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Many grieve after the Aurora shooting
massacre, and wonder "Where was God?" |
About a week and a half ago, CNN posted a question on Twitter. They asked "Where was God in Aurora?" They were referring to the recent shooting massacre at the showing of Batman: The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado. Within 24 hours, over 10,000 responses were submitted, and in a wide variety of theological conviction. I am not going to give you a sampling of what was said. If you want to read the whole article, you can find it here. I simply want to give my own evangelical response to this age-old question posed in modern terms.
The question asked was, "Where was God in the Aurora massacre?" And many good answers were given:
"He was in the hearts of the men jumping in front of others to take the bullet instead,"
"God was in complete control,"
or a little bit longer,
"We as a country have been telling God to go away. We told him to get off our currency, get out of our schools, get out of our Pledge of Allegiance, take your Ten Commandments out of our courthouses, get those Bibles out of hotels and no graduation ceremonies in our churches. How can we expect God to give us his blessing and his protection if we demand that he leave us alone?"
I have a short answer, and and a long answer. My short answer is this: He was in the exact same spot that He was 2000 years ago when He watched His son Jesus get brutally tortured, sentenced, and murdered by irreverent soldiers and religious leaders alike. He was right there sovereignly in charge of all things, and deeply grieving over the evil.
But my long answer answers the question that I think CNN was really asking. I think they were really asking, "If God is omni-present (i.e. everywhere), good enough to hate evil, and powerful enough to stop it, why did He allow the horrendous evil to ever happen?" And this answer is a bit complicated, so buckle up.
First, God did not create evil, nor does he approve of evil (Habakkuk 1:13). He is intrinsically opposed to evil. That is simply his nature as a holy God. So where did evil come from? It came from the free choice of man to reject God way back in Genesis. So wait... How could God be sovereign over all, yet give man a free choice? Picture this, you have two daughters. One of them is your direct descendant, and one is a bio-chemically engineered robot who is programmed to do what you want. So you program the robot daughter to say "DADDY!!!" and hug you every hour. But your biological daughter does that every day when you arrive home from work. Which one do you feel loved by? Obviously, you real daughter. Why? Because she freely chose to elevate you in her affections. If God simply made everyone perfect and unable to make mistakes, we would not be able to love Him because real love requires a free will to exist. So God made us with the free choice to love, but with that free choice to love God also comes the free choice to reject Him. And that is what happened on July 20th in Aurora, Colorado. Rejection of God and his standards was made gruesomely evident. So God is not the author of evil.
Second, God is present in the world restraining evil (2 Thessalonians 2:7). In other words, the evil that is present in this world could be much, much worse were God not alive and active on planet earth. But the question remains, if God hates evil, why does he not stop it with His infinite power? Answer: if he did, man would no longer have the free choice to choose to love God. Therefore, evil remains.
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Jesus bore the full, infinite wrath of God
on the cross, so we wouldn't have to! |
However, all is not lost. There is a solution! There is a cure for the rampant evil in this world. But this only cure comes in individual doses. And it is found in Jesus Christ. As I mentioned earlier, God watched as His son Jesus was crucified by sinfully "religious" men. Why? To save men from the consequence of their evil. Believe it or not, every person on earth is sinful enough to deserve the just and infinite wrath of a holy, offended God. According to Romans 3:23 and Romans 6:23, every person to ever lived is infected with a poison called sin, and this poison leads every man right down the path to eternal death, aka hell. But God offers everyone the free gift of salvation. And the basis of that gift is what Jesus did on the cross 2000 years ago, so we wouldn't have to (even though we could never pay the infinite price for our sin). When he died, he bore all of God's wrath against every sin of man for all time. He paid the price! You don't have to. All you have to do is believe in Jesus and repent of your sin. If you do this, your sinful record will be erased, and the spotless, clean record of Jesus will be applied to you. So when God sees you, he no longer sees a sinner deserving hell, but a forgiven child of His who receives His crazy, amazing, undeserved, unhindered, unbound, infinite love.
God also promises hope for a world-wide cure to evil. This will come when Jesus returns to earth and takes every person who has believed in Him and repented of their sin to sinless paradise with Him. On that day, He will justly and mercilessly crush all evil, and restore creation to sinless harmony. This is why I urge all to repent and believe while there is still time. There isn't much time left. I am excited for Him to come back, and I hope you can join me in saying, "Hallelujah! Lord, Jesus come quickly!" If you don't know whether or not you can say this, I strongly invite you to contact me at brantcole13@gmail.com. I would love to talk to you. Or you can call 1-800-NEED-HIM. This is not a decision you can afford to put off. If you are confident in the hope of eternal life, this, my friend, is a time for much rejoicing!
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| Why do we flock to watch senseless evil? |
And just one more thought: if we are so eager to endorse, and buy tickets for, and make posters of, and plaster logos of, and stand in ginormous lines to watch senseless evil for hours in a movie like The Dark Knight Rises, why are we so horrified when it happens in real life for just a few minutes? Interact with me on this one in the comments below!
