The Struggle of Why

Romans 9:20 NIV

But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? "Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, 'Why did you make me like this?'"

Do You Have a “Why” Question For God?

Growing up, like you, I had many “why” questions for my parents…most of which I knew better not to ask.  Why do we have to have a Volkswagen bus instead of a normal car?  Why do you serve peas for supper?  Why do I have to wash the dishes?  Why can’t we watch my favorite TV shows?  Why would you think mashing the roast beef with the potatoes and carrots and peas and onions and other quasi food items, mixing them together and calling it “hash” would be a good idea?  Why can’t I watch the second feature at the drive-in too?  How come my allowance is so small?  Why don’t we take more votes when family decisions are made?  What made you think that a baby blue polyester leisure suit should be my Christmas present?  Could I get my hair cut by someone who earns his living at it?  Can we listen to something other than country western music?  Why does Dad need to know about my grades?  Can we go to Disney Land for our vacation rather than camping this year?  What “Why” questions would you ask of your parents if you could?

Perhaps you ask them why they treated you like you did, or why was your brother or sister the “favorite child”.  Maybe you would ask about a relative who was kind of strange or whether they were happily married or glad about their career choices or what they really thought of God.  We might have lots of questions we would ask of our parents if we thought it appropriate or if it was possible.  Are there “why” questions you have for God?  What do you “wonder why” about God’s dealings with you?  Do you have lots of “why” questions for Him or just a few?  What is your most important “why” question for the Lord?

Our “why” questions seem to grow in magnitude and number when the toughness of life bears down upon us.  There are a number of ways we attach causation to the difficulties and painful parts of their existence.  One is bad luck.  There is we guess some force in the universe that operates and sometimes the coin turns up heads and other times tails and when it is good luck we try to keep doing what we are doing and when it is bad luck, we scramble for ways to “change our luck”.  We wear different kinds of clothes, take a different route to work, give a homeless person an extra dollar.  We can just assume that everything that happens is random and without any sort of organization.  Jackson Pollock famously painted using random drips and drops and splatters to create his art and it represented this idea, that there is neither rhyme nor reason to life; it is just a bunch of splatters shot about by mindless nature.  There is another way to look at the tough parts of life and that is to blame it all on Satan.  Satan is the one who takes our lives apart and ruins them to satisfy his cruel fancies.  A fourth view of these rough times is to guess that God is mad at us and punishing us.  Sometimes we see God as cruel for He deals with us more harshly than we deserve.  Like Job, we know we haven’t been perfect but why does He come down on us as hard as He does?

Now we must see what the Bible says about those rough times we have faced.  Hebrews 12: 5-6 gives us deep insight into what goes on behind the scenes when painful experiences come our way.  And you have forgotten that word of encouragement that addresses you as sons: "My son, do not make light of the Lord's discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son." (NIV) Now what is almost irritating in this is that we are told that the very experiences that tear us apart and make us miserable and even angry should encourage us.  How can we be encouraged by the loss of our job, by the long and painful illness, by the troubles we have with our children and by the discouraging things people say to us?  It is impossible unless we have Christ dwelling within us and we understand what God is doing for us.

We must realize that there is a real possibility that we may not even be aware of how much work God has to do with us.  When David committed adultery with Bathsheba and had her husband killed, he had no idea just how badly he had acted.  It is strange to consider that David, the author of so many of the Psalms in the Bible could have thought it was ok to have sex with another man’s wife and then order the general of his army to position that man on the battle lines at such a place that he would be killed.  One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, and David sent someone to find out about her. The man said, "Isn't this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite?"  Then David sent messengers to get her. She came to him, and he slept with her…In the morning David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it with Uriah.  In it he wrote, "Put Uriah in the front line where the fighting is fiercest. Then withdraw from him so he will be struck down and die." (2 Samuel 11: 2-4, 14-15 NIV) It seems David had grown comfortable with what he had done…so comfortable that he had no qualms about marrying the woman after her husband died.  When Uriah's wife heard that her husband was dead, she mourned for him.  After the time of mourning was over, David had her brought to his house, and she became his wife and bore him a son. But the thing David had done displeased the Lord. (2 Samuel 11:26-27 NIV)

This is critical to realize when it comes to the psychology of sin.  We can sin and sin egregiously and not even rattle our conscience.  There is a masking agent attached to many sins that can render the conscience impotent.  We have seen this often in our personal experiences; Christians and non-Christians alike not aware that what they have done was wrong.  We may think that they are just trying to cover up their sin by pretending they don’t see anything bad in their behavior but we would be wrong in many cases.  Like David, the sin itself has put the conscience to sleep in the matter.  The mechanism for this is beyond our discussion today but it is too ubiquitous a phenomenon to ignore.  In David’s case, he went nine months without being affected by the damage he had caused.  It was only after the prophet Nathan confronted him that David grasped the immensity of his evil acts.  “Why did you despise the word of the Lord by doing what is evil in his eyes? You struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and took his wife to be your own. You killed him with the sword of the Ammonites...Then David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the Lord." (2 Samuel 12:9, 13 NIV)

Because sin damages our personality so severely and the habit of sin is so difficult to stop once it gains momentum, God chooses to intervene with those He loves.  He “disciplines” them, Hebrews 12 insists.  The word translated “discipline” means to train up, nurture, instruct, correct.  It is often used in conjunction with children; it is in many ways a family term.  In Christ, we are a part of His family and we are His children.  Because of the severity of David’s sin and the great damage it was causing among God’s people, the Lord disciplined the king ruthlessly.  He took David and Bathsheba’s son and promised David that other children of his would rise up against him in rebelllion.  That was a dreadful blow; a horrendous shot.  David prayed with weeping when the baby Bathsheba bore became deathly ill so we know it was terrible for David but God did not give in to David.  He took the child and later two of his adult children tried to wrench the kingdom from him.  The discipline of God was severe.

It takes faith to believe that a father or mother punishes you out of love.  You can’t just accept the discipline at face value as good…at least not when you are a child.  As adults or young adults, we too need faith to believe the harsh moments in our lives are part of God’s work with us done in love.  The one to one correspondence is almost never as neat and easily recognized as we saw with David.  You have adultery and murder in you.  I will take that out of you with this discipline.  Much of the time we cannot even figure out what we might have done wrong when God disciplines us.  God’s promise though is that the hard times never come because God hates us or because they just happen, always God is in charge of what we face and it is never because He despises us.  There is a second term the Lord uses in Hebrews 12: 6.  …the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son." (NIV)    The word translated “punishes” means to “scourge”.  It is discipline capitalized.  No one can describe this as easy or comfortable.  Remember, Jesus was “scourged”.  We realize that there are many parts of us that God must work on with severity and we may cry when we face what he gives us.  God’s goal though is not for here; it’s that later we will be rid of every ounce of sin and settled in holiness…perfect children of a perfect God.

Our goal is comfort.  We love to be able to relax and enjoy the ride.  God’s goal is holiness.  He loves to develop perfect people.  These two goals can be at loggerheads; butting up against each other like two mountain goats.  As He disciplines you, our Lord is proving your holiness; showing you and all those watching you what sort of person you are in Christ.  He is making you strong that your strength can be transferred to those not as strong as you, making you forgiving so that your forgiveness can be transferred to those not as forgiving as you, making you kind toward those who mistreat you so that your kindness can be transferred to those not as kind as you.  My father went through special training that he might protect those who would need his strength and help.  You are being trained by God that you might of great good for those He brings into your life.  If you are not trained to be patient, someone who needs your patience won’t have it when she needs it.  If you are not disciplined to be at peace with the storm, those who face the storm may not have enough peace to get past it.  The one who grieves finds great comfort in a friend who has grieved herself.  You are not your own.  You were made by God to be a perfect friend to each one you meet.  The storm you face is for them…not just for you.

An Open Letter To My Daughter

The other night you asked your mom how we know that God exists. You wondered if maybe someone made up all the stories. How can you at six ask such questions? You are growing up much too quickly!

Probably the most fascinating story of them all is the one about the peasant family that gave birth to a baby boy in a dusty cave. Yet we are told this was the birth of God...at least as a human. What do you make of this one? It seems like it could have been made up but there are some details about the story we can be certain happened. This Jesus was born. How could that have been made up? There were shepherds and Magi and priests and plenty of others who saw the baby. He was born in a stable and that couldn't have been concocted out of air because there was an inn keeper who knew about it. The birth registry of the Romans would have documented his birth and anyone wanting to prove he never was could easily have looked that up. Of course the question about Joseph being the father is a bit of an oddity in the story but there is no reason to make that part of the account up. It would look too bad for the family of God to have the child not have the father who should have been his father his. How do you explain that to normal religious people anyway that you want to be your friends except that it is what happened. Make up the story that God was the baby's real father and you become a nutcase in a small town with enough gossip already in it to fill a stable. Either Joseph was the father (which obviously was not the case) or someone else was (which would have been the most reasonable conclusion except they never say it--because to their complete humiliation there wasn't another father). The story is a bizarre myth (which nothing about it except the virgin birth sounds like one)or it is what it is. God born the only way He could be born. To a mother normal like you and me but with God as His real Father.

The angels in the sky seem a bit weird too and that is understandable that you think it sounds like something from The Lion King. But again, it was real, filthy, dirt poor shepherds who saw it all and the story was never refuted...and could easily have been proven because the shepherds were there. No one questions a car wreck if seven people saw it. The fact that we haven't had many angel sightings lately doesn't prove they haven't occurred any more than a lack of George Washington sightings make the George Washington legend unbelievable too.

Now I realize that I haven't proven God exists but the other stories about Jesus are just as reasonable. The death of Jesus was witnessed by Romans, Jews, friends and enemies and no one refuted His death when the stories started circulating.

Oh, but the big story, the one of Jesus climbing out of His tomb after he died is certainly up for disbelief. But can we really question it just because we don't have dead grandfathers popping out of their coffins or dead aunts slipping back to us after they have been cremated. Just because I haven't seen such a thing can't always disprove it's something true. Again, I did not follow the Apollo rocket up to the moon and although it hadn't happened before, I am not one to doubt that shocking turn of events didn't happen. I believe the hundreds of NASA workers who tracked the thing and followed its progress through the skies. More than five hundred people saw Jesus alive after He died and they couldn't have all been a bunch of quackers with duck brains. There believability packed the Temple grounds of Jerusalem with normal souls like me and you who were too convinced to shy away from the most hated and purged "myth" to come along. No one made a movement of killing off Aphrodite lovers or Isis lovers. Those myths were just silly little tales. But the one of Jesus coming back to life was right there for all to see and prove right or wrong. And more than that, the myth cost you everything you had if you held to it too tightly...including little girls like you. You had to be certain you were right. Your world depended upon it.

The stories of God are a strange collection it is true my child but strange doesn't mean false. How do you explain a rag-tag band of one million slaves marching away from the greatest and most imposing army of its time if not by means of the sea splitting apart and the first borns of the slave owning nation all dying at once. The legend was too big for myth-hood. It was the most easily of all little stories to refute but the entire nation of Israel held to it not because it made them something special (psychotically special is what I really mean)but because every last grandfather of them and grandmother too (who are certainly more believable)said it happened. To top it off, the Egyptians all knew it happened and never made mincemeat (I know you have never heard of mincemeat--it is an ancient myth of still more ancient peoples than your own)of the crazy reports...because it happened just like Michael Jackson happened.

Myths that are really myths are just foolish but the myths that are true are only too good to believe. But then, I could say the same of you. Too good to be true!