(By Mike Steinsland) – So today in class I had a really interesting, and altogether, boggling experience (I use the word boggling because, like the game, I’m currently in a mess). You see, there’s a man in my class from the Congo, and we all had to make presentations today, and his really spoke to me. While he was growing up in the Congo he lived through two civil wars, and had a lot that he wouldn’t talk about. He would just say that he saw very terrible things. My initial reaction was, “But it’s ok, because now you are safe, God has rescued you.” It soon happened, as it usually does, that I saw that that was a foolish thing for me to think. He met with several Christian refugees from the Congo, and asked them this question, “Do you think God loves the people of the Congo?” This of course led him to the question, “Do you think God is fair?” This is where it gets a little hard for me to stomach. They all said yes to both questions, and their reason why was the same as mine: God brought them out of the Congo, away from all that violence. The problem with such an answer is that it neglects the first question. How can God love the Congo, when only a few of its people get to escape? What about everyone else?
I don’t admit to becoming emotionally involved in things much, but this was it. I felt stirred, and I didn’t know what to think about it anymore. I kept asking myself over and over again, “How can God be fair in the eyes of the people still in the Congo, who where killed for no reason? How can I even ask this man about it when his family has been killed inside of a church?” Luckily for me, my teacher is a very smart man of amazing faith and was able to help. He said we were asking the wrong question. It’s a good question to ask, but it’s not the one we really want the answer for. The question we are attempting to ask is, “Is God responsible?” Is God responsible for what happened in the Congo, or what is happening in Uganda? Is God responsible for families becoming homeless? These are the questions we are trying to ask, but instead of asking if He is responsible, we sort of take the easy way out.
The point is that we shouldn’t ask if God is fair because, just like in the story of Adam and Eve, we had a choice, and God knew what was going to happen and still let us make that choice. You could say God’s full time job is correcting the wrongs that people do. If we could look at all of existence, and I’m going to try to not seem like a know-it-all, we would understand how fully awful and treacherous the human race truly is. Through Jesus Christ our sins were forgiven though, which makes us clean right? Well, we sort of have to try to stay clean. I mean, you don’t take a shower and then go play in a mud-pit, or maybe you do. The fact is no matter how clean you were before playing in that mud-pit you are filthy afterward and need to be cleaned again. That’s what a relationship with God is like, except in the process we help others get clean too, hopefully.
So here’s my closing statement. Though, don’t let this stop you from thinking about these questions, because they are beautiful ways of seeing how great God is. God knows how things are going to end, and it frustrates us and so we complain. I’m beginning to realize the question isn’t a matter of whether God is fair, and how deep the question of God being responsible really goes. If God is not responsible, which I hope by now you know he isn’t, then the question isn’t about God being responsible at all, it’s shaking a finger, an awfully big one, at the entire human race. We are responsible, we are responsible because God gave us a choice and right now that choice is to help the homeless or not to, to help the people of the Congo or not, to stop the genocide in Darfur or not. I’m not an incredibly intelligent person, but I understand to a limited extent what purpose this gives me as a Christian and what the actions of loving my neighbor should look like. Am I stopping injustice, or am I letting the sin of this world corrupt me into apathy? Am I responsible? By listening to God and obeying his word, we can make an impact and change the world for his glory.