God's absence

[Brad Fox]

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 who seemed very afraid there 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 continue.  And 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 cause 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. 

 

Mosley goes on to state that the possibility of making wrong choices is far outweighed by the preciousness of freedom.  As he says, "Without freedom you can forget about all that is most precious in human relationships, all that is most precious in life itself.  Love can exist only where there is genuinely free choice.  Free and responsible people are capable of creating suffering..  That point should help us understand a lot of the pain in our world and most of the tragedy."