Where Is God?

“Night, is a book by Elie Wiesel about his experience in the German concentration camps. “One day,” writes Wiesel, “as we returned from work, we saw three gallows… The SS [guards] seemed more preoccupied, more worried, than usual. To hang a child in front of thousands of onlookers was not a small matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was pale, almost calm, but he was biting his lips as he stood in the shadow of the gallows… ‘Where is merciful God, where is He?’ someone behind me was asking. At the signal, the three chairs were tipped over… Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive… The child, too light, was still breathing… And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death… Behind me, I heard the same man asking: ‘For God’s sake, where is God?’ And from within me, I heard a voice answer; ‘Where is He? This is where – hanging here from this gallows…'

Where is God when a child is shot in Newtown or hung in Auschwitz or killed in an American drone air strike or for that matter dies of cancer? I don’t know. There is no answer.

Talk of God giving humans free will and thus allowing us to face the consequences of our choices solves nothing. If the creator could intervene personally when it came to the magic tricks in the Bible like making the sun stand still for a day in a battle, he could have done something about that child gasping out his young life. He didn’t. Theology that tries to paper this horrible fact over with explanations about why there is evil is nothing but nervous blather.

But I take comfort in the fact that sometimes a person of immense courage follows Christ to a cross. Such acts point to a God that had the empathy to share our fate. Sometimes one person’s example gives me hope that following Christ might be the path that leads us out of the hell we’ve made, even if I’ll never know why we’re here in the first place, let alone why God didn’t just make things simpler, better, faster rather than taking the slow path of gradual ethical evolution."

***

If you are Christian, if you deal regularly with the unchurched, sometimes even the churched, you will hear the wail and the anger - because there is no God, because no fair God would allow ...

And how do you answer them?

When I think of my late friend Peter, telling of me of the nun Maria's plight in a Magadan death gulag ...
When I think of the 6.5 million Jews, the 7.5 million Christians executed by my father's Reich ...
When I think of Lenin and his 19 million executions to purify the land ...
When I think of the 30 million Stalin in his paranoia executed ...
When I think of Mao Tse Tung and his 32 million deaths ...
Or Pol Pot ...
Or Rwanda ...
Or Ruby Ridge, Idaho ...
Or Waco, Texas ...
Or the assassination of John F Kennedy ...
Or a record setting typhoon ...

Where is God when the millions, or even the one is crying out in their death rattle?
Where is God in the storm, the waves, the tides, the mass deaths by nature?

How can a fair God ...

And that is the rub, God is not "fair".  If he was you would already be dead, as would I.
God is a "just" God, he does what is right, not what is fair.

When we see with human eyes, we are looking for fairness.
When we see with God's eyes, we are looking for justice.

And when we are judging God, we are judging by human standards, not God's standards.

Where is God?  Allowing man to trash and destroy His creation, even human life.  He has already provided the only standard of measure for life - the ability to stand with Him but acknowledging His son's sacrifice, at human hands.

Where is God in the storm or other natural disaster?  Perhaps judging a perverse culture, perhaps destroying false witnesses, perhaps testing the faith of His people, perhaps calling His people home because it is time.

We are not smart enough to know.  I can look at a culture dedicated to sexual vice and know God will call them to judgement.  I can look at authorities whom are ruthless or corrupt and know that God is going to call them to account for their deeds.  I do not know when, I do not know how, but anyone can read Jeremiah or Isaiah in the Bible and see that God has a standard and He was willing to use it even against His own people - to their own destruction!  How much more so for a just God, to do the same to  _____ (fill in the blank).

We are the creation, not the creator, we can not judge how He uses us, when he uses, where he will use us - we just have to be willing to be used, ready to be used and expect to be used.  The problems arise when we say, "Well, God would never work that way!"  Really?  Maybe you need to study your Bible a little more closely before you side with Western (American) Culture's beliefs about God.

The real God does not cause sin, that does not mean He can not use it to His advantage.  The real God does have control of everything and is more than willing to turn Satan loose upon a world unable to recognize much less fight against it without the Holy Spirit's intervention.

Everyday, in the world around you, in your daily life, God is there, God is working.  Can you see Him?  Can you see His handiwork?  Can you show others?

But, if you are not a Christian, well, there is no requirement that God does anything in your life or around you, other than to continually offer you the chance to make your peace with Him - through you acceptance of His son's death as the payment for your doing things your way and not His.  And then you get to be held accountable for having followed teachers of the truth ...  (hint, we are surrounded by those quite willing to lie to us and mislead us!)

So where is God right now?  Calling the hurting, the desperate to look to Him and not theirselves for the answer to their problems.  Calling you to account - right now, right here ...

That does not mean you are saved from death or punishment, but it does mean there is a better way from what you knew on this Earth.