remembers his covenant, he calls to mind the promise made, and goes about making it happen.
1 When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to him and said, “I am God Almighty ; walk before me and be blameless. 2 I will confirm my covenant between me and you and will greatly increase your numbers.” 3Abram fell face-down, and God said to him, 4 “As for me, this is my covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations. 5 No longer will you be called Abram ; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations. 6 I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you. 7 I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.
How God makes things happen is by making a positive choice to bless the world through the descendants of Abram. It is tempting in our very self centered world to see the bible as a story of the choices - good and bad - of individual human beings. So, in the last days of Jesus we might think the drama comes in the choices of the characters. In other words the story is driven along by, for example, the betrayal of Peter and the faithfulness of John. What is important is how we choose to respond to Jesus. But this is wrong. When you look at the New Testament while standing on the Old you see that God makes a choice and decides that one will bring blessing to many and it is GOD’s CHOICE to do so. What the Old Testament is able to show us is that our little choice for Jesus is only is strong as His great choice for us. The story of Abram reminds us that everything we have in our faith is based at its very heart on a choice that God made for us.
Christus pro nobus!