If God Is In Charge, then Is Not God to Blame?

The morning on the radio program, Family Life Today, Dennis Rainey asked his guest to explain the earthquake tragedy in Haiti to a 9 year old child. The answer was that we can’t explain, but we can know God cares.  The guest went on to say that unless one holds a Christian world view, this explanation will be rejected.

I agree, but I’m not sure I like the world view approach for discussing this. We do need something more personal. If God is truly in charge, then one would think God can be held accountable for the disasters occurring  under God’s administration of the world. An atheist may quite reasonably decide that a God so incompetent and uncaring as to permit such carnage is too scary to be trusted.  Shear chance is a definitely more comforting possibility.

There is only one answer to this problem- Jesus.   No one who reads the story of Jesus can imagine Jesus calling down fire from heaven, floods from the sea, earthquakes, volcanoes, or any such thing against anyone. If Jesus is, as he claimed, the way to know the Father,  then God is like Jesus, and God wouldn’t do such things either. So the question arises. When Jesus suffered and died, was God really in charge?  The cross reveals a helpless God when Caiaphas and Pilate were in charge.

Still let’s not not jump to conclusions too soon. The final outcome reveals who is really in charge, and the resurrection shows God in charge of the outcome.  Yes, there are plenty of stumbling blocks right there in the Bible to discredit God, but if we stumble we haven’t read the whole story.  Jesus makes God credible if we can believe the story of his resurrection .

So is God responsible for all the suffering in the world, since it happens under his administration?  Is God responsible for what the Caiaphas and Pilates of the world do? The answer is yes. God is responsible, and God takes responsibility. Unlike us, along with the corporations and governments we have created, God has taken full responsibility upon himself for everything wrong with the world. If someone must be punished, then God has stepped up and taken the punishment. The retribution we demanded (Let’s admit it. We all want Adolf Hitler and Osama Bin Laden to get what they deserve.) came down in full force on a helpless Jesus. But the final outcome, the resurrection, showed God still in charge.

Jesus not only reveals what God is, Jesus also reveals the full potential of what it can mean to be a fully qualified human. The wind and the waves obeyed him as did the fish in the sea, along with a herd of pigs who jumped over a cliff into the lake when he gave the word.  (Yes the devil made them do it, but Jesus gave permission.) The humanity of Jesus reveals the full capacity of what a human can be, and in his humanity reveals a God still in charge.This suggests that one day the wind and the waves, the movements of mountains, and the behavior of animals will be under our management. If we trust God in obedience and faith now, the final outcome will be that he entrusts us with all he has as our inheritance.

“O the depths of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God. How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out!!” (Romans 11:33 KJV)