Infinite Love

Getting in touch with the power that drives the Universe...

God’s Absence

 

Steven Mosley wrote a book called Glimpses of God in which he investigates the reasons why God often restrains the use of His overwhelming power.  He begins by relating his own failures as a young missionary in Japan.  Mosley is totally unprepared for the vast cultural indifference that the Japanese have for learning about the Christian God.  After many hours of work arranging for evangelistic meetings, and praying devotedly to ask for God's help in making the outreaches successful, Mosley and his colleagues were almost totally ignored by the Osaka population.  He thought to himself, "God had not shown His power.  He hadn't acted at all.  He hadn't answered our modest call.  Where was the Almighty?  Our efforts to speak for Him in the metropolis seemed painfully feeble.  We hadn't even made a ripple.  God Himself had not made a ripple.  The millions just walked on by."

 

He goes on to write about a particularly uncomfortable experience he had as a young college student.  Joining a group of students who made visits to local hospitals in order to "cheer up" the patients, he sang songs up and down the hallways and then made personal visits to the patients' rooms for informal chats and encouragement.  He "chatted with a Black matron there who seemed very afraid but who warmed to the name of Jesus. 

 

 

Then I stepped into a large room with six beds.  I started toward a bed with a patient who appeared about my age but then stopped cold.  There were tubes running into his body from a cluster of machines.  He seemed pretty banged up.  What was I doing here?  I began to feel faint.  Then I spotted the elderly man.  He lay on the other side of the room, moaning.  His body twitched as if trying to shake off an invisible blanket.  I could not tell if the man was asleep or awake.  For a second I felt sure his pained jerking around would stop.  But it went on.  No one in the room seemed alarmed.  No one seemed to notice.  Then it hit me hard - he's always like this.  This is his existence.  And that fact was as unfathomable as eternity."

 

 

"I swallowed hard.  (The songs we had sung) lay thick and gagging in my throat.  The tubes, machines, soiled bedsheets and bare walls blurred into the elderly patient's convulsions and I had to rush outside for air."

 

"Suffering had always been an abstraction before that day at the hospital.  You can maneuver abstractions into their proper place in the scheme of things.  But afterward, suffering had a face.  You can't maneuver around a face; you can't forget it.  Those contorted features embodied for me all the suffering I had ever read or heard about ."

 

"They also took me by surprise.  In those few vulnerable moments in the hospital I felt pinned against the wall by the conviction that God Almighty and this poor man could not exist in the same universe.  It was inescapable.  The patient's spastic body was a constant witness against the faith I had cherished since childhood.  It seemed to be wrestling to express an unpronounceable curse against Heaven.  Everything was NOT all right in my Father's house.  I didn't think I would ever have peace... again."

 

"This is the darker side of God's apparent powerlessness.  It's not just a lack of heroic miracles that distrubs us.  It's the Almighty's failure to stop suffering - something that surely basic decency requires.  Evil abounds.  People hurt.  Tragedies multiply.  Unspeakable crimes continueAnd God seems idle."

 

Later in his life, Mosley considers why God permits evil and brokenness to exist.  He guesses what God had in mind when He created people.  He discusses the possibility that God could have created humans that had no choice but were constrained to love God no matter what; robots if you will.  However, Mosley points out that what God wanted most was for mankind to love Him, and that that would require that humans have free will, the freedom to choose right or wrong.  Mosley writes that this independent choice could free humans to decide their own fate.  On the other hand, it also means that they must live with the consequences of their decisions.  As he puts it, we are free to love and help each other, or hate and hurt.  All this is familiar theology; I've heard it all my life. 

But what I read next, I was totally unprepared for.  Mosely takes the reader back to the inception of Satan, the Devil.  As a fallen, selfish angel, he dared to question God’s authority.  He tried to convince other angels to try his path to happiness.  He placed a small doubt in their minds about God’s love that grew into outright rebellion.  Mosely points out that God had a choice to make at this point.  He could extinguish Satan, or he could banish him from heaven and let him proceed with his evil plan to subvert the kingdom.  It seems like a no-brainer to me.  Why allow a subversive like the devil to continue living?  Wouldn’t that ruin God’s plan for goodness, or at least severely damage it?  But Mosely had the insight to wonder “what if”?  What if God had quashed Satan outright, snuffed him with his thumb; would the questions about the “alternative way” been silenced?  More than likely, no!  Looking at the story from the perspective of millions of years of sin in human history, there can now be no doubt.  Satan’s way not only doesn’t work, it’s even self-destructive!  Now the justice and righteousness of God’s plan is self-evident.  No one can question the plan of the most loving and trustworthy God.

The question may now be eternally settled, but the battles of sin continue to be waged in our lives.  As humans, we have free choice to love or hate, heal or wound, steal or give.  When we see the kind of pain and suffering that Mosely saw as a young man, we need not blame God, but rather blame our sinful nature.  It wasn’t part of God’s perfect will that we suffer pain, but it is part of his permissive will.  As a God who suffers pain himself, He knows that pain and adversity can introduce us to our true nature, our highest calling.  It can make us see the wisdom of His love and freedom.

 

"Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating."

Simone Weil

 

Mosley, Steven, 2000.  Glimpses of God.  Questar/Multnomah

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