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If God is loving and all-powerful, we ask, why did He allow terrorists to kill 3000 people on Sept. 11? More personally, we might ask why He allowed my wife or my child or my parent to die. It is a difficult question that we struggle to answer. But it is the wrong question based on a false assumption. The assumption is that we are good people to whom something evil has inexplicably happened. That is a false way of looking at the question. September 11 wasn’t something that God did or some force out there somewhere did. It was something we human beings did to each other.
A month or so after Sept. 11, radio commentator Michael Campbell argued that government should lower taxes and leave more money with taxpayers because “most people are basically good” and will use the money well. Leaving the economic argument aside, can we accept Campbell’s assumption, shared by many people, that human beings are basically good?
It is easy to think of the terrorists as evil people far different from you and me. Yet, how then did they manage to live among us for years and be accepted by their neighbours as normal people? The answer is that they were normal people just like us. Their anger and hatred led them to murder thousands of people, and that is a terrible thing – but how different was their motive from the attitudes we display every day? Jesus Christ, in the Christian holy book, the Bible, said, “It was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment” (Matthew 5:21-22). The Bible further says, “Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer” (1 John 3:15). The terrorists acted out of the same anger and hatred that we do when we do hurtful things to other human beings, and if we have not gone as far as they have yet, the best we can say is that we differ from them only in degree, but not in nature.
Our false assumption is that we are good people and that God wasn’t good enough to stop bad things from happening to us. We have it backwards. God is good, perfectly and absolutely good, but we are evil. We do bad things to each other, and God, who has allowed us the freedom to choose our own actions, grieves that the people that He created choose to do such evil things to each other.
God is not our servant whose conduct we have a right to judge. Rather, we are God’s servants, and God is our judge. God is infinite, wise and immortal. He repeatedly intervenes in human history to teach us to be loving, kind and good, and He judges us for the evil things we do. Could God have prevented Sept. 11? Sure. Could God stop the evil in the world? Certainly – but only by killing the people who do evil or by taking away their free will. And the people who do evil are all of us. It is only by the mercy of God that all of us are not destroyed immediately as the 3000 were on Sept. 11.
© Joel Kaufmann |
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