Some people tend to blame God for their troubles. They get angry. They ask “Why me?” Their hearts turns hard and they become bitter over the course of their lives… I suppose such people assume that if they are generally well-mannered and occasionally helpful to others, they have the “right” to expect a life of relative ease, and if that does happen, they feel disappointed with God. As Tevye ironically said to God (in the Fiddler on the Roof): “It may sound like I’m complaining, but I’m not. After all, with Your help, I’m starving to death.”
There are other cases, however, when a person may sincerely struggle with anger and disappointment with God, such as during a time of great tragedy and personal loss. Questions can arise from the conviction that God is ultimately responsible for whatever happens in our lives – both the good and the bad, and this can lead to confusion and anger over what has happened. The reasoning behind the conviction that God is responsible goes something like this. God has all power; he could prevent anything from happening, but he did not prevent this thing (i.e., tragedy) from happening. Having the power to prevent something from happening and choosing not to do so is to allow that thing to happen. Therefore since God allowed this to happen, he is responsible for its occurrence….
Now some might want to defend God by saying that he cannot prevent some things from happening, for instance, he cannot prevent the free choices of moral agents, so he is unable to intervene and stop their occurrence. Indeed there are many things that Almighty God cannot do. For instance, God cannot make a rock so heavy that he cannot lift it; he cannot make a four-sided triangle; he cannot lie or commit suicide; and he cannot overrule the will of free moral agents without violating the essence of what makes them responsible for what they do. Therefore God is not responsible for the evil actions of others.
However, even if we concede that God cannot overrule the will of free moral agents, it does not explain why God permits other tragedies such as natural disasters, accidents, diseases, famines, birth defects, and so on to occur. After all, God is in the “midst of the whirlwind” and controls all the “natural” forces of creation. He is the LORD of Creation, the author of reality, and by his power he upholds all things. Events such as earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, tsunamis, plagues, and famines are part of the created order, though this order has somehow been affected by the “fall” of mankind with the loss of the original vision and goal for the creation (Rom. 8:20). Consequently the natural world is dangerous, difficult, unpredictable, and tragic, though it nevertheless is under God’s supervision and control.
So in light of all this, we can infer that bad things – tragic things – happen to people in this life, and, as the Book of Job clearly teaches, some of these bad things are not the direct result of moral or spiritual failure on behalf of a moral agent, but instead are part of the “warp and woof” of life as we sojourn our days. This seems to imply, as H.W. Beecher once said, that “suffering is part of the divine idea,” since, as noted above, God is the Sovereign Master over creation who is ultimately responsible for all that happens.
Now it is commonplace that human reason objects at this arrangement of the universe and does not want to submit to the Kingship of God. It argues that life is not fair; that fate seems arbitrary, and that the threat of random and unpredictable tragedy evokes anxiety and pain for people. It asks: Are we safe in the universe or not? If both the good and the bad alike undergo the same troubles, does it ultimately matter how we live?
The apostle Paul anticipates this objection of reason by going even further – by reminding us that God will have mercy on those whom he will have mercy, and he will have compassion on those whom he will have compassion (Exod. 33:19; Rom. 9:15). Since every human being is a sinner indebted to God, it is his prerogative to forgive the debt or not (Matt. 20:15). God is not to be blamed for showing mercy to others, after all.
To illustrate the divine prerogative, Paul brought up the choice of Jacob rather than Esau to be the heir of the family (and therefore of the Messiah). He wrote: “For the children being not yet born, neither having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him that calls, it was said unto her (Rebecca): ‘The elder shall serve the younger'” (Rom. 9:11-12). This pretty much settles the issue, doesn’t it? Before the children were born – before they had done any good or evil that might warrant or justify the choice, Paul says that it was God’s purpose and intent to choose Jacob to be the heir of God’s people, and not Esau (Rom. 9:13).
Of course Paul anticipates the difficulty human reason might have with God’s seeming preferential treatment of Jacob by writing, “You will say to me then, “Why does God still find fault? For who can resist his will?” (Rom. 9:19). And the answer to these rhetorical questions is “no one.” “Who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? (Rom. 9:20-21). The point here is simple: God is sovereign over all things; his thoughts are not like our thoughts; yet whatever he does is flawless and right: “The LORD is the Rock, his work is perfect: for all his ways are justice; He is a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is he” (Deut. 32:4). So whatever we say about God’s sovereignty, his foreknowledge, his election, his predestination, and so on, must be contextualized in the truth that God’s ways are perfect, and there is no fault in him… We simply cannot appeal to a higher standard of justice by which to judge God, since God is the transcendental source and ground of the very idea of justice itself…
But still…. we suffer, and life hurts. And if suffering is (somehow) part of God’s overarching plan for creation, if it is part of the “divine idea,” then how do we learn to emotionally accept it without becoming bitter? How can we resist the temptation to blame God for our troubles?
Well perhaps we might ask why God chose to create Adam and Eve in the first place, particularly when he foreknew their transgression, their exile from the garden, the forfeiture of human dominion to Satan, and the curse that would befall all of creation. God foreknew not only the suffering of humanity but also his own suffering as he later sacrificed his own life upon the cross in order to redeem the dominion back to humanity and to reconcile his justice and mercy for his alienated children (Rom. 3:23-25; Psalm 85:10; Heb. 9:12; Heb. 10:10). God’s plan for the ages was to demonstrate his glory as not just our Creator but as our Redeemer and Healer, and that implies that we needed to be created, redeemed, and healed by Him. As the sages have said: “We descend in order to ascend,” which means that we first learn of our lost condition and our need for deliverance before we are raised up into newness of life. The sages have also said “God creates the cure before the plague,” suggesting that he arranged the way for our healing before he began the work of creation itself. Therefore Yeshua is called the “Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8; 1 Pet. 1:20). We are in the “school of suffering” intended to teach us truth we could never have learned any other way: the truth of God’s truth, the truth of compassion, the truth of our desperate need for forgiveness, healing, and sacrificial love.
Emotionally speaking, we must “forgive God” for creating us in the first place, by accepting his will that we are here for a reason – a divine purpose – and that purpose ultimately is for our good. This is part of “enduring ourselves” by looking beyond ourselves to accept a greater vision of the meaning of life. We “forgive” God by letting go of our (usually subconscious) demands to be something other than what we are, and that means giving up hard feelings of disappointment, bitterness, and rage over things we cannot change. We must abandon the need to “justify our existence” on our own terms. In that sense “forgiving God” is a way of forgiving ourselves, since holding on to our hurts, either by self-pity or blaming others, chains the pain to our hearts, enslaving us to anger.
I realize it may seem almost ludicrous or even blasphemous to say to God, “I forgive you for what you have done – or what you have allowed to be done – to me,” but if you are emotionally reacting to God in terms of being a victim, you must first begin there. Martin Heidegger regards the brute fact of our existence to instill a sense of “thrownness” in relation to the world. After all, we were not asked to be born into this world, with the particular parents and DNA we have, at this particular time and historical circumstance, and so on, so in a way we are “victims” of God’s sovereign will that orders and decrees all things. This is part of the birth trauma we never outlive. (As an aside, understand that an existential atheist (like Sartre) suffers from his own birth trauma as well: conscious before a mute and unthinking mechanistic universe that ineluctably determines all things, his life is a “protest” against being enslaved to irrational forces, and the only “choice” he has is how to define meaning for himself in a lonely and indifferent world of his own making.)
How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it and why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought by a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn’t it a matter of choice? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager? I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?” — Soren Kierkegaard
From the human point of view, we are “thrown” into the world without our consent; our descent to this world is a “fallenness” and we find ourselves alienated and lost. God’s grace is realized when we “come to ourselves” and turn back to the sacrificial source and blessing of our lives. Because we are all radically contingent beings, that is, our existence is not intrinsically necessary, in a sense we are all “victims,” and the only question therefore is whether we are willing to become a sacrificial victim on behalf of God and his redemptive mission for the world or to become a lost soul who refuses to accept the reason of our existence. When we genuinely reconnect with the Lord who entered into our pathos and spiritual sickness by sacrificing himself for our healing, we are enabled to give of ourselves to others for their healing.
“Forgiving God” requires faith, however, namely faith that God’s decision to create you is for good rather than evil, or minimally that it is better for you to have been created than never to have been born. In that sense forgiving God represents an affirmation of your life and its value. Whether this is the “best of all possible worlds” is an abstract question for speculative theology, but where we live, in the raw and messy struggles of life, in the midst of our joys and elations, but also in our darkness and pain, we need faith to believe that our existence has some meaning and purpose, that our lives carry some significance, and that not everything is hevel havalim, “vanity of vanities.” Asking whether it would have been better had you never been born is not a trivial question, then, and indeed the ancient Hebrew prophets Job, Solomon, Jeremiah, and Jonah each wrestled with it in the course of their lives (Eccl. 4:1-3; Job 3:1-3; 10:19; Jer. 20:14; Jonah 4:3).
The early Jewish sages also argued whether life was worth living. In light of the ongoing wickedness of humanity, the sages Hillel and Shammai engaged in a machlochet le’shamayim (“a debate for the sake of heaven”) regarding whether it would have been better for humans not to have been created at all. Hillel argued that it was better that humans had been created, whereas Shammai argued the other way. Finally a vote was called for and the decision rendered was this: It would have been better for humans not to have been created than to have been created. However, since we do in fact exist, we must search our past deeds and carefully examine what we are about to do (Eruvin 13b).
For many people, however, perhaps most, the question of whether life is worth living is never urgently raised. They seem relatively happy and go about their lives one day at a time. They seem to be asleep to the deeper things of life until they are touched by misfortune or tragedy. For others, however, the question of whether life is worth living haunts their days, as Albert Camus once wrote: “The only philosophical question is suicide,” suggesting his own misgivings on the matter. Of course everyone may occasionally find themselves depressed because of troubles and suffering in their lives. For example, the death of a loved one, the betrayal of a marriage partner, a diagnosis of a terminal sickness, and so on often lead to dark questions regarding the value of life.
Those who are emotionally or spiritually constituted (or perhaps sufficiently wounded) to probe the depths of questions others take for granted may regularly experience feelings of isolation, loneliness, grief and sorrow. In his Gifford Lectures on the Varieties of Religious Experience, Philosopher William James one said:
This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical life of the individual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands related. Its significance and framing give it the chief part of its value. Let it be known to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it may be in its immediacy, its glow and gilding vanish. The old man, sick with an insidious internal disease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it; and the knowledge knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners of death and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness.” (William James, Gifford Lectures: 1901-1902).
This may seem counterintuitive to you, since, as James also affirmed: “How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure,” and yet there is a “basso profundo” note of the depths that resounds over all things, and people must be careful to distract themselves lest it pervade the ruminations of their hearts… Of course, when irremediable suffering or loss occurs, the illusion is taken away and pain is given its voice. At that point, grace has its opportunity: “To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o’er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is” (James, ibid.). In other words, a sense of powerlessness combined with a desperate hunger for life presents the conditions for turning to God, heeding the call of “impossible” grace to believe that you are accepted and loved, despite your sins and the wasting of your days.
On the other hand, the soul may become agonized and protest what is happening. We are familiar with the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, though (as mentioned above) acceptance may be expressed as “forgiving God” for what has happened (or is happening). Understood in this way, forgiving God is an affirmation that you accept God’s will and are therefore willing to let go of your complaint and your heartache. It is a conscious decision to quit blaming God (or other things) for your pain and troubles, even if you don’t understand what is happening to you.
The last point is important. To quit blaming God for your life you need something more than a “narrative” that can explain or justify God’s decision for your suffering, even if that narrative attempts to justify it as a means to a greater end that will one day make everything right… This is because explanation or reasoning does not address the underlying emotional pain and abandonment that arise in intense suffering, and therefore the answer must be found “outside” of the realm of reason alone.
Alida Gersie wrote about her grief when her eight year old daughter died of a brain tumor and her twenty year old son became severely handicapped after an accident:
“Do not show us the road to recovery. Whatever recovery might mean. Allow us to find our way through… Let us know that you too are speechless, wounded and outraged because the universe ahs done this to us and therefore to the human community. Listen to our guilt, when we think in spite of ourselves, that our child’s death was some kind of divine punishment for our shortcomings. Hear the reality of these shortcomings. Do not diminish them in our own eyes, but help us also to see the strength of our love, and the solidity of our care. We have discovered that life can no longer be relied upon to safeguard us. Understand that therefore we feel in so many respects lost and lonesome. Try to comprehend our fear, and hear it. Do not try to remedy it, or to protect us against it. We need the full measure of our fear, so that we may discover the full strength of our courage. We also need the full measure of our self-accusation, so that we may experience the depth of our forgiveness.” (Storymaking in Bereavement, London: 1991).
Rightly understood, when we “forgive God” we are confessing our own ignorance about what is happening to us while allowing our hearts to give voice to its pain. At bottom, suffering is a type of grieving, a confession of the darkness of loss. On the other hand, we can find healing through the grieving process. Over time we learn that by “forgiving God” we are able to forgive ourselves, and we are then released from the pain that withholds us from love and blessing in our lives. Amen.
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Hebrew Lesson:
Isa. 64:8 Hebrew reading:
- Isa. 64:8 Hebrew page (pdf)
Addendum:
From the Torah we read about the frustration of Israel in the desert: “You were not willing to go up but rebelled at the word of the LORD your God. And you murmured in your tents and said, ‘Because the LORD hates us he has brought us out of the land of Egypt…'” (Deut. 1:26-27). We may decry the childish insolence of the people, we lament their lack of faith, and yet God was still speaking through Moses to Israel… The sages asked whether we can ever be justifiably angry at God, and they answer that surely we can, because otherwise we could never love Him “bekhol levavkha,” with all our heart (Deut. 6:5). Indeed, how can we claim to love God if we withhold the truth, lie to ourselves, and attempt to hide who we really are from Him? If you are angry at God, he already knows, so why the pretense? Being angry with God is part of being a real person in a real relationship with Him, and allowing yourself to express the truth of your heart to him is a sign of trust… Forgiving God means letting go of your grudges over matters infinitely beyond your control.
If you tell me Christian commitment is a kind of thing that has happened to you once and for all like some kind of spiritual plastic surgery, I say go to, go to, you’re either pulling the wool over your own eyes or trying to pull it over mine. Every morning you should wake up in your bed and ask yourself: “Can I believe it all again today?” No, better still, don’t ask it till after you’ve read The New York Times, till after you’ve studied that daily record of the world’s brokenness and corruption, which should always stand side by side with your Bible. Then ask yourself if you can believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ again for that particular day. If your answer’s always Yes, then you probably don’t know what believing means. At least five times out of ten the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, maybe more so. The No is what proves you’re human in case you should ever doubt it. And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes, it should be a Yes that’s choked with confession and tears and great laughter.” — Frederick Buechner
Personal Note:
I had lived a life of quiet desperation and silent scream before God for many years… I was among the walking dead when he touched my lacerated heart and gave me hope to believe. Yet I struggle, even today; I am still on the “potter’s wheel” and it sometimes feels like a whirlwind within my anxious heart. I close my eyes, trusting His hands are somehow shaping me into his design and pleasure; my hope rises. A recent near-death experience was another part of God bringing “beauty out of the ashes” of my past. God is faithful.
And then the spirit brings hope, hope in the strictest Christian sense, hope which is hoping against hope. For an immediate hope exists in every person; it may be more powerfully alive in one person than in another; but in death every hope of this kind dies and turns into hopelessness. Into this night of hopelessness (it is death that we are describing) comes the life-giving spirit and brings hope, the hope of eternity. It is against hope, for there was no longer any hope for that merely natural hope; this hope is therefore a hope contrary to hope.” – Soren Kierkegaard
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