As promised, we now return to the issue of God's goodness, cancer, crepes, and such.
For those of you who've been dying in anticipation to hear the definitive answer on how we can know God is good, here it comes...............
You can't.
God's goodness is not measured by our circumstances. The only trap more dangerous than doubting God's goodness due to pain is believing in God's goodness with happiness as your only evidence.
Co-existing with other beings is our reality...and that coexistence brings with it both pain and happiness. The same goes for God. He isn't some perpetually euphoric being, independent of circumstance. He cries with us. He laughs with us. More notably, perhaps, he is grieved when we turn our backs on him, when we choose to isolate ourselves from him, when we choose to go our own way. And he rejoices when we return to him, under whatever circumstances.
The only instructions I can offer when it comes to navigating the landscape of joy and sorrow in life is to line up your emotions with God's: to be close to him is joy, to be distant is sorrow.
As for circumstances, all I can say is that I really think Bono is just feminizing God when he sings Mysterious Ways:
...to touch is to heal
to hurt is to steal
If you wanna kiss the sky,
better learn how to kneel
On your knees boy!
It's alright, it's alright, it's alright
She moves in mysterious ways...
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3 comments:
You can't know that God is good? But isn't that the message of the Bible, that God is a loving God who cares about the intricacies of our life? Or is that just fluff that we're to cling to when the rubber hits the road and things like cancer or loss or any of the millions of bad things can occur?
I'd argue that telling the starving child in Africa to just live in God's joy is painting God as a physically handicapped diety that can only meaningfully play into those living in western civiliazation and answering prayers about boyfriends/girlfriends, basketball games, and whether the weather will be nice for the next church picnic.
Hmm, I don't think I've said anything that implies THAT. I would argue, though, that you can't KNOW that God is good. I mean empirically; our little brains aren't capable of it. I would say that the starving child in Africa knows what it means to be surrendered to God and experience his inexplicable joy perhaps better than most of us spoiled westerners, who place our belief in God's goodness in boyfriends/girlfriends, basketball games, and church picnics.
But if you don't know that God is good, how can we trust that God is good? The Bible is supposed to be God's message to us...the "good news" that all may be reconciled to God, and that he loves us more than we love ourselves, blah blah blah...
But then when life happens and God doesn't seem to be there, how to we resolve that? If this were human terms, it would be like the husband that beats his wife but tells her he loves her...and we would tell her to trust her husband and love him because she just can't understand his love for her, even though she hurts.
The starving child in Africa would probably feel more joy with a sandwhich I think...I'm not sure there's much joy in starving to death and never actually experiencing life.
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