Perspective

Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped. And he said, “Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:20,21 ESV)

I recently overheard a discussion between two women, one who is a professed Christian, the other who is not. The nonbeliever had started by saying she was "praying to God" that she and her husband would get the house they are trying to buy. When the Christian woman tried to explain the necessity of having a relationship with God for prayer to be effective, the nonbeliever bristled and said, "I pray to God all the time and he never answers my prayers!"

The absurdity of praying "all the time" to God, whom you believe "never" answers your prayers aside, the human tendency to blame God for everything bad that happens, yet fail to give Him credit and gratitude for anything good, is pretty much universal. Much of this attitude is a defense mechanism, a way to justify one's refusal to submit to God. Why submit to God when He is so cruel as to allow all these bad things to happen to us? Many, as Dostoyevsky wrote of his character Ivan in the The Brothers Karamazov use it as a rationale for denying the existence of God: "I renounce the higher harmony altogether," declared Ivan. "It's not worth the tears of...one tortured child."

C.S. Lewis dealt at length with this question in his (highly recommended) book The Problem of Pain. He starts chapter 2 this way:

"If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty, He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both." This is the problem of pain, in its simplest form.

This is not the place to re-state Lewis' arguments; I couldn't hope to match his eloquence and brilliance anyway. I'll just commend the book to all. But I would like to make the point that much of our struggle with this question, even as believers, is due to perspective: ours, as finite and mortal, is so limited.

The passage beginning this piece is probably the most quoted from the book of Job. And, while verse 22 tells us that, in all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong, a careful reading shows that Job went on to vigorously "blame" God for the evil that had befallen him and others (see 9:23-24; 10:8,16,20; 21:17-26, 30-32; 24:1-12; 30:21), for which God roundly rebuked him.

Most of God's rebuke to Job is in the form of questions concerning the majesty and complexity of creation, but in 40:8 He says, "Would you discredit my justice? Would you condemn me to justify yourself?" (NIV) Of course this is exactly what most humans do who seek to escape surrender to God. But even those who have surrendered to God fall to the temptation of "blaming" Him for the evil that transpires in their lives.

To Job's accusation that God was responsible for his misery, God's answer seems to be that he should keep his mouth shut because he was speaking about the nature of reality whose vast complexity he was completely incapable of comprehending. When Job is given a glimpse of this divine perspective through God's discourse, he says, "Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know." (Job 42:3 NIV)

When I first overheard the woman's complaint that God "never" answered her prayers, I was tempted to say, "sure He did; He answered every one of them...with, 'NO!'" Such a frivolous statement would have done more harm than good, but there is a kernel of truth to it in that what we often conceive as divine silence, or worse, indifference, is always simply a lack of understanding or limited perspective of the reality. We make demands of God, or draw conclusions about His nature based on our desires and expedience.

In the Gospel of Mark we are told when Jesus was before the Sanhedrin, after they had condemned him as deserving death, some began to spit on him and to cover his face and to strike him, saying to him "Prophesy!" (Mark 14:65 ESV) Take note: they demanded a prophesy, not of honest motives, but from their own private incentive to mock and debase Jesus, and vindicate themselves. At perhaps precisely this instant, below in the courtyard, a prophesy of Jesus is fulfilled as Peter, at the insistence of bystanders that he must be a follower of Jesus, began to invoke a curse on himself and to swear, "I do not know this man of whom you speak." And immediately the rooster crowed a second time. And Peter remembered how Jesus had said to him, "Before the rooster crows twice, you will deny me three times." And he broke down and wept. (Mark 14:71,72 ESV)

Here, we too, like Job are given a glimpse of the divine perspective. Those who sarcastically demanded a prophesy from Jesus reveled in their perception of his failure, but from God's perspective their request was all too tragically granted.