Sometimes, I don’t like any of the answers.

Michael Spencer July 28th, 2009

Sometimes, I don't like any of the answers.

Let’s take the problem of suffering. My friend Glenda recently had a serious bleed-out in her brain. It looked for a while like she wasn’t going to make it. After a coma, two surgeries and some miraculous responses to treatment, she’s at a rehab center dealing with a relatively small amount of residual consequences.

This weekend at church, we were rejoicing in Glenda’s recovery. One person kept saying “Thank God for intervening.”

God intervenes. So…..where was God before he intervened? Are we deists? Is the universe running like a clock, and God only shows up to repair some of the occasional breakdowns? For reasons only he understands? In answer to ____ (number) of prayers?

I really don’t like that answer.

Now I can think of some of my reformed friends hearing this story and they would say that God was sovereign over all aspects of Glenda’s crisis. He was as much sovereign over the bleed-out as the recovery. They would say that God had this event preplanned from all of eternity past and what we witnessed was a demonstration of his glorious sovereignty.

God commanded that stroke and God commanded her recovery.

Which would, in their view, have been true if all of us prayed or if none of us prayed, if Glenda lived or died, if Glenda were walking or in a coma. Whatever happened, it’s God’s will, and we should rejoice in such a God.

In it’s higher forms, this kind of theology will stand in the midst of tragedy and rejoice in exactly the same way as if it were standing in the presence of an instantaneous and complete healing. In fact, there seems to be little reason to call anything a “miracle,” because it’s all the preordained ways of God.

I see the appeal. It just doesn’t work for me. When I believe this, prayer is drained of its significance. (“I’m now praying, which is another foreordained aspect of God’s sovereignty….”) The meaning of the event itself is confused. Is it better for Glenda to be in a coma or healthy? Despite what I might think, God might want Glenda in a coma, and I need to praise him for that.

Sorry, I’m not that good.

Some of my spiritual warfare oriented friends would say Glenda’s suffering was an attack of the devil. In the Gospels, the demonic realm often affects health and physical life. Jesus casts out demons and restores what the devil has attacked. Jesus heals people and shows his power over the devil.

Medicine and doctors are fine, but what we need here is specific prayer against Satan and his agents who are at work destroying life and health out of hatred for God.

Ok. But what about the many people who are prayed over in this way who don’t get better? Or the many who aren’t prayed for and do get better?
What’s up there? Do I really believe that demons cause strokes? Despite what medical science tells us? Am I prepared to reject science as really being a distraction to the reality of spiritual warfare?

And then there is the atheist or naturalist, who seems to have the most common sense approach. Blood vessels get old. They bleed out.
Doctors have science and medicine. They stop it. End of story. Let yourself off of the hook.

While this has the advantage of simplicity, it also takes God, meaning and prayer out of the picture. For all the problems that these theological explanations create, they also answer some big questions of meaning and purpose. Hope and purpose, God and prayer are as important to many humans as blood or medicine. Removing them changes who we are in ways we abhor.

Is Glenda no more significant than a dog? Does no one hear and answer any prayer? Any time? Is Glenda’s recovery just a lucky role of the dice? Is there no place for God in this picture?

I don’t like that answer either.

As a person of faith, I have to admit I don’t have the answers. That’s part of the “narrow path” we walk. Too much God. Too little God. God too far away or too close. No God. Satan and God.

Jesus loved sick people. He healed them. He didn’t explain everything in a modern way (and seldom in an ancient way.) He doesn’t ask me to understand prayer, but to pray. He doesn’t ask me to understand God, but to trust and worship him. The depths of my experience with God are ridiculable by all kinds of measurements, and irrefutable by my own experience.

I am who I am by the grace of God, and I choose to not understand by trusting God rather than to claim to understand everything without him.

Theology has its limits. So does atheism. And so do I. But life still comes at us. Things still happen and the person we have become and are becoming must make a choice.

My choice is to follow Jesus into and through those many questions. I am not gloating over anyone because “I have the answers.” I am saying that for me, Jesus is the answer I am trusting, even when the questions get very, very deep.

Somehow, I think all these answers probably play into “the” answer. But like Job, there are limits to what you are going to know and comprehend. But the point of faith is simple. Trust and go forward. Without arrogance, and with love. But trust and go forward. Be useful and joyful in this world, because Jesus makes such things possible.

Michael Spencer, aka "The Internet Monk" is the host of Internet Monk Radio, a weekly podcast you can find at internetmonk.com or on iTunes. He's currently working on his first book, a fresh approach to Christianity for those who have left the church.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 at 9:12 am and is filed under Answers, Atheism, Christianity, Church, Deism, Demons, Faith, Grace, InternetMonk.com, Jesus, Jesus Shaped Spirituality, Michael Spencer, Pain, Prayer, Questions, Reformed Theology, Religion and Spirituality, Science, Spiritual Warefare, Suffering, The Devil, The Internet Monk, The Sovereignty of God, Theology, Trust. 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.