Recently, my publisher “outsourced” the publicity on my book Hidden in Plain Sight, meaning they hired an outside agency to garner media attention.  I was surprised to find the agency pitching the book with the headline, “How can a merciful God allow an earthquake in

Peru?” with an accompanying photo of distressed Peruvians clambering over mounds of rubble.  “Ethicist (!) Mark Buchanan,” the press release announces, “is conducting national interviews to address this tough question and others like them.”

            Yikes.

            It’s a good question, though my books touche on the problem of suffering from a very different angle.  But why would a merciful God allow such a thing?

                Several things come to mind:

v      It’s a question that most people through most of history did not ask in the face of catastrophe.  Throughout most of history, people’s  instinctual question was not, “Why has a merciful God allowed this?” It was, “What have we done to a holy God to deserve this?”  In other words, pervious eras began with a clear sense of their own blameworthiness and God’s innocence.  Our age reverses this: we’re innocent, and God’s to blame.  He owes us an explanation, not we him.  C.S. Lewis says that this change in perspective is one of the most significant, and dangerous, theological shifts that’s ever occurred.

v      But I don’t think either question – who caused this, God or people? - is on the right track.  The book of Job tells us that suffering is a mystery, and no clear, cut-and-dried theological explanation exists for it that we can come up with in our lifetime.  Romans 8, however, gives as clear an answer as we can hope for: the whole creation is broken, frustrated, groaning, and waiting for one thing - the children of God to come into the fullness of our liberation.  In other words, earthquakes and the like are a by-product of a fallen world.  But what they do is sharpen our own anticipation for that day when God heals, through and through, what is now broken.  And the fastest way from here to there, as much as it depends on us, is for us to live deeply into the freedom of Christ.

v      In the meantime, Romans 8 says, we can rest in the sure knowledge that “nothing in creation” can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, earthquakes included.

v      And I’d point to Paul’s words when he himself was overwhelmed with grief.  “This has happened,” he says, “so that we would not rely on ourselves, but on God, who raises the dead” (2 Cor. 1:9).  The earthquake in

Peru has killed over 500 people and injured thousands more.  It is an overwhelming tragedy.  But in the face of it, and other tragedies, God has one profound lesson to teach us: Come to Me.  Look to Me.  Rely on Me. 

                        God does not always provide a supernatural cure for or rescue out of suffering.  But he is always ready to provide his divine presence in the midst of it.

 

Shalom

 

Mark