We've all heard the question, some of us may have asked it..."If there is a God, why does He allow such horrible things to happen?" That is a really good question, one that has gotten much debate over the centuries and will probably continue to do so. No one answer seems to satisfy everyone. SO, what if we just take God out of the equation?! What if we say, what if I say, there is no God?! (And no I am not recanting my beliefs!)
So, now that we have decided there is no God, are all of the really horrible things still happening? Are people still starving? Are natural disasters still devastating? Are people still acting out of the selfishness of their own hearts and cheating their neighbors, killing their brothers, lying in office or under oath? Since there is no God has that changed our history at all? Did the Holocaust not happen? Was slavery a really bad dream? Did we not drop nuclear warheads on Japan? Was 9/11 a really bad joke? If there is no God and has never been one, then WHO is to blame for all of that? If there is no God then we can't blame Him for anything, and if we can't blame Him, then who else is there? If the person who has become history's number one scapegoat really isn't there, then we only have ourselves to blame...right?!
The gracious thing about God (and yes we are back to the fact that He does IN FACT exist) we can blame Him for everything. We can say it's His fault that we lost our house, that our child was taken from us, that the rivers flooded, or the ground shook, or whatever else we blame Him for, and He will take it. We can point our finger all we want and all it will do is break His heart (no big deal). But why is it that we feel like He is good enough to blame when things go really wrong, good enough to call on when we make a really big mess, but unnecessary the rest of the time? It's like we've deemed Him the world's worst secretary because He can't seem to keep under control the things that we, as CEO's of our own lives, should never have to worry about BUT He is also the world's best maid, cleaning up messes so big and thick that we aren't even sure what kind of floor lies beneath it, forget asking about the color!
God is so much better, so much bigger, and so much more creative that we don't need Him to be a scapegoat or a maid. You can continue to blame Him, it's not His fault. Even the natural disasters, if they were to be manipulated by God (you would first have to acknowledge His existence) would no longer be natural!
You want to blame someone, blame us, blame yourself. It's never easy taking responsibility for something, but at least when it's your fault you can change it. Christ said He came to change the world, but what He changed first were the hearts of the people that He encountered on a daily basis. The mission He left those hearts to carry out was do the same thing, to change the hearts of those they encountered every day. I wasn't alive two thousand years ago, but with all the technological advancements we have today I would say that it is faster and more efficient to inflict harm on someone now than it was then and you don't even have to be on the same continent. Christ walked the earth two thousand years ago and were still waiting on the world to change. So, maybe we stop blaming God, maybe we start blaming ourselves, and maybe we change the way we do things!
Novel idea don't you think?!
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