LIFE IN A BROKEN WORLD

It's been a very long time since I posted anything here, and so probably nobody is looking in on my blog any more. Anyway, with the events of the last week in Haiti, I thought I'd enter the fray. Here's my article for the January 15 edition of the Sterling Journal-Advocate, our daily newspaper here in Sterling, Colorado. May it get you thinking.

We’ve all seen bits and pieces of the horrifying tragedy that has taken place in Haiti. Already the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, this island nation is reeling under a blow from which it may never fully recover. The depths of heartbreak and hardship are beyond the capacity of most to even imagine.

Just before the earthquake happened, I began reading a new book by Randy Alcorn, called “If God Is Good: Faith in the Midst of Suffering and Evil.” Alcorn does a spectacular job of wrestling with the truly difficult questions about what C. S. Lewis called “the problem of pain.” He dedicates a whole section to issues surrounding the occurrence of so-called “natural disasters,” including Hurricane Katrina and the December 2004 Asian tsunami. He doesn’t evade the knotty subjects, but faces them head-on with a firm conviction that God’s Word is true.

I strongly recommend the book to you, because Alcorn tackles the problems most Christian authors simply gloss over. As we think about what happened Tuesday afternoon in Haiti, let me lift up some of what Alcorn wrote.

“Many people blame God for natural disasters. ‘How could he allow this?’ they ask. But what if the Architect and Builder crafted a beautiful and perfect home for Earth’s inhabitants, who despite his warnings carelessly cracked its foundation, punched holes in the walls, and trashed the house? Why blame the builder when the occupants took a sledgehammer to their own home?”

Alcorn isn’t saying that the Haitian earthquake was the specific fault of some certain group of people, but rather that when God turned the earth over to the human race so that we could “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28), the planet was still in perfect condition. There were no earthquakes in Eden.

So . . . what happened?

Alcorn explains: “God placed a curse on the earth due to Adam’s sin (see Genesis 3:17). That curse extends to everything in the natural world and makes it harder for people to live productively. Paul says that ‘the creation was subjected to frustration’ by God’s curse, until that day when ‘the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay’ (Romans 8:20-21). The next verse says, ‘The whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth.’ Earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis reflect the frustration, bondage and decay of an earth groaning under sin’s curse.”

We live in a broken world. In a broken world, unexplainable tragedies take place. Babies die. Planes crash. Earthquakes strike. And when the world’s brokenness inflicts enough pain, thinking people start asking reasonable questions. As we seek answers to our profound uncertainties, it is important to remember who broke the world we live in. It wasn’t God. For thousands of years, He has called to humanity to follow His plans and submit to His order for creation. And since Eden, we have defied Him.

No, it wasn’t God who broke the world.

It was us.