There is a place for clinical discussions of theodicy (the theological ‘problem of evil’): if evil exists, how can God be both good and sovereign at the same time? But with thirty deaths in the wake of last week’s tornado in Mississippi, and six people murdered, three of them school children at Covenant School, including the nine-year-old daughter of the senior pastor at Covenant PCA, in Nashville, the question ceases to be an academic one. Our faith travels along life’s highway well enough, until days like this bring it to a sudden, painful stop, slammed into the brick wall of unanswerable grief.
How shall we think about these awful losses? How can we grieve and still hope in the face of monstrous evil? How will service, prayer, compassion be sustained, when the faith that animates them is shaken? Answering those questions is like climbing a sheer cliff face. It’s not easy! Let me suggest three handholds to which our faith can cling as we make the ascent.
Handhold #1: The Impassability of God
Impassability is the truth that God does not suffer. Christians sometimes imagine that only a suffering God can offer comfort to sufferers. As a pastor, it has been my experience that often that assumption is made by those who are not really suffering themselves. They want to feel some solidarity with those who do, however, and they like to think of God feeling the same way. But God-as-fellow-sufferer doesn’t really help those who actually live with suffering, whether it’s chronic illness, or, as in the case of the residents of Rolling Fork in Mississippi, or our brothers and sisters at Covenant PCA in Nashville, sudden, terrible, loss. What faith needs when unspeakable evil stalks the corridors of an elementary school isn’t a Cosmic Victim, unable to do anything about it while suffering along with us. What a suffering faith needs is a God who reigns over evil, untouched by evil, even when that truth creates unresolvable questions. Only if God is impassible can God be sovereign, and only if He is an impassible sovereign can he be a perfect Cosmic Judge. As much as we need comfort, we also long for justice; for a final, satisfactory righting of wrongs. A God who is swept away by the same unforeseen nightmare as the rest of us can’t deliver justice. But blessed be God, the “Judge of all the earth will do right” (Genesis 18:25).
Handhold #2: Good Friday and Easter Sunday
Alongside divine impassability, we need to cling to the Cross and the Empty Tomb, because, in Jesus, the impassable God has taken into union with Himself passable human nature. In Jesus, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity has plumbed the depths of unutterable human suffering and pain. He wept and grieved. He was a man of sorrows. He bled, and He died. He has sanctified our tears with His own. He has made holy the graves of all three covenant children, snatched away by bullets. Thus, He is able to “sympathize with us in our weaknesses,” or as an older translation expresses it, He is “touched with the feeling of our infirmities” (Hebrews 4:15).
And at the Cross, Jesus too hurled His unanswered “why?” to the heavens. Amidst God-forsakenness, He too sang a song of lamentation. We may never comprehend the plan of God when tornadoes leave nothing but rubble where once a town stood, and bullets end the lives of children and staff at a school. But the Cross authorizes our protest, our lament, our “why?”
But we mustn’t stop there. We mustn’t remain at Golgotha. We must go on to the Garden Tomb. Have we ever needed Easter Sunday more than in these last few days? Because Jesus rose, death is not the last word. Evil does not have the last word. Our questions remain, of course, but in such days as these, faith clings more tenaciously than ever to the handhold of our Lord’s resurrection, and through tears, if need be, we say with Paul, “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” (1 Cor. 15:54-55).
Handhold #3: New Creation Is Coming
1 Corinthians 15:19 reminds us that, “If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.” Our Christianity will crumble under the weight of human suffering and tragedy if we follow Jesus only in the expectation of an easier life here and now. While sin remains, and evil exists, and death intrudes, we must never forget that this world is not our home. We are bound for a New Creation. Jesus’ resurrection was the first fruit of that coming reality. He rose to bring us to a new world, a place where death will give way to life. There, at last, glorified Christians will look back over the record of their darkest days — at their sin and sorrow and suffering — and see in them all, with ever increasing understanding and great joy, what they could only glimpse through tears here and now. They will see the perfect victory of Jesus Christ. One day we shall all come to take our seats at the wedding supper of the Lamb. On that day “everything sad will come untrue” (Tolkien). That is the Christian hope. Let us make our way through this Vale of Tears as pilgrims just passing through, until at last, “the day breaks and the shadows flee away” (Song of Solomon 2:17).