Answer Me
The LORD sets the prisoners free;
8the LORD opens the eyes of the blind.
The LORD lifts up those who are bowed down;
the LORD loves the righteous.
9The LORD watches over the sojourners;
he upholds the widow and the fatherless,
but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.
On my drive to work this morning I was asking myself “Does God really intervene at all in this world? What’s the point of all this religion if there are no miracles, no interventions, no immediate hope?”. It seems that much of my interpretation of readings of the Bible is along the lines of no God really doesn’t change or do anything but our belief in God causes the change. So what’s the point? Why don’t I just become an atheist who thinks God is a nice psychological game to be played in order to produce social harmony?
At the root of all this is the need for a test of faith. How can you believe something without evidence? The very nature of belief requires some kind of evidence, whether you reason with the mind or use your feelings as a guide.
But it is not an isolated intellectual puzzle, on this hangs my whole framework for living – is there any hope? Can I rely on God or am I in this alone? Is it all up to me afterall? Can anyone answer this for me? No only God can answer it, and if God doesn’t answer it, then that is an answer too.
Posted: January 27th, 2005 under Bible Bashing.
Comments: 1
Comment from James the cat
Time: 2/2/2005, 4:06 pm
How does God act in the world?
One answer, completely true but not all that helpful, is to point out that the movement of God in the world is a profound mystery, God’s reasons and methods are beyond human understanding. True, but hardly reasurring in time of crisis.
To unpack this a little, Christians can look to the doctrine of the incarnation as a hint to better see the action of God in the world.
John’s gospel tells us, ‘in the beginning was the word, and word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginnning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being…’ (John 1:1f) God is in the world. God is greater than the world, but in it, emersed in it all the same. In Genesis we read how God walked in the Garden in the light of evening… – figurative language for sure, but reassurance that this God is present among us. (Gen 3:8)
God is among us, in a physical and material way – enfleshed and incarnate.
How does God act? Perhaps in earlier times inexplicable acts were attributed to God – miraculous acts of healing, disasters, natural events. In more recent times, say the last 300 years, there has been greater awareness of natural laws and processes which govern many such events. Acts of God were progressively restricted to those things that were still not understood. (and for Insurance brokers this conveniently included certain natural disasters). The rationalists supposed that by knowing the mechanism of a certain event, that God thereby was excluded from teh equation.
Now, to return to the point that Matt raises… who sets the prisioners free? who opens the eyes of the blind? etc. And we could say, well the lawyers, amnesty international, the Red Cross, Medecins sans frontières, Anglicare, St Philips church, etc. allthese groups and people, motivated by good will, do these things.
We will recall Matt25:31f, that describes work of charity and says, ‘whatsoever you do for the least of my brothers and sisters you do for me’. we recall Micah 6:8, ‘what does the lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God’. We recall the words of Isaiah, ‘the spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anouned me, he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives…’ (is61:1f)
That is to say, Isaiah embraces the work of God. Indeed, these are Jesus words to the Nazareth synagogue (Luke 4: 16f). The work of God is the work of the people of God. We are the MEDIATORS of God’s action in teh world. God acts in many and various ways, through believers and non believers alike. Through well understood physiological and biochemical processes as well as in ways we do not understand.
Rationalist thinkers who think that by explaining how things happen, they dismiss God, miss the point.
Of course, in saying that God acts through these well understood processes does not limit God to them… scripture is full of stories of events that we cannot completely understand even now, and in my 31 years i have see things, ‘cooincidences’ and such like i do not understand and could readily be called miracles.
How does God answer our prayer? well it might just be through the passing comment of a workmate, or the cooincidence of seeing a new job add in the paper. And of course, the medium, the person or thing that mediates God’s action, probably does not know that they are acting as God’s messenger.
Now, after all that, the very real question arises, well if God is active in the world, why the Tsunami? Why Dafur? Why Bush? I will not attempt to answer that now, but to recall that these very questions have been asked by people of faith for centuries, and our scriptural tradition is rich with attempts to understand the action of God in such disasters.