September 17, 2001

FAITH GOES THROUGH A TRIAL

In a time of shared-trauma, like the experience Americans have gone through during the past week, believers find their belief-system more difficult at the very moment when it is more essential.

We believe in a God who knows everything and controls everything. He could have stopped this tragedy, but he didn't. Even though we're afraid to admit it, mixed in with our other feelings is a tendency to blame him, to be angry with him. How could he let this happen?

We stifle this emotion because of our great need for him. How can we angrily push away the only one who can comfort us and give us hope? So we turn to him in private prayer and corporate worship. People who have seldom seemed to acknowledge him suddenly turn to him for solace.

So, at the very time when faith in God seems most difficult, faith in him is most essential. We see this in some other episodes along life's way. Some of us have rejoiced at the birth of a baby and thanked God for its safe arrival, only to come to the same God for solace at the baby's funeral after only a few months of life. Others have rejoiced in God's blessing as we said "I do" with unbounded optimism, and then later have fallen into God's arms when our "partner-for-life" has left us for another.

The Old Testament prophets were familiar with this faith tension. In contrast with the peoples around them, they believed there was only one true God, the creator and sustainer of heaven and earth. They faced the awesome implications of this, and they affirmed that God was in control of the negative experiences in their lives as well as the positive:
      "I am he; there is not other god besides me. I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal ....
            (Deuteronomy 32:39)
      "Your hurt is incurable, your wound is grievous . . . for I have dealt you the blow of the enemy, the punishment of a merciless foe, because your guilt is great . . . . I have done these things to you. But all who devour you shall be devoured, and all who make prey on you I will make prey. For I will restore health to you, and your wounds I will heal, says the Lord."
            (Jeremiah 30:12-17)
      "Come, let us return to the Lord; for it is he who has torn, and he will heal us; he has struck down, and he will bind us up."
            (Hosea 6:1)

How can believers live with such a schizophrenic faith? The answer is found only on the cross. It is there that God's wounding and God's healing come together:
      "He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made him whole, and by his bruises we are healed."
            (Isaiah 53:5)

Our familiar hymn asks, "Did e'er such love and sorrow meet?"

The fact that our Christian belief-system has seemed difficult for us at the same moment we find it to be essential forces us to think more deeply than we customarily do. Our usual neat-as-a-pin, tied-up-in-a-package way of expressing Christianity is a caricature of Christian faith. We don't have all the answers, as this crisis has demonstrated. But we are driven back to the central truth of our faith—that all the tensions between good and evil, between order and disorder, between wounding and healing are resolved in God's Son hanging on the cross. We don't have all the answers, but he is The Answer. "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son."

–Pastor George Van Alstine