What kind of God do you love?

by Sue Ingleby

Yesterday I heard the news that my friend Joanna had had her first baby. I saw her a week previously when she was enormous and looking forward to the birth. Her son James was born in the middle of the night, three days late, fat, healthy and strong. Triumphant and exhausted, the parents laughed with joy at their screaming son, and thanked God for him.

But their joy was incomplete. Two weeks before the birth, Joanna reported a suspicious symptom, and the doctors investigated. The results were due the same day baby James arrived, and in the morning, after a couple of hours fitful sleep, they were told she had a malignant growth that required immediate treatment; otherwise it would spread to other organs and kill her within the year. At 3.30am, Joanna had experienced one of the highest peaks of a woman’s life – giving birth to her first child, and a few hours later, she was told that a deadly tumour lurked in her body.

Does God give and take away?

My first reaction was one of anger; “This cannot be right! I don’t believe that God gives a new baby with one hand and cancer with the other. How can this be? This is evil!”

A debate had been going on in my mind for several months. A popular song in our church is “Blessed be the name of the Lord”, speaking about the need for us to love and worship God in the good times and the bad. It is based on Job 1:21; “The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away: may the name of the LORD be praised.” It’s a good song, and we sing it cheerfully.  But is it true? Does God give and take away? Does he give good things with one hand, watch us enjoying them, and then swipe them away with the other just to teach us to do without them? Is he capricious? Does he create a special new baby, perfect, beautiful and vulnerable and then kill the mother? What possible reason would he have for doing that?

One way of looking at this verse is to remember that the book of Job is an ancient poem. Though it contains many profound and inspiring insights, it is speaking out of a limited knowledge of God. As the Christian revelation unfolded over the centuries, we get a fuller view of God’s character, culminating in life and teaching of Jesus, who was the exact image of God. Jesus showed us the fatherliness of God who gives good things to his children for their blessing and unlike the capricious gods of the ancient pagan peoples, does not take them away as a punishment.

What does God think about death?

When a premature death occurs some Christians are fond of quoting the verse; “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints" (Psalm 116:15). This can give the impression that God is pleased when his people die, and even plans their early deaths for his own purposes. It can imply that God needs them more than their loved ones do, and has the right to take them to heaven at any time. But does this interpretation of the verse stand up to scrutiny?  

First of all the context of the psalm is of being saved from death. The psalmist says in verse 3-4, “Death wrapped its ropes around me; the terrors of the grave overtook me. I saw only trouble and sorrow. Then I called on the name of the Lord: ‘Please, LORD, save me!’” God answers his cry, saves him from death and the psalmist replies, “Let my soul be at rest again, for the LORD has been good to me (verse 7).

This version brings out the correct meaning: “The Lord’s loved ones are precious to him: it grieves him when they die.”

In this context, the word “precious” means that it is costly, both for us and for God. People suffering and dying was never part of his original plan, and it causes him pain. Remember that Jesus wept at the death of his good friend Lazarus. Was he feeling the pain and loss of his close friends Mary and Martha? Was he expressing his own grief? Or was he also broken by the fact of death on a global scale, destroying all that is beautiful and promising: weeping for the desolation, the finality of loss, the ugliness, the end of human hopes and dreams?

Bringing Lazarus back from death was one of the most powerful works that Jesus did, and tells us something important about the heart of God towards us.  

God is Sovereign. He is in control

When a child or a young adult dies, many Christians say, “Don’t worry, God is sovereign: He is in control. He knows what he is doing.” What do we mean by this?  Do we mean that God is in control because he devised a particular cancer and has planned every detail of its destructive course? When we glibly say, “He knows what he is doing “shouldn’t we ask “What is He doing? Is he slowly killing this person for a reason, and what might the reason be?”

Is this what we mean by God’s sovereignty? None of us can question his power, but what about his intentions? If God is a Sovereign who is vindictive and cruel, there is no comfort for us. He becomes a Sovereign whom we obey out of fear, but whom we cannot love.

Have we got the wrong picture of God?

This distorted view of the character of God has had a profound impact on many people inside and outside the church. Many sincere Christians have laboured to love and worship a god who is harsh and vindictive, and wonder why it seems so difficult. And many brilliant and outstanding people have rejected the gospel of the cruel god, and with good reason. Kingsley Amis, a life-long agnostic, expressed his feelings about it in this bitter poem:

To a Baby Born without Limbs

(The narrator is God)

This is just to show you who’s boss round here.

It’ll keep you on your toes, so to speak,

Make you put your best foot forward, so to speak.

And give you something to turn your hand to, so to speak.

You can face up to it like a man,

Or snivvle and blubber like a baby

That’s up to you. Nothing to do with me.

If you take it in the right spirit,

You can have a bloody marvellous life,

With the great rewards courage brings,

And the beauty of accepting your LOT.

And think how much good it’ll do your Mum and Dad,

And your Grans and Gramps and the rest of the shower,

To be stopped being complacent.

If not God then what and who?

If we reject this caricature of God and say he doesn’t plan these things, then we need to ask why there is so much destruction in human life.  The Bible is clear that as human we are flawed and selfish; this is what has created havoc since the beginning of time. Sin has brought sickness, destruction and death and we must face up to our part in that. Even innocent babies are subject to that destruction; it runs through humanity like a poison, and none of us can escape its effects. 

Jesus the King

But the good news is that in the gospels we see something else going on. Here we see Jesus striking out against sickness and death – healing people, curing the insane, rebuking fevers, restoring sight to the blind and life to the dead. In many cases, it is emphasised that he restored people to their families, children to their parents, husbands to their wives, the outcast to their communities. We also see him attacking evil systems that oppressed ordinary people, and deprived them of the blessings of a normal life. He hated evil, he challenged and dealt with it in individual lives, setting people free to be healthy and fulfilled. His desire was for them to be well, and to learn to know him and to live according to the rules of the new Kingdom.

Jesus showed us that God is the loving father who gives good things to his children and has great and good purposes for the whole human race.

Bringing good out of bad

Another argument sometimes put forward is that God sends sickness and death to a child or an adult to teach them something.  

It is clear from the gospels that this is not what God intends, but because of his tender love and creative power he can and will use trouble to bring good things out of it. These good things may be a sense of his nearness, a deepening of loving relationships, even people coming to Christ for the first time. But we can never say that illness, pain and deformity are good in any sense.

“Clearly, God often uses a time of illness to deepen character…it is not illness, but man’s right reaction to illness which brings the good.”  (L. Weatherhead. “Wounded spirits” Hodder 1962.)

Our own mortality

We must however face up to the fact of our mortality.  Death will come to all of us in the end. We need to face death with courage and faith, and prepare ourselves for it, whether we are young or old.

But there is some fighting to do. Like Jesus who hated the destructive power of sickness, sin and death and fought against it, so we should take up our weapons against it in his name and through his power.

Most importantly, let us make sure we are worshipping and loving the Real God as revealed through Christ, and not a malevolent being who wills our destruction. 

Sue Ingleby is the Personal Development Tutor at Redcliffe College, Gloucester, encouraging the personal and spiritual development of all students. She is a trained counsellor and is also involved with mission agencies in discussing areas of mental health and pastoral counselling for people working abroad.'