A while back I read a book titled “How the News Makes us Dumb.” The book discusses the problem of how the news has to be entertaining in order to hold an audience, the problem of news being too brief and superficial to be truly informative, and the problem of the news never being objective but always slanted, always pushing a particular point of view even by the very selection of what is considered newsworthy; and, several more things. As Mark Twain said, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.” The book’s subtitle is “The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society.” It is a good book, and I’d like to tell you all about it sometime. But want to take this meditation off in a different direction.
Rather than talk about how watching the news turns us into morons, I want to describe to you how watching the news turns us into theologians. Let me tell you what I mean. Let’s say you are on the couch watching the 10:00 news. The newscaster is on the scene of yet another disaster, let’s says a massive tornado in Nebraska. A lady being interviewed says her whole family made it through alive, and it was a miracle, indeed. They could see the massive funnel cloud coming, but they prayed to God, and just at the last minute the tornado shifted and spared their lives and their farm. “It was just wonderful,” she said. The next interview is with her neighbor, whose farm was devastated (after the tornado shifted away from the first lady’s farm over to hers), and whose husband and daughter were killed. This lady, through her tears, tells how nice everyone is being to her, and how the people from her church are already there offering to help, and how her faith in God is still strong. And you say to yourself, “How does that work? Did that second family, even though they were God-fearing, church-going people, forget to say a prayer, and so God shifted the tornado over that way? Or just what was God doing there that day in Nebraska with that tornado? Why did the tornado even have to be there in the first place?”
So, you might not look like or feel like a theologian sitting there in your pajamas, but you are already asking all the big theological questions of the ages. Why does God allow bad things to happen in the world? Does God protect some and not others, and does he do so on the basis of what they do or do not deserve? Can I trust God to hear my prayers and protect me and deliver me?
The writers of the Bible struggled with these very same questions. Psalm 40 is one of the many Biblical statements about this very thing. It is a Psalm of praise for God’s deliverance, and it says there that yes, God can be trusted and does hear our prayers. “You are my helper and my deliverer, O God,’ says verse 19. ‘Great things you have done for me,’ says verse 5. Verse 12 says to God, ‘Your love and your faithfulness keep me safe forever,’ and, says verse 18, ‘though I am poor and afflicted, the Lord will have regard for me.’ Therefore, says the fourth verse, “Happy are they who trust in the Lord.”
“Yes, Lord,” I want to respond, “but could you say a little more about that. I am still a bit confused. How about that lady who just lost her husband and daughter in that tornado? Did she not trust in you enough? And if not, how then can I know if I am trusting enough?” How can we know what God is up to in the world and if we can rely on him?
What do we say about such things? Here are some options.
We could say that God has nothing at all to do with tornados in Nebraska or with anything else on this earth. A ‘deist’ like Thomas Jefferson would say that yes, there probably is a God somewhere out there, but he just created this universe and is now letting it go, on its own steam, without stepping in all the time to move tornados around from one farm to the next just because some farmer’s wife asked him to do so. So, Thomas Jefferson would say, God was nice to create this big world for us, but don’t expect him to be protecting anyone from anything. In fact, Jefferson created his own edited New Testament, taking a scissors to it and cutting out any talk of miraculous interventions by God (there was a lot missing when he got done). But that is not the God that we read about in the whole Bible, who does in fact take an active part in the events of this world, delivering whomsoever he pleases, even responding to the prayers of individuals, farmer’s wife or whoever.
So, we could go in the opposite direction and say God has everything to do with precisely what path that tornado takes, even determining ahead of time what farms get hit and what chickens and people get killed? Has God determined ahead of time everything that will happen, planning out every detail for his own purposes, the delivering and the damning all set up far in advance, even to the point of deciding and predetermining who will murder who and when? That is what a pure Calvinist would say. But I don’t think that is a Biblical position either, because God in the Bible holds people responsible for what they do when they oppose His will. (continued…)
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Good Lord, we pray that in your great mercy you would deliver us from evil. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.
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