How do you explain an omnipotent God letting bad things happen to good people?”
“Is God sovereign? If so, are we robots? Do we have any choices or are we predestined to choose what we choose? So why witness, send missionaries, minister?”
“If God knows what we need more than we do, if He knows our thoughts and desires, if He sees the future and charts our path, why pray? Why not just wait for Him to do whatever He’s going to do anyway?”
The questions seem to fly as soon as we confess a faith in Jesus Christ, as if finding a question not yet fully answered gives the questioner some ground to stand on for not believing.
And perhaps for all of us there is a time in our young lives when we feel we have the luxury of always questioning and never resolving the great issues of life. But sooner or later inquisitors and critics choose to resolve some major questions, or they become cynics.
For many, the time for deciding comes as we birth a new generation. It’s one thing to sit around in college dormitories discussing the unsolvable problems of the universe. It’s another to hold your own newborn baby in your arms and realize that what this child thinks and feels and believes will be largely your responsibility. You realize you will never have all the answers to all the questions, but you also know there are at least a few things you’d better get nailed down. Turbulent spirits must lay a few things to rest, and although we can’t know everything, we begin to realize we must know a few things for sure. Jesus taught that the evidence that confirms our leaps of faith comes after we risk believing, not before.
Bill and I wrote “I Believe in a Hill Called Mount Calvary” at a fork in the road for our lives. We hadn’t then, nor have we now, resolved all the questions. But we chose to risk everything we were or ever hoped to be on a few things that began for us a growing relationship with Christ.
We, like most human beings, would have preferred that God prove Himself before we risked believing. None of us wants to make a fool of himself. “If You prove You’re real, I’ll believe” is the way most of us approach the omniscient Jehovah. But God is not an axiom of science. He is the great I Am, and it is not He but each of us who is on trial. Judas (not Iscariot) tried the “play it safe” avenue of reasoning with Jesus. Reveal Yourself to the world at large. It would be so much easier, then, to make people believe in You. These miracles are great! Could you take this show on the road? But Jesus’ answer was quick. “I will only reveal myself to those who love me.” (See John 14:22–24 lb.)
Bill and I had to learn that God required that we first risk, believe, love. The “knowing” only results from relationship. And relationship—not evidence or knowledge or miracles or gifts—had to be our passion. We were beginning to learn that what we considered the process, God considers the goal. Once we dared to risk believing, all the tough circumstances of life would then crowd us to Christ, shove us closer to Him, nudge us into dependency on Him. That—relationship—is His goal. “I will only reveal myself to those who love me and obey me,” Jesus said.
Some years ago a slogan made its way to bumper stickers and lapel pins. I’m sure it was well intended, but I never really liked the phrase—“TRY JESUS.” It reminded me of a tray of hors d’oeuvres at a party. If you don’t like the shrimp canapés, try the bacon-wrapped mini-hotdogs or the tiny cheese tarts.
But we have found that serving Jesus is not a taste sampling. It’s not a risk-free bet. It’s not a for-profit investment, an “if you want to get, then you have to give” deal. It’s a leap into the unknown, risking everything you have and are on the Way beyond proof, not for financial gain, not for good feelings, not to get “gifts,” even gifts of the Spirit, though all of those things may result from this choice somewhere down the road.
If they do, chances are we will be the last to know. Most likely we will feel very inadequate and ordinary when we hear someone else say, “She is one of the most forgiving people I know,” or “He is a kind and gentle man of integrity.” Who me? may be our quick response.
That is how we come to know that in pursuit of a relationship with Jesus, we are being changed into His likeness. At that point, all the bewildering questions may remain unanswered. But, as the old-timers used to say, we are finding we don’t have such a gnawing need to know the answers when we know the Answer. We are coming, as the poet Rilke said, to love the question and to get more comfortable with the paradox of God. When we trust the author, we don’t have to know the end of the story. We just know it will be true.
We Americans have lived primarily in a country friendly to the Gospel. Oh, we may have what we consider “persecution” in some of our homes or we may work in an “unfriendly” environment. But we have not known persecution as Paul knew it or a world in which Christians are beheaded, burned at the stake, or thrown to the lions.
But history has shown that the winds of public opinion are fickle. Our freedom to worship openly, form Bible study groups in our homes, hold Christian concerts in public arenas, praise God with sixty thousand Promise Keepers, declare we are “women of faith” with thousands of other believers, could be replaced by regulations, repression, or even imprisonment.
Only “relationship” would stand through such a change. If we serve God because we think “serving Jesus really pays” in a material sense, we would likely be blown away like chaff on a threshing floor. If we’re hanging around the church because we like fellowships and enjoy the warm feelings of “the womb,” we would most certainly be torn away like helpless children in wartime.
Only a growing relationship with the living God, bought by the blood of His Son Jesus, sustained by the nurturing of His Holy Spirit internally, will long endure.
When Corrie ten Boom spoke at a Praise Gathering in her later years, she recounted a conversation she had as an adolescent with her father about the martyrs killed for the cause of Christ. She told her father she didn’t think she’d be capable of standing firm if she were tortured for her faith or her family were killed before her eyes. In short, she didn’t think she could be a martyr.
Her father gave an insightful answer, asking her a question: “When our family took that train trip, when did I give you children your tickets?”
“Why, just when it was time to get on the train,” she answered.
“If God asks you to give your life for His sake, He’ll give you the grace to do it when the time comes.”
Little did she know then that she’d be the only one of her family to survive the atrocities of Nazi prison camps, where they’d been sent for their compassionate role in harboring Jews and helping them to escape.
Even as an octogenarian Corrie would quickly have said she hadn’t answered all the theological questions people often use as an obstacle to faith, but she loved to sing a song based on the apostle Paul’s testimony:
But I know whom I have believed
And am persuaded that He is able
To keep that which I’ve committed
Unto Him against that day!
