The following is an updated letter I have mailed to the church family in the past in response to the tragedies experienced by members of the church family. It is included here to help you in your relationship to God as we tackle the problem of evil in the world.
Dear Church Family,
Some of you are teachers and leaders. Many of you are parents. All of you will need to deal sooner or later with the question of how a good God can allow bad things to happen.
Following are a few pastoral and biblical perspectives which I encourage you to consider as you communicate with your children, students, colleagues and friends about why tragedy happens.
1. God didn’t do it. He doesn’t bring about tragedies. He allows them.
In a broken world broken things happen. God prefers to give us free will as
opposed to creating us as puppets on a string. This allows therefore for human error, failure, sin, brokenness and pain.
2. God never wastes a hurt. He is totally and only good, and He has a future and a hope for every person, none excluded. ( see Jeremiah 29:11) All any of us needs to do is to accept it, believe it, and follow Jesus, the One who puts it all back together.
3. There are no satisfactory answers to the question “why.” The jar will never comprehend the mind of the potter. (see Isaiah 29:16) Most of the answers that we give to the question “why” end up being trite, or wrong, or a misrepresentation of God.
4. Avoid seeking blame or “justice.” As painful and difficult as it is to do (for some almost impossible) forgiveness heals, blame kills. No amount of human “justice seeking” will heal. The legal system may need to come into play at times, but extreme effort is required to dislodge seeds of bitterness from the heart. They grow and poison and eventually kill.
5. Be real. The “why” question, although unanswerable, is great as a cry of anguish. The Psalms are full of all the contradictory human emotions of pain, hope, anger, sadness, joy, bitterness and love. You can openly bring it all to God. When you’re real God has “raw” material to work with and heal.
6. Talk with your children and friends.
7. Pray and never give up. (Luke 18:1) God heals. Those who have not been physically healed will have been healed in the next life. They are now with God in Paradise. Let’s thank God that you and I can have that healing too.
But do pray for physical healing, also for spiritual and emotional strength for the family and friends of those facing pain. God has His best in store for all of us and prayer makes a huge difference. Sometimes our biggest failure is that we stop praying too soon. Where we are today is not the end of the story. God has good chapters for each of our lives, which He has yet to write.
8. “Spiritual warfare” is a biblical metaphor and it is real. Evil exists as does the “evil one”. There is a force (Jesus named it Satan) outside of ourselves which seeks to destroy God’s creation and that includes people. God has conclusively dealt with it on the cross, which means resurrection and restoration, not defeat, are the end of the story.
9. Yet the best way to frame suffering is not to focus on the evil but on what God is doing through it all. What I see is God turning many, many of us more and more to dependence on Him, into deeper and more intense prayer, and into a deeper personal experience of Him. That is a fantastic outcome. It is the outcome that, of all outcomes, is most fully life-giving.
10. None of us is guaranteed a tomorrow. Assuming we’ll be here tomorrow is presumption. Each of us needs to learn better to live in the “now” and be genuinely grateful for it.
11. For me, the most important thing is that all those who have allowed Jesus to connect them to Himself will see each other again. Each of us can have a reunion with loved ones we have lost. “If for this life only we have hope . . . . we are a pretty sorry lot.” (see I Corinthians 15:19) The longer I live the more true I know this to be.
Your fellow believer,
Pastor Jeff
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