`If your God is all powerful and all knowing why doesn’t she get rid of Coronavirus?? And if she can’t or won’t, why call her god?`
Right now lots of us may have been getting asked this. It’s basically a version of, `If there’s a God, why is there so much suffering?` This one came up on the online site of the (London) Times, and replying got me into a long, good interaction. Maybe my reply, as below, can offer some starting points for you in similar discussions?:
`F, thank you for asking a serious question. Let me try to give you my serious answer as a Christian.
• First, the Bible teaches no easy answers to this question. At the heart of Christian faith is a man on a Cross shouting, ‘My God, my God, why?’ In Revelation we read of the ‘sealed book’ of war, famine, imperialism, economic injustice, disease and religious persecution: and we find it’s something only Christ can comprehend, ‘because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God’ (5:9). Christ alone went to the utter heart of the darkness; he took human pain seriously, and he alone sees and understands all our suffering.
• However there are some other partial answers. At the start of history, humankind insisted on running our own world, rather than submitting to God’s reign. Our world has been wrecked as a result, and we haven’t the power to put it right. Yet generation after generation, each of us still repeats that mistake, demanding to do things our way. As a result God’s loving power is withheld.
• Christ’s death was God’s loving response: he got involved in our suffering, removed the barrier/blockage of the guilt of my/our sin, and also opened up the way through death.
• But if God stamped out all the evil in the world right now, we’d each be dead too! So instead he calls us to work with him; learning in suffering, building a new community marked by his love and peace and healing, and slowly spreading his transforming power. In the meantime too, if we’ve chosen to link our lives with his, these things become a training for what we’ll be doing in the millions of years of the afterlife, training that won’t be possible there because there is no suffering there. (If you’re selected for training in the SAS [Britain’s `special troops`] the immediate results aren’t entirely pleasant, but they’re worth it.)
(Note: I’ve noticed in these recent debates that some atheists hate any idea that any good, or growth, can come out of suffering. So, sadly, they empty suffering of all possible meaning.)
• But one day, the Bible promises, God will say `Enough`, and Jesus will come back as King this time, to abolish evil. If we are his, there will be a new heaven and earth where at last there will be ‘no more death or crying or pain’ (Rev 21:4).
Four very different books worth reading on this are: Edith Schaeffer, Affliction; Joni Eareckson, Joni; C S Lewis, The Problem of Pain; and John Wenham, The Enigma of Evil.
Just in case it helps!
(PS Another atheist wrote simply: `God made the virus.` I replied: `And they did no harm until we humans insisted on running everything our way, and God respecting our freedom withdrew and let us… As most of us still do, & complain about the consequences…` This, by the way, is why Genesis 3, and the doctrine/fact of the historical Fall, are so important. Without Genesis 3 this is a tough challenge to answer… May God bless us all as we speak for him in these days!)
