The God of Real Life

012

Western civilization craves simple, clear answers to the ills of life, to disappointment, failure, suffering, sickness and death. We are horrified by what we can’t control—disasters, genocide, social disorder. We like our God to be straightforward and comprehensible, to guarantee our well-being with logical consistency.

God, of course, doesn’t conform to this simplistic view any more than life does, and as the millennium turns, many people have rejected this sanitized modern version of God—and rightly so. Neither the Bible nor the communal traditions of Judaism and Christianity support such a childish image of God.

Biblical authors speak of God diversely, complexly and concretely, without simplistic, vague stereotypes or abstractions. God both loves his people and rages at them. He fights fiercely against their enemies, whether the Pharaoh of the Exodus or the Roman Empire in the Book of Revelation. God rules his people authoritatively, and he judges them harshly when they fail to measure up. God’s anger as well as his compassion and love, his promises as well as his threats, accompany every step of the biblical story, beginning with Abraham’s arrival in the Land of Canaan, through the prophets’ struggles with Israel, to Jesus’ teaching of love. Our modern bias toward an easy-going, friendly God collapses before the robust, engaged and demanding God of the Bible. Like life itself, the God of the Bible has many sides. We experience both life and God ambiguously, as nurturing and threatening, through prosperity and insecurity, in health and sickness.

Just as we have begun to discard this more simplistic view of God and of life, so, too, we have, like Job, begun to question God. Theodicy, the intellectual inquiry into the question of God’s justice, has become one of the hottest theological topics and the study of the Book of Job is thriving.

How should we speak of God, given our modern skeptical cast of mind? Is God a silent, hidden, remote ruler who keeps Job at a distance? Or is he intimately caring? In the end, God answers Job’s complaints. Is that the key, that they engage in dialogue? Or is God’s self-revelation in his speeches (Job 38–41) the key? Is God a mighty, provident ruler or a limited deity struggling against the ever-present propensity toward chaos? Or, in the more radical view of some, has the author of Job parodied God as a blustering, ineffective windbag who gives no adequate answer to Job’s questions?

Christians who wrestle with the Book of Job and the problem of human suffering must turn for guidance to the sufferings, death and resurrection of Jesus. Unfortunately the temptation to a simplistic solution is great here as well: Jesus suffered so we must suffer. But often the reasons are not clear and may even seem sadistic: Do we suffer because of sin? But the innocent suffer too, as Job loudly complains. This is the problem of Job, and of Jesus’ death, too. Another answer: We suffer in this life, but will be rewarded in the next. This answer subtly drives God out of the gritty, daily struggle to live well as a human being under God. If God loves us and guides us, then God’s creative, gratuitous love for us must include all human experience, including sickness and death.

Underlying all conflicts, sufferings, questions and complaints is life itself. Each age and each culture has developed strategies for dealing with suffering and sorrow. But all share one fundamental experience and commitment: life.

God is the God of life. God created life in Genesis and transforms life in the apocalyptic future. In wisdom literature, the creator God nurtures life in the orderly world he has created. Through the liberation from Egypt in Exodus and the laws in the Pentateuch, God constructs and sustains life in Israel. In the prophets, God threatens life because of sin and promises life as a reward for renewed fidelity to the Law. In Jesus’ death and resurrection, Jesus and his followers confront the dangers of life and rejoice in a new, divinely given life. Paul struggles with his small, gentile assemblies of God to create a new way of life within the biblical tradition. As messy as Paul’s conflicts are with his many and diverse opponents, in the end he and his communities seek to live with God in and through Jesus Christ; they succeed because they keep on living, just as Israel has kept on living under God throughout the centuries.

The final goal of life is life. Various metaphors may be used to describe life—life with God in a rebuilt Jerusalem, according to Revelation 21–22; life in the world to come, as described Rabbinic literature; and life in heaven, according to traditional Christian literature—but they are all trying to describe the same thing. In the beginning only God was alive to tame chaos (Genesis 1:1–2); in God’s creation today, individuals, families and societies continue to live despite the harsh reality of suffering and death. The challenge posed to us by the Bible is this: Given God’s past creation and a present of human joy and misery, how are we to envision the future consummation of God’s divine plan?

Western civilization craves simple, clear answers to the ills of life, to disappointment, failure, suffering, sickness and death. We are horrified by what we can’t control—disasters, genocide, social disorder. We like our God to be straightforward and comprehensible, to guarantee our well-being with logical consistency. God, of course, doesn’t conform to this simplistic view any more than life does, and as the millennium turns, many people have rejected this sanitized modern version of God—and rightly so. Neither the Bible nor the communal traditions of Judaism and Christianity support such a childish image of God. Biblical authors speak of God […]