Where is God when things go wrong?

The official death toll resulting from the devastating earthquakes and tsunamis in the Indian Ocean a few months ago may never be known and their impact on the thinking of millions of people is beyond calculation.

For many without a biblical perspective, the almost instinctive reaction is to ask 'Where is God when things go wrong?'

In answering the question, some have taken the same line as the American lawyer Edward Tabash who lost two members of his family in the Holocaust: 'I want to sue him for negligence, for being asleep at the wheel of the universe when my grandfather and uncle were gassed to death in Auschwitz.' Others have decided that God is incapable of doing 'what it says on the tin' (the Bible) and is powerless to prevent natural disasters and the pain and suffering resulting from moral evil. Still others have gone even further and agreed with the British art critic Brian Sewell: 'After watching a world gone mad with greed and aggression...I ceased to believe in God and abandoned faith and its observance.'

God in the dock?

It is curious that millions of people who never give God any credit when things go right immediately put him in the dock when things go wrong, even to the point of denying his very existence. Yet I wonder whether they have considered the implications of dismissing God in this way.

Firstly, if there is no God, why should issues of good and evil, or human suffering, cause any problems to the unbeliever? If Bertrand Russell was right to dismiss man as 'a curious accident in a backwater', why should it matter in the least whether lives are ended slowly or suddenly, peacefully or painfully, one by one or en masse? If, as the Oxford professor Peter Atkins maintains, mankind is 'just a bit of slime on a planet', why should we be remotely concerned at the systematic slaughter of six million Jews or the appalling death toll of the Indian Ocean tsunamis? What is more, if we have no meaningful origin or destiny, why should the way we treat each other matter more than the way brute animals behave?

Matters of opinion?

Secondly, if atheistic evolutionism is right in saying that we are nothing more than what Russell called 'accidental collocations of atoms', then we have no sensible basis on which to come to any moral conclusions. How can we jump from atoms to ethics and from molecules to morality? If we are merely genetically-programmed machines, how can we condemn anything as being 'evil' or commend anything as being 'good'? When people respond to tragedy by asking, 'How can there be a just God?', their question is logically flawed, as without him words like 'just' and 'unjust' are purely matters of personal opinion.

Source of conscience?

Thirdly, where else, apart from a transcendent, moral Creator, can we find a basis for conscience, which seems to react to a transcendent moral law? The distinguished geneticist Francis Collins, who led the successful effort to complete the Human Genome Project, makes the point well: 'This moral law, which defies scientific explanation, is exactly what one might expect to find if one were searching for the existence of a personal God who sought relationship with mankind.'

Asking and answering these questions points us to what some will find the strangest of conclusions: the existence of evil points towards the existence of God, not away from it! Getting rid of God does not solve the problem of evil and suffering - and leaves us trapped in what the French philosopher Albert Camus called 'that hopeless encounter between human questioning and the silence of the universe'.

God and evil?

A favourite ploy of the unbeliever is to say that an all-powerful, all-holy God would always intervene to prevent evil, but this logically leads to the uncomfortable idea that in moral matters we would be reduced to the role of puppets, not responsible for a single word, thought or deed (good or bad) - but this is not what the Bible teaches! While teaching that God decrees everything that happens, it makes it crystal clear that God is neither the author of sin nor in any way implicated in it. Instead, it tells us that human beings are free, responsible and accountable moral agents, answerable to him for every thought, word and deed.

Then where is God when natural disasters happen and when moral evil leads to pain and suffering? Exactly where he was at the moment of the world's greatest sin and suffering, the crucifixion of his beloved Son, Jesus Christ, when he was in complete control of an event brought about with 'the help of wicked men' yet nevertheless according to 'God's set purpose of foreknowledge' (Acts 2.23). Analysing how this can be so is utterly beyond our finite understanding; as Don Carson puts it, God's way of working 'defied our attempt to tame it by reason...we do not know enough to be able to unpack it and domesticate it'.

God who is near

We can begin to get our thinking straight when we marry the two great biblical truths that God is absolutely sovereign, doing 'whatever pleases him, in the heavens and on the earth, in the seas and all their depths' (Psalm 135.6) and that 'he does not change like shifting shadows' (James 1.17). This means that he is unchangeable in his power, his love, his mercy, his understanding and his compassion, and that he is 'near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth' (Psalm 145.18). Christian believers who have suffered tragic loss or terrible pain in the recent catastrophe have joined millions of others over the centuries in testifying to the truth of this promise and to the powerful reality of God's enabling grace in their lives.

John Blanchard's booklet Where is God when things go wrong? is published by Evangelical Press.