Don’t Worship Your Emotions

How can there be an all-loving and an all-powerful God if there is so much suffering and evil in our world?  Perhaps that is the most difficult religious question of all time.  Why does God not act in the face of suffering?  Why do bad things happen with seemingly no response from God?  In a famous book, ‘After Auschwitz’, Richard Rubenstein asks how it is even possible for a Jew to believe in God after the holocaust.  How can we believe in God in the face of God’s seeming inaction in the face of suffering and evil?

There have been countless attempts to answer this question, not the least inside the tortured experience of those who are suffering.  There have also been many attempts at offering some kind of acceptable theoretical explanation.  Inside of Christian theology, C.S. Lewis, among others, has written insightful books on this question.  Christians believe that what is ultimately at stake is human freedom and God’s respect for it.  God gives us freedom and (unlike most everyone else) refuses to violate it, even when it would seem beneficial to do so.  That leaves us in a lot of pain at times, but as Jesus reveals, God is not so much a rescuing God as a redeeming one.  God does not protect us from pain, but instead enters it and ultimately redeems it.  That might sound simplistic in the face of real death and evil, but it is not.  We see a powerful illustration of this in Jesus’ reaction to the request of the Canaanite woman.