Pop’s Page

Last Sunday night was the Festival of Lessons and Carols at our church. Those in charge of the event graciously asked me to participate by being the reader of Lesson 8. That lesson contains the following passage (Matt. 2:16-18)

When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

“A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning.
Rachel weeping for her children
And refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more.

One can’t help be struck by the fact that here, in the middle of the joyous Christmas story—the story that God so loved the world—is a tragedy of such magnitude that it can only be described as “Rachel…refusing to be comforted.” Concurrently with the story of salvation and “peace on earth, good will to men,” we are immediately confronted with the problem of evil. That problem, as it is often put by theologians and philosophers is: in a universe created by a good and holy and all powerful God, how is it that evil exists?

As I’ve pondered that question in this context a few thoughts have occurred that I now share with you, the faithful readers of this blog.

First, I’m struck with how the Gospel writers don’t try to cover up what might seem to be embarrassing issues apparently inconsistent with the message they are trying to convey. Since this so-called “slaughter of the innocents” seems to be in contradiction to the protection we might expect a loving God to provide for these two-year-olds, Matthew might have felt strong peer pressure simply to conveniently leave it out. Not only does Matthew not omit this tragic fact about the events after the birth of Jesus, but he even points out that they were predicted by the prophet Jeremiah. This frankness of the human writers of the Scripture has always seemed to me to make a case for the authenticity of the Bible.

Next, my thoughts turn to the two-year-olds that were slaughtered by Herod’s troops. Now it turns out that I know not just a few two-year-olds. One of them, Lydia Dishman by name, is very dear to me. She has incredibly deep blue eyes, and when she sees her Grandpop she often comes running to me with a smile and her little arms outstretched to be picked up. She will even kiss me on occasion—and I’m told that I’m one of the few that she gives such favors. Oh yes, she does have her “terrible twos” moments, but even those suggest a personality that when mature will also be very precious to me. So any hint that my two-year-old granddaughter would be put at risk by someone like a Herod makes me shudder. I would do everything in my power to prevent her life from being taken, including giving my own. Any grandfather or father would. Of how Herod was able to overcome these natural feelings and actions of the grandfathers and fathers of the two-year-olds that he slaughtered I have no idea. But when the deed was done I can very much relate to the idea of “refusing to be comforted.” This evil which Herod instigated in his lust for power was evil indeed.

So, of course, this leads to the question: why did our sovereign God allow such evil to take place at the birth into humanity of the Son of God? Surely, an all powerful God could have prevented this.

I have asked this question many times over the last three years as I struggled to understand the illness and death of my precious Susan. Although the loss of a child is unimaginable to me, I believe I can understand it better than most because I have lost someone just as dear. Like Rachel weeping for her children, I have wept and mourned for the loss of my life companion, the person closest to me in all the earth.

I’m sure that as life went on for those mothers and fathers of the slaughtered boys, they would often think or say: “how tragic that my son is not here to see his sister born, or his older brother get married…” and so on. I find myself doing this constantly. “How sorry I am that Susan will not be here to see the third grandchild born.” Or, “how sad it is that she will not see her granddaughters grow up, and be there for them, and see them get married some day with their own children.” And on and on. There is this feeling in the minds of survivors like me that the dead person is to be felt sorry for because she/he is missing out on the wonderful things connected with our life on earth.

But as I start to think more deeply about this, I realize that I am looking through a glass dimly. In my mind, secretly, is the idea that heaven is really a pretty boring place. Just a bunch of angels and saints standing around worshipping hour after hour after hour. It would be like a church service with no end. No chance to have a good Sunday afternoon dinner and then watch the Cowboys game (not that the last few have been worth watching, but that’s another story). When I put these secret thoughts into writing their starkness reminds me that I don’t have a clue about what heaven is like, or what the lives of those who have gone there are about. When the Apostle Paul said that heaven is above all that we can ask or think, he meant exactly that. Think of the most wonderful Sunday you’ve ever had, including a powerful worship experience and yes, maybe even a delicious noon meal followed by a Cowboy game (that they actually won). Multiply that by ten thousand times ten thousand and that’s what those in heaven are experiencing not just on one occasion, but continually.

I remember the first time that Susan and I saw the Grand Canyon together. We walked along the path from the parking lot, and then suddenly there it was. It literally took our breath away. It was truly awe-inspiring. Think of having that experience moment after moment observing sights in heaven ten thousand times ten thousand more excellent than the Canyon.

I say all this to help me put in context the total picture of what was happening on that fateful day when the innocents were slaughtered. Was evil present that day? Very much so. But that wasn’t all that was in operation. Counteracting that evil was a more powerful grace and goodness. Those innocent boys experienced no doubt a very brief moment of fright and pain as they were put to death. Yet, in an instant they were ushered before the very throne of God to a new life in heaven that is indeed beyond what they or we could ask or think.

None of the above answers the classic problem of evil as a matter of logic. But it does show how our sovereign and mysterious God—whose ways are not our ways—solves the problem of evil as a practical manner in the lives of those who by faith cling to him. Yes, I regret and mourn the fact that Susan will not be here with me as I watch my favorite two-year-old grow up and develop into the wonderful person she is destined to become. Yet I think somehow she is not decoupled from these events, not now and certainly not into eternity. The question of how our experience of time on earth and the timelessness of heaven link up is beyond even an Einstein. As Paul puts it, “For I consider the sufferings of this present time not worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed to us.” (Rom 8:18)

I recently read a work by Cornelius Hunter entitled “Darwin’s God.” Hunter’s thesis is that Darwinism with its reliance strictly on chance and necessity (physical laws) is really a religious theory, not a scientific one. Darwin and his followers were so repulsed by “the problem of evil” that they wanted to distance God from His creation so as not to make Him responsible for the apparent evil that embeds nature “red in tooth and claw” and including us. Taken to its logical conclusion—as done today by the mandarins of science—that distance becomes infinite: there is no need for a “god” at all. Thus, it is not surprising that 95% of the members of the elite US Academy of Sciences consider their religion to be that of atheism. Yet the ongoing findings of science—particularly in the biochemical realm—show that at the microscopic level the cell is made up of incredible irreducibly complex molecular machines that have very high information content. The likelihood that these machines are the product of chance and necessity are infinitesimally small. Any engineer will tell you that the more complex the machine, the more intelligent is the designer who conceived it. That designer is the one who imparted the information about the construction of the machine. So we have the paradox that as science produces data that strongly suggests an “Intelligent Designer” of life on earth, the scientists themselves become steadily more atheistic. Hunter’s argument is that this is because of their religious presupposition that “a rational God wouldn’t do it this way,” which in effect is an extension of the revulsion at the problem of evil combined with a fallen Adam’s desire to have absolute autonomy.

Yet the passage above itself illustrates a paradox that Christians understand as revealing the very character of the Intelligent Designer of the universe. Even as the earthly fathers of Bethlehem mourned the loss of their sons to the killers dispatched by Herod, our Heavenly Father mourned the loss of His only Son to the taunts and persecutions of fallen humanity. That loss began on the first Christmas day as the Baby Jesus was born to a low income family forced to take refuge in a barn. (“A rational God wouldn’t have done it that way….”) And that loss was completed when the adult Jesus cried out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” On that first Christmas as the Father received the first martyrs of the Christian age into His heavenly courts, He sent out His own Son from heaven to do battle with the prince of this world who ultimately controlled and controls all the Herods of human history.

Thus, the choice for each of us is stark. Do we accept the Intelligent Designer of the universe as the God Who so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son to be our true King and Savior? Or do we reject that in favor of a purely materialistic and purposeless universe that has no regard for us, for our loved ones, nor for the innocents at Bethlehem? By the latter notion Herod was only doing what Darwin said he would do: surviving by being the fittest—by eliminating any opposition to his earthly kingship.

I suggest that this is not just an intellectual choice. The ancient Scriptures are quite clear. If we reject the latter choice for the former, that Intelligent Designer—the Lord of All—is not content to let us live in private isolation. Rather, He talks about an invasion. An invasion of our very soul with His Spirit. As Paul puts it:

Those who are in the flesh are cannot please God. You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to Him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. (Rom. 8:8-10)