Is This Judgment?

"God is judging Japan" said the woman in a brief interview on the evening news.  She was a Japanese national of Shinto faith.  My first feeling was relief that it was not an American speaking or representing some expression of Christianity.  But just as quickly it struck me: Hers is the only conclusion that performance-based world views - whether Shinto, Muslim or "Churchianity" - can come to when trying to come to grips with the unfolding national crisis in Japan.  The Gospel is very, very different.

For performance-based world views - you could use the word "religion" here if you like - bad things happen to bad people, and good things happen to us when we are good.  Call it karma.  Call it "the Lord's blessing on obedience."  Call it submission.  Call it what you will, this perspective encourages us to expect that if we are good or do the prescribed good things, mostly good things will come in turn to us.  It is the motivational structure deeply embedded in nearly all the religious systems known on the planet.  It drives parenting, and performance reviews at work and  eulogies at funerals.  It is the default setting of the human heart.  It reflexively guides how we make sense of events in our world.

A real problem arises though, when "bad things happen to good people."  Something seems out of kilter with the universe.  Church people fall back on the truth that all are sinners, so no one is really "good" in the absolute sense of the word.  But when the guy down the street looses his wife in a car accident while she is driving him home from the Dr's appointment where he got the cancer diagnosis, we feel like something is terribly wrong and out of balance.  The karma is way out of whack.

It hardly seems better that the secular viewpoint looks at the world and can only say that everything is no more than a fantastically long series of random accidents that just happened to produce you and me through mutations and natural selection.  The strong eat the weak.  The sick die.  Boulders roll down mountains and kill people.  Accept it, there is no meaning to the universe.

How different the Gospel of Grace is when compared to each of these explanations of life and suffering.  First, the Gospel declares there is a moral order to the universe that reflects the character of a good and loving Creator.  Because of that, plant good seeds and you can usually expect good fruit - whether that is apples or attitudes.

But the Gospel goes on to declare that there is also something radically wrong with the world in which we live.  The goodness in this world has been broken.  Bad people can have good things happen to them.  Good people can have bad things happen to them.  Situation by situation can be very difficult to sort out just who is which and why things happened the way they did and from what causes.

Occasionally, there is a direct, clear, even causal link between a behavior or attitude and the bad things that happen in our life.  Smoke two packs a day and I'm betting you have lung cancer in 30 years.  Go through life in self-absorbed pride expecting people to revolve around you and I can explain why you have no close friends.

Very often though, there is no such clear connection between our behaviors and the circumstances of our life.  And so we are wrong to state or even insinuate that there is one.  Jesus speaks to this very clearly in Luke 13:4,  "Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem?"

So the world, though created "good," is now broken and often we will be unable to explain what caused terrible things like the earthquake and tsunami to happen to particular people.  That is a more nuanced view than performance-based religion or secularism, but it is hardly hopeful.

Here is the hope:  The God Who created the world good, has done everything it takes - at the cost of His entering the human condition and giving His life - to free this world from it's brokenness and one day to recreate it's wholeness and justice.

Do I wish that this would be complete before my mother had Parkinson's or before the earthquake in Japan, or for that matter the one last year in Haiti?  Of course.  I may not have an answer to every "why," or the timing that I would want, but I have a hope in the midst of real tragedy.  The Gospel of Grace that is changing my heart in real ways, gives me a hope that empowers me to move beyond fear, despair or mere anger, and live with humility, compassion and service.