Exodus 33:13
He made known His ways to Moses, His acts to the sons of Israel.
Psalm 103:7
We are caught between seeing the Acts of God or the things people tell us are the Acts of God and knowing the Ways of God, or the principles which explain the way and the why God works. We hold to the popular belief that God blesses those who do good and punishes those who do evil. We pray for answers which are in accord with that belief and the principles or ways of God which we believe we understand. I told you it is not God’s fault that tragedy strikes this world. It is purely the result of us living in this fallen world. We still trust that God will be fair to all; that He will bless those who keep the Commandments and He will punish those who do evil in proportion to the evil they have done. Christians expect God will answer their prayers according to what they ask. The basic principles still hold, don’t they?
We rejoice when we hear of miracles of God’s protection that reinforce to us that God is alive and well and on His throne, looking after the children of God and while bringing swift justice to the evil doers. We see the odd miraculous response from God but for every miracle we see, we have more unanswered questions. Miracles from God are real and they do happen. We hear of miracles happening in other places around the world. We delight to hear of miracles even if they are not evident in our neck of the woods. At least it leaves us with the hope that it might one day happen to us and ours, especially when we have asked for that. Many listeners voiced to me, during the years I told What-on-Earth-is-God-Doing stories on Radio Rhema, that their hope was hanging on by a thread. The only miracles they heard to reinforce their hope was second or third hand in some far off land rather than seen first hand. Far more often it was the reverse they encountered at home: i.e. disasters close at hand or in the lives of people they knew. We all have those anti-faith stories and which shroud our souls in doubt making it harder to believe for anything concrete to bolster our belief that life on this earth works according to God’s plan as we believe it should.
I will share some stories below with you, much as I did during those years when I told Rhema Stories. [I still have those Rhema stories on my computer and will post them on this website in the not-too-distant-future.]
For now I will introduce you to my friends. Who are my friends? They are the writers of some books I have gathered to assist me in this venture I have undertaken. I have looked for books on the subject of Pain and Praise, Solace and Suffering and Grief and Glory. I acknowledge my short comings and so looked for other resources to help, but of a particular kind. I wanted to find books on this subject which honestly handled the tension between each of these pairings. I also looked for people who had been through the mill on this issue themselves. Not people who were speaking theoretically but those who had personally experienced pain, suffering and grief. I know in myself it was not until I had experienced moments where God didn’t make sense and when the pain of unanswered prayer cut deep that my faith became more real. It is only in those moments that reality bites and we can fashion a faith that is real and God then uses the pain we encounter on the journey to perfect us.
Why? Because in this fallen world life ain’t easy.
The friends (books) I have on my list and have read in the last few weeks are:
- When God Doesn’t Make Sense by Dr James Dobson
- God is Just Not Fair by Jennifer Rothschild
- When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Harold S Kushner
- God, Why? Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People? by Chas Stevenson
- Where Is God When It Hurts? By Phillip Yancey
- God on Mute: Engaging the Silence of Unanswered Prayer by Pete Greig
Let’s examine the concept of the Acts of God a little more with some short stories.
In 1870, the community of Swan Quarter, North Carolina hoped to build a church on a certain plot of land, but the land owner declined their offer to purchase the property and the church was built on another site. Amazingly soon after a hurricane struck and the church was plucked from its foundations and was moved to the exact location where the community had originally hoped to build. [Source: a story I remembered and checked on the Internet for the details]
A church in Dallas some years ago which was destroyed in a tornado when the funnel cloud dropped down from a roiling sky and selected this church. Once the church had been razed to the ground so that nothing was left standing, the tornado funnel lifted again without touching anything else in the surrounding area. It was like the tornado selected that specific church for demolition. [James Dobson]
An eleven-year-old boy of my acquaintance was given a routine eye examination at school and found to be just near sighted enough to require glasses. No one was terribly surprised at the news. His parents both wear glasses, as does his older sister. But for some reason, the boy was deeply upset at the prospect, and would not tell anyone why. Finally, one night as his mother was putting him to bed, the story came out. A week before the eye examination, the boy and two older friends were looking through a pile of trash that a neighbour had set out for collection, and found a copy of the magazine Playboy. With a sense that they were doing something naughty, they spent several minutes looking at the pictures of unclothed women. When, a few days later, the boy failed the eye test at school and was found to need glasses, he jumped to the conclusion that God had begun the process of punishing him with blindness for looking at those pictures. [Harold Kushner]
One January, I had to officiate at two funerals on successive days for two elderly women in my community. Both had died “full of years,” as the Bible would say; both succumbed to the normal wearing out of the body after a long and full life. Their homes happened to be near each other, so I paid condolence calls on the two families on the same afternoon. At the first home, the son of the deceased woman said to me, “If only I had sent my mother to Florida and gotten her out of this cold and snow, she would be alive today. It’s my fault that she died.” At the second home, the son of the other deceased woman said, “If only I hadn’t insisted on my mother’s going to Florida, she would be alive today. That long airplane ride, the abrupt change of climate, was more than she could take. It’s my fault that she’s dead.” [Harold Kushner]
Jennifer Rothschild, whom I introduced you to in the last Nugget, Two Opposing Views, had occasion to hear the testimony of Marolyn who had experienced a miraculous healing and had her eyesight restored to her in a theatre in Tallahassee. Marolyn’s experience with blindness was very similar to that of Jennifer’s who confessed in her book, subsequently faced the reality of Marolyn’s eyes being healed while hers still were not. “It was so hard to admit I loved God but was disappointed in his ways. I resisted feeling the depths of my disillusionment about how God could heal Marolyn and me but healed Marolyn and not me. . . I struggled with how God’s ways are perfect – but not so perfect for me.” [Jennifer Rothschild]
In January 2005, a huge mudslide demolished 15 homes and killed 10 people in the coastal town of La Conchita, California. The world watched their TV screens in horror as one traumatized father, Jimmie Wallet, described how he went out to buy ice-cream for his wife and three kids and returned to find his home buried under 30 feet of mud, sand and debris. Jimmie fell to his knees in the rain, screaming the names of his children and digging in a frenzy with his bare hands and his credit card. 36 hours later that the lifeless bodies of Jimmie’s three children and his wife, Michelle, were pulled from the mud. Ten-year-old Hannah, six-year-old Raven and little Paloma appeared to have been sitting together on a couch, no doubt waiting for ice cream, when the house was crushed. [Pete Greig – Page 81-82, with an interesting end on page 83 which is not included here. Get Pete’s book]
How would you classify each of these stories? An act of God or evidence of God’s ways or something else entirely and neither God’s acts nor His ways?
I have already introduced you to the six families I am writing this series for:
- Team Bethany Wake (who this week celebrated the 10 year Memorial of Bethany’s passing to glory as a result of a brain tumour)
- Team Miah (Jeremiah Glassie) (who graduated to the Life of the Age to Come on December 17th 2020)
- Team Phil Carr (a Wycliffe Bible Translator who has been medivaced back to NZ and is improving but needs more prayer)
- Team Kate (Kate Diprose) (who is making slow gradual progress and has been returned to Starship from Melbourne)
- Team Gavin (Gavin Harris) (who is making good progress but would still value your prayers)
- Team Honour (Sergeant) (who is doing well but still needs prayer cover)
- To which I have since added another family (but will not share any details without their permission)
I will share some of the stories of these seven people as I am permitted and as seems appropriate. To those I will add feature stories for which I have permission and which I will make the focus of coming Nuggets. Their stories are too precious and important to miss.
Unanswered prayer is only a problem for those of us who truly believe. For cynics, it is simply a reassurance that they were right all along.
Pete Greig
We humans have an ability to withstand enormous hardship and suffering, including the likelihood of our own death, as long as we can make sense of the circumstances.
James Dobson
It is more important to know what God says about Himself than for us to come up with clever intellectual reasons as to why things happened as they did.
Jennifer Rothschild
Like Moses, take the time to stop and ask God to show you His ways.
Ian Vail
[Holy Saturday*] is the no-man’s land between questions and answers, prayer and miracles. It’s where we wait – with a peculiar mixture of faith and despair – whenever God is silent or life doesn’t sense.
Pete Greig – * Pete has very creatively structured his book around the days of Easter:- Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday
This is the first time I have added quotes to a Nugget in same way I do with the Bible Gems. It just seemed appropriate this time.