Where I live, this winter has been brutally cold. We’ve had record snowfalls, record low temperatures, and about 5 months of winter weather. Put simply, it’s been a hard, tough slog through a winter that doesn’t seem like it will ever end.
At church, we recently completed a series exploring the character of God. A couple of the weeks in the series were spent answering tough questions like “If God is so good, then why is there so much in the world that doesn’t look like Jesus” and “Why do bad things happen to good people?” We even looked at the story of Job, where it looks like Job is a pawn in some cosmic game of chess. Where was God in the midst of all the suffering?
I won’t lie and say that I got all of the answers I was looking for out of the series that was taught at church. Being honest, answering all of the tough questions people have about the problem of evil in a post-cross world wasn’t really the point of the series anyway. In the end, one of the main points of the series was that we learned a lot about who God is because of what Jesus did in his time on earth, and that it isn’t the greatest idea to base our assumptions about who God is on stories that were early in the process of God’s redeeming work on behalf of His people. God had to slowly show His people a better way, and there is a pattern that you see where God was gradually “raising the bar” as more and more time passed.
I get all that, but something that always bothered me is that we live in a world where we have to deal with truly evil things happening all around us. It’s not always easy to see God working in our circumstances, and there are genuinely things out there that hurt us. Where is God in the midst of this present evil?
Interestingly, God provided me with what I believe is at least a partial answer to this question when I walked out of church on a Sunday morning. When I walked out, the sun was shining so bright that I thought the temperature had to finally be above 30 degrees for the first time in what seemed like forever. After the winter we’d had so far, it felt wonderful! It was so warm (I thought)!
However, when I looked at the temperature gauge in the car, it read 12 degrees. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I would have sworn up and down that it was at least 20 degrees warmer than that!
That’s when it hit me – the strength of the light made all of the difference. It made me feel warm when it clearly was not. Perhaps dealing with the problem of evil in the world has some parallels to what I felt that day.
Many times in the Gospels, Jesus calls himself “the light” – perhaps if the “light” within us is bright enough, the troubles of this world don’t seem quite so bad. In other words, when evil should be consuming us, the “light” keeps us from feeling like it is.
I am realizing that I am far perfect in living in the light – in fact, many days my life feels like kind of a mess. What I need to realize is this is a sign that I’m not letting enough “light” in, and that if I will just let Jesus do what he promises us He will do, things will definitely feel a lot different in a positive way. Sure, things are still going to happen that are completely out of line with God’s plan for His creation, but carrying a powerful “light” is the best possible way to stand up to it all.