Tom’s Big Picture

For a long time I have struggled with the practical implications of God’s Will. What I mean is that I failed to see how God’s Will, while undeniable, could be any sort of real comfort. It’s a variation of the old “Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People” problem.

I remember one of the Oprahfied celebrity rabbis out on the West Coast producing a book of the same title. His conclusion was to simply deny God’s sovereignty, that God was not in control since things contrary to His Will took place. But this is no solution for a Christian. This particular rabbi, ate up with the Pharisees’ cultural legacy of supremacist, self-righteous thinking and feeling entitled to God’s blessing, simply morally rejected a sovereign God who offended his fallen sense of right and wrong. As a Christian, I know we are fallen and deserve death, all of us.

So my issue is not a moral rejection of God (who would I be to do that?), but rather a stoic unwillingness to take any comfort in God’s Will. Taking as a given we are fallen and deserve to die, we can lay no claim to anything better than that. Thus, any comfort from God’s Will is foolish, since any range of outcomes, ranging from death to happiness, would fit.

I remember from a few years ago a nice family in my area, with three or four beautiful kids, active in church, the husband a doctor earning an honest living helping people. One day the husband, about thirty years old, comes home and gets a pounding headache. Eventually, it’s so bad he calls 9-1-1. By the time they get him to the hospital, an aneurysm had rendered him a vegetable and within 48 hours he was dead. His children, the youngest an infant, will grow up without their natural father.

Now, I don’t blame God for this. He can do with us what He wishes. What I objected to is the idea that trusting in the will of God is any sort of real comfort. When people say this, I often think it an excuse for passiveness or inaction, as if doing something could prevent the Will of God from coming to pass. Or else, it’s a coping tool that my analytical mind rejected as practically baseless.

Yes, we can take comfort in the will of God, as long as we can take comfort in the worst possible things happening to us. Now some would say that even bad things, such as one’s children growing up fatherless, will work out for good according to God’s will. This view presupposes two things that aren’t really true, A) that bad things don’t really happen, they just look bad, and B) God will come behind and clean up bad things for Christians so that they aren’t really bad and are really a net gain in the long run.

I reject this view, as I believe bad things really do happen, and though the ordinary means of grace can work in spite of bad outcomes, this does not mean a bad outcome (e.g. one’s children being fatherless) is somehow romantically cast as an ideal or preferred outcome. But I understand why people believe this, and I try to be silent about it as much as I can, for I wish to deprive no one of comfort.

Some may see a contradiction in my views, in how I can acknowledge man’s fallen nature (and man’s deserved sentence of death), and yet then complain that God’s will is of no comfort. Actually, what I said was that God’s will was to me of little or no practical comfort.

So while I acknowledge I deserve nothing from God of my own accord, at the same time I want to avoid bad things happening to me and my family. And since I deserve nothing from God, I could not see how I could expect anything from Him and thus, how His will could be of any practical comfort. In the long run, of course, God will set everything aright. But in the long run, we’re also all dead. And I do have very practical concerns about this life in the meantime.

Yet I cannot deny that this view, that I once held, while logically sound is somewhat inconsistent with Scripture, where God is portrayed, for Christians, as a caring father who intervenes frequently on our behalf. It makes sense more from a Deist sense than a Christian one.

Then I made a critical connection with two other concepts related to belief and assurance.

1. Why Faith is Required to Believe: I have heard it said that there is enough evidence of Christianity to either believe or not believe. Unlike obviously false religions like Mormonism or Islam (that are internally contradictory and thus cannot be true), Christianity is plausible, yet there is no absolute proof. A minister explained this to me in this way: it is a mystery, but for some reason God wants us to have faith for salvation. If proof were absolute, say by sight or the physical, visible presence of Christ, then faith would not be required and God would not get what He requires from us. This is why while everyone will be a believer at the last judgment, this belief will not save anyone, as the window of opportunity to be saved by faith will have closed.

2. The Necessity of Vague Assurance: I often look at things in terms of their impact on human behavior, the unintended consequences of things. One good example is the welfare state. On the surface, helping poor people with money and food looks like a good thing, until you see the unintended consequences (though many conservative blacks, the population most impacted, doubt the unintended part as their people have become the electoral slaves of the Democratic Party): illegitimacy, criminality and a permanent dysfunctional underclass. Similarly, I see as untenable any system of theology that gives people absolute assurance of salvation. The Calvinist position, which amounts to a rigorous version of “once saved, always saved, if truly saved”, is tenable. The Church of Christ and Catholic position, that of losing salvation, while more Biblically problematic, is also tenable. What is not tenable is the position of irresponsible evangelicals who promise people assurance through the saying of a prayer, guaranteeing salvation based on one moment of belief. Such a position actually makes people less likely to be truly saved, by holding out the possibility of salvation independent of personal responsibility and behavior. Salvation is not an end in itself, and by making it so and making it guaranteed evangelicals stymie the real heavy lifting of sanctification.

So how are these related to the problem of taking practical comfort in the will of God?

Simple, as both are examples of complex feedback loops and the mechanics of human behavior. Let’s take my example, that of a young thirtysomething father. What if God indemnified all Christian fathers of young children against death or disability?

1. First of all, such a phenomenon would make the problem of #1 most acute. Little faith would then be required. If Christian fathers could jump off cliffs and be shot in the head and live, then that would be pretty solid physical proof of Christianity.

2. Christian fathers would do some stupid stuff playing around with their invincibility. Why not crash a motorcycle, or drive at 100 mph? This is a silly example, but this IS what would happen.

Just a few thought experiments like this and it becomes obvious that God cannot and will not be used as a vending machine. His intervention will always be undetectable and unpredictable. Else, fallen man would use any “insurance” with impunity. This is a concept economists call “moral hazard“:

Moral hazard is the prospect that a party insulated from risk may behave differently from the way it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk. Moral hazard arises because an individual or institution does not bear the full consequences of its actions, and therefore has a tendency to act less carefully than it otherwise would, leaving another party to bear some responsibility for the consequences of those actions. For example, an individual with insurance against automobile theft may be less vigilant about locking his car, because the negative consequences of automobile theft are (partially) borne by the insurance company.

We see this in the current housing crisis in most of the country. The feds gave an implicit guarantee on mortgages, so banks and other lenders got stupid in handing out loans. More loans means more money chasing the same number of houses, which means price inflation in housing. Price inflation invites speculation and creates a bubble. Moral hazard is summarized by the proverb, “No good deed goes unpunished”.

The longer I live, the more I realize how non-linear and unpredictable life is. I am convinced that if God wanted to, there are innumerable opportunities for Him to slip in and out, put His thumb on the scale, without anyone noticing. Our world is extraordinarily sensitive to initial conditions (i.e. it’s chaotic, sorry I couldn’t resist the math geek-out), probably by design!

The problem with this hypothesis is that it’s unprovable. It can only, logically(!), be taken on faith. What a coincidence. God has created a world where He can only be known and believed in by faith. Almost like it was meant to be that way, huh?

So how do I take comfort in God’s will? If you were hoping for something life-changingly inspirational, I’m sorry to disappoint.

All I’ve got is something typically Calvinist.

Our comfort in the will of God is as follows: whatever our situation, things could be, but for God probably would be, and but for God definitely should be worse. A lot worse. Working within the constraints of His holiness, man’s fallen nature and His long term plans, the world we live in is better than it would be otherwise thanks to His undetectable and unpredictable, and thus unexploitable, but frequent interventions.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Christianity & the Church. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.