January 19, 2010: The Goodness Of God And The Horror Of Haiti

A friend of a friend, who had been feared dead, was rescued recently from an elevator shaft in a collapsed building in Haiti. His loved ones rejoiced and celebrated the goodness of God. "See," wrote one, “I told you God was faithful...he preserved Dan’s life.”

But what if God had not preserved Dan's life? What if the elevator shaft opened to reveal the corpse of a man who had agonized for days before dying in pain? Would God have been faithful then? Should Christians acknowledge God's faithfulness only when their prayers are answered favorably?

Just over 50 years ago an evangelist colleague of Billy Graham contemplated misery of the sort that is happening in Haiti now (which is also happening during every second of every day in some part of the world), and concluded "No, we should not celebrate God's faithfulness - because he doesn't even exist." Thus Reverend Charles Templeton became an atheist.

Later when Templeton was asked if there was one thing in particular that caused him to lose his faith, he said, "It was a photograph in Life magazine." The photograph showed a starving woman in Africa holding her dead baby. Templeton thought, "Is it possible to believe that there is a loving or caring Creator when all this woman needed was rain?" He asked his interviewer, "Who runs the rain? I don't; you don't. He does - or that's what I thought. But when I saw that photograph, I immediately knew it is not possible for this to happen and for there to be a loving God."

Christians do in fact believe that God - the only God, the loving God - runs the rain. When he gives it, people reap and eat; when he withholds it, people starve and die. Sometimes he gives so much of it that people drown. He also micromanages every millimeter of the earth's shifting tectonic plates, using them both to create majestic Himalayas and to take 100,000 lives in one furious instant. He personally builds and engineers all the DNA strands in your body - both the ones that help you to feel inexpressible delight and the ones that will leave you diapered and unable to recognize your children.

(You should know that Christianity is not for wusses. If you want a religion that provides spiritual daintiness and mild moral uplift, look elsewhere.)

I actually sympathize with the frustration that atheists like Templeton (or comedian Ricky Gervais or Tribune columnist Eric Zorn) express when they see Christians proclaiming "God is good! God is faithful!" in happy circumstance but going silent (or changing the subject) when they face pain. Is God still good and faithful and praiseworthy when things are Haiti-awful?

The Bible thinks so. When Job lost everything he fell before God and worshiped, saying "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised." (Job 1:21) David fasted and prayed for several days about his sick son, and when he heard that the boy had died he got up from the ground, "washed, put on lotions and changed his clothes,...went into the house of the Lord and worshiped." (2 Samuel 12:20). The prophet Habakkuk even steeled his heart to rejoice in God in advance of lean years: "Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior." (Habakkuk 3:17-18).

What kind of fool rejoices in the Lord and trusts his goodness despite seeing (or experiencing) Haiti-like horror? Simply one who believes that God is infinitely smarter than we and takes all eternity into the scope of his good plans.

Take for example the photograph that crushed Templeton's faith: a starving, grieving mother holding her dead baby. I do not know, cannot claim to know, would not hint that I think I knew, the divine purpose behind that horror. But how much intellectual arrogance does it take to insist, as Templeton does, that there cannot be a loving purpose behind it? How could he know that? How could he know for sure (did he simply take it on faith?) that there is no afterlife where that mother and child now celebrate with joy unspeakable and full of glory? Or how could he know beyond a doubt that if the child had lived he would not have grown up to be a serial rapist? I don't know that either, of course, because I'm humbly agnostic about that child's future in the set of all counter-factual realities, but Templeton's belief requires certainty that - even in the eternal scheme of things - it was better for the child to live than to die in infancy. I simply don't know that.

There is a lot that I don't know. The Bible hammers away at that theme too, telling me that God's ways are above my ways, and his thoughts are above my thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9). When Job came to question God's decisions, God answered him (essentially) "Hey Job. How do you make a hippopotamus?" Think about that. We who will never be able to assemble from scratch a single self-replicating cell ought to think twice about questioning the Wisdom that created and sustains all life.

The horrors in Haiti are not grounds for believing in the goodness and faithfulness of God: they are sorrows which lack the power to hinder such a faith that we have established or received on other grounds. I will discuss those grounds, Lord willing, next week. In the meantime, it is right to praise and thank God for every instance of rescue and provision and charity and heroism in Haiti. And it is right to acknowledge his goodness and wisdom and worthiness when, despite best efforts, everything goes horribly wrong.