Click here for Part 1 of this article.
Click here for Part 2 of this article.
Click here for Part 3 of this article.
It’s time to face the music. It’s time to get busy and struggle with our faith. It’s time to search for what God is trying to tell us in allowing so much tragic suffering and death. It’s time to consider what God may be asking us to do about it.
First, we must simply admit:
7. We will never fully understand God’s actions
In Part 1 I said that I can’t answer all of your questions about why God allowed particular people—some of them people you loved and cared about—to die of cancer, or in an automobile accident, or from a hurricane or flood. That’s because I don’t know why God allowed these things to happen.
Only God’s understanding is infinite. Our understanding is small and limited. Often, we simply don’t have enough information to understand why God allowed an innocent person to die, and their loved ones to suffer.
Sometimes the best we can do is to trust that God actually does love everyone involved, and that in the eternal scheme of things there is some reason for what happened, even if it looks completely senseless to us.
Yes, if circumstances had been different, maybe things could have turned out better. However, God has to take into account all of the factors that affect our lives as they unfold. Those factors include the inexorable workings of a material universe that doesn’t care whether we puny humans live or die. They also include all of the human factors of love and hate, enlightenment and insanity, compassion and sadism, that make human life and human community so complex and tangled.
We humans see the particular circumstances that surround particular tragic events. God sees all of the circumstances, past, present, and future, near and far, that influence those events.
We see only the immediate aftermath of deaths due to accidents, cancer, or heart disease—and of natural disasters that claim thousands of lives. God sees the eternal consequences of those events.
Where is God in this?
As the years pass and we look back on the events of our lives from a longer perspective, we may gradually come to see and understand more of the factors that God took into consideration in providing for or permitting events to unfold as they did.
In case it’s not clear by now, God never causes evil things to happen. Here’s how it works:
- God provides for good things to happen to us.
- God permits evil things to happen to us.
And as I said earlier, God permits evil things to happen to us only if it was necessary for our freedom and our salvation.
Also, if God does allow something evil to happen, then there must be some good that can come from it. Mind you, that doesn’t mean it was good that it happened. It doesn’t even necessarily mean that something good will come from it. Only that something good can come from it.
Whether or not something good does come from it is up to us.
The greatest good that can come from human tragedies is that it may cause those of us who see and experience them to grow in compassion for others who are suffering. When tragedy prompts us to get busy and do something for those who need our help and care, it is part of our growth toward angelhood. (See, for example, “Ihor Lakatosh’s Story: How Healing the Body Helps the Soul.”)
When we make the decision to respond with care and compassion, we give those who are suffering the gift of knowing that even in their darkest times, someone truly cares about them. That’s what human life is all about.
This brings us to our final point:
8. Whatever happens, we can choose to grow spiritually from the experience
I can’t tell you why the tragedies you grieve happened. Only God knows. We can only hope that it will become clearer in time.
I also can’t say anything simple that will make it all better. You must still face these severe temptations and tests of your faith.
What I can say is that painful trials and temptations are a necessary part of our spiritual development.
But more than that, when we are going through these harrowing tests of faith, we are most fully engaged with our true humanity. In fact, we are forming our humanity. To adapt the famous line of Thomas Paine, “These are the times that try men’s souls.”
Under ordinary circumstances and on ordinary days, we simply go about our business, doing what we have to do to in order to survive in this world. Yes, these ordinary days and small moments do build up the sinew of our lives, and gradually mold us into emotionally and spiritually mature adults. Not even the smallest moment of our life is wasted.
But consider what is going on when we are facing the ultimate questions of life!
Consider what is happening when we are questioning the very foundations of our faith!
Consider what we are doing when we face these heart-wrenching spiritual crises!
Thumbs up or thumbs down?
At these moments, we are like Caesar at the Colosseum, watching the gladiators fight their battles. When the battle has ended and the fate of the combatants hangs in the balance, everyone in the stadium looks to Caesar. Will his thumb point up toward life? Or will it point down toward death?
That is the ultimate power we have over our own life when we face these agonizing battles of spiritual trial and temptation.
Our life on earth is a spiritual Colosseum where we fight the life-or-death battles in our soul that will determine our eternal future. It is not designed to be easy. It is designed to bring us face to face with the ultimate questions of life.
We are not meant to avoid or run away from these deep and harrowing questions. If we are to be truly human, and become angels, then we must enter the fray. We must face the foes of evil, pain, suffering, uncertainty, anxiety, and all the other “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”
When we are facing these spiritual battles we are at our most human because that is when we make the ultimate choices of who and what we will be. Whichever way we point our thumb—up, down, or sideways—that is the direction our life will go. In these times of anguished trial and temptation, we determine the meaning of all the other, ordinary daily moments of our lives.
That’s why I can’t answer your questions for you. You will have to struggle to find answers for yourself. I do hope, though, that the ideas I have offered here will give you some clearer light and a better perspective from which to face the battle, and move from darkness and anxiety into the light and peace of greater understanding.
To achieve greater understanding, we must be willing to let go of our own ideas about how God ought to run the universe so that we can gradually come to understand how and why God does run the universe.
What does God have in mind for you in these events?
When we are willing to let our old ideas and our old self die, and let God give us a new self and new meaning for our life, we will also grow in our ability to help and comfort friends and family who are suffering from tragedy and loss.
Perhaps that is why God has allowed these things to happen in your life.
Perhaps you are experiencing these particular tragedies because God is asking you to grow in compassion for those who are suffering from their losses.
Perhaps God is challenging you to think more deeply about the meaning of your life and your relationships.
Perhaps God sees that through facing the painful spiritual battles that these tragedies have triggered in your soul, you may become a comfort and a blessing to friends and family who are struggling and in pain because of them.
Perhaps through the seemingly random and senseless illness and death of those you care about, you can grow in love, understanding, and compassion.
If so, you will be moving closer to the eternal future of enlightenment and love for your fellow human beings that God has had in mind for you from the moment you were born.
This four-part article is a response to three spiritual conundrums submitted by readers.
For further reading:
- If God is Love, Why all the Pain and Suffering?
- How does God Govern Humankind? Is God Actively Involved in our Lives?
- What is the Source of Human Fragility, Sickness, and Disease?
- Strip Search Prank Calls, Domestic Violence: Evil Loves Deception
- Is There Really a Hell? What is it Like?
- Who Are the Angels and How Do They Live?
- What Happens To Us When We Die?
- Heaven, Regeneration, and the Meaning of Life on Earth
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Lee Woofenden is an ordained minister, writer, editor, translator, and teacher. He enjoys taking spiritual insights from the Bible and the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and putting them into plain English as guides for everyday life.
Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life 
Kudos, Lee, on a very masterfully presented piece of work. I especially liked this last segment!
Interestingly, this last piece has many parallels to some writings I have been penning for either my own blog or perhaps self-publication, in my own search for understanding and inner growth as I try to deal with my current life’s circumstances.
Though my writings may not reflect the same points of view having all the same spiritual references as your piece does, it is eerily similar in overtone. It is a bit ironic how closely they travel as they unravel in their nature to present perspective.
Hi Richard,
Thank you. I’d say it was no coincidence that you came across our blog.
You’re probably right. I must have been subconsciously searching for someone just like you to offer the right kind of support with the proper perspective and presentation.
Very nicely written Lee. Recent Malaysian airline & Gaza tragedies makes one question the strength in the positive energy.One feels everything around is breaking apart and one feels ashamed to be human. Dalai Lama said somewhere that there is more goodness in the world than evil but as a society we focus more on the negative than the positive. I try my best to keep my faith in positive energy alive and thriving but it is sad to see negative forces win again and again. or is it that they have already lost as they decided to embrace negativity…
Hi Baldeep,
Thanks for your thoughts. It certainly is a battle for light to overcome darkness both within us and in our world. I do like the thought that for evil, winning is losing. The more it operates, the more it brings about its own demise.
Unfortunately, since the existence of evil is a necessity in our human existence here on Earth, it can never really bring about its own demise regardless of its persistent efforts to influence or destroy anything and everything it can
As you’ve said, all evil cannot be extinguished from our lives without extinguishing us in the process, no? Therefore, sadly, no such ultimate demise could ever occur over any period of time.
Hi Richard,
Yes, good points. I was speaking more poetically than literally.
Evil tends to be self-limiting, in that there is no coherence and solidarity in it. Sooner or later, instead of attacking the good as it desires to do, it turns on itself and becomes “a house divided against itself,” to use Jesus’ words (Matthew 12:25).
For example, a government whose officials are motivated by concern for the welfare of its people can work together harmoniously to achieve constructive goals for the country it governs.
However, a government whose officials are motivated by a desire for money and power will be riven by infighting and backstabbing as each tries to gain more money and power than the others in government. So that government’s doom is inevitable. It has happened to empire after empire throughout history–and is still happening today in our modern empires.
So although I agree with you that evil does not go away in an ultimate sense, but persists to eternity, it exists in a state of continual self-limiting internal strife and revolution, causing particular evil people and groups to rise up to power and then inevitably fall to weakness, subjection to others, and (in this world) death under the weight of their own evil.
This is what takes place over time to evil individuals, groups, and nations here on earth, and this is what takes place in hell to eternity.
About evil being extinguished from our lives:
This can happen through a process of spiritual growth and rebirth during our lifetime here on earth.
It is true that we will never rid ourselves of 100% of our evil impulses. There will always be shadows in our life. Even the highest angels are not perfectly pure.
However, what matters most is what Swedenborg calls our “ruling love” or “primary love.” Whatever we put first in our life–whether loving God, our fellow human beings, money, or power–that will determine the overall nature of our life.
If, through a process of spiritual rebirth here on earth, we put God and our fellow human beings first in our loves and priorities, then the evil parts of ourselves will be pushed more and more to the side, and our life will be one of love, understanding, and service to God and our fellow human beings despite our remaining flaws.
Excellent points, Lee, and a perfect conclusion to this series.
Hi Walt,
Thank you! And thanks for your good feedback and questions.
There’s a Biblical problem with the idea that there were always intended to be carnivores and predators. Genesis 1:29 says that God gave creatures every green herb for food. It doesn’t say anything about meat, or animal flesh. Not only that, but the verse means that every green plant was edible, whereas paleontologists say that there were always poisonous plants.
It wasn’t until after either the fall or the flood that animals became carnivores.
It wasn’t until Genesis 9:3 that people were allowed to eat meat.
Genesis 3:16 also suggests that women weren’t always intended to give birth to children in pain. Childbirth was originally supposed to be painless. Why is it that apes, our closest relatives, have no difficulty or pain giving birth, yet human females do? Why didn’t natural selection eliminate women with narrow birth canals? Another way to avoid childbirth pain is for natural selection to favor babies born of smaller size and weight to fit more easily through the birth canal.
Hi World Questioner,
These are all indications that these early chapters in Genesis are not meant to be taken literally, and that they are not about the creation of the physical world. According to Swedenborg, the original authors never intended them to be taken literally the way fundamentalists and creationists do today. They created these stories to tell about spiritual things, and used earthly imagery as symbols of those spiritual things. In Secrets of Heaven #66, Swedenborg explains that there are four modes of writing in the Bible:
Here is his explanation of the first one:
The first eleven chapters of the Bible were written in this mode. They are not meant to be taken literally at all. Only at the end of chapter 11 and the beginning of chapter 12, where Abraham’s story begins, does it switch over to the narrative mode, which is intended to tell actual history. Really, much of that is not real history either, but rather a story that gives meaning to the Jewish people and their culture.
The Bible is simply not a history book, and it’s not a scientific textbook. It is a book that is intended to lead and guide us toward heaven. Reading it as a textbook of science or history is completely missing the point, and lowering it to the level of a merely human book. Really, it is disrespecting the Word of God.
As far as the difficulty in childbirth, this has to do with the rapid growth of the human brain, leading to a much larger head proportional to the body, and the trade-off between a large birth canal and efficiency in walking and working for women. Having a wide birth canal requires the femur to be at a greater lateral angle, which is less efficient for walking and working than having a straighter femur. Men have an efficiency advantage in running, walking, and other activities because of their narrower hips and less angled femurs.
Genesis 3:16 is not about how women came to have birth canals that can barely fit an infant’s head. Rather, it uses the known difficulty in childbirth to provide an “origin story” that is really about spiritual and psychological things, not about physical things.
Eve did not suddenly get a narrower birth canal after God said told her that he would greatly increase her pain in childbirth. It’s not even about having babies. It’s about greater difficulty in bearing spiritual offspring, “fruit,” which are new developments of love and understanding. Because Eve had chosen to distrust God’s instructions, and trust her own senses instead, it would now be harder for her to have these new spiritual births of love and understanding. Plus, Eve was not an individual human being, but a representative of an entire culture.
Once again, attempting to read Genesis as if it were a scientific textbook is completely missing the point. And it’s bound to lead to all sorts of faulty ideas about how this physical world came about—exactly the faulty ideas that the creationists are cramming their books and websites full of. It’s all a bunch of hooey, because it’s all completely outside the arena of what the Bible is about.
You didn’t comment on what I said about Genesis 1:29 or Genesis 9:3. Also, don’t you think that, while maybe far from ideal, that it would be better for men to be bipedal women to be quadrupedal than vice-versa? Quadrupedal women is more acceptable than quadrupedal men, right? It’s more acceptable for women to walk on all fours like apes and monkeys than for men to, right? Is bipedalism more important for men than for women? I’d be surprised if bipedalism benefits women more than men. I’d be surprised if quadrupedalism would be more problematic for women than for men. Also, I promise, I am honest, if Genesis chapters 1:11 had a much lower WCI count, had much less wayyiqtol conjugation, I would take it as allegory, poetry, and myth. Regardless of what Jesus says in the New Testament like “as in the days of Noah.” If it was written in a mythical style like the Epic of Gilgamesh and Enuma Elish. I take it literally BECAUSE of its writing style. BECAUSE of the WCI count and the wayyiqtol conjugation.
Hi World Questioner,
What you said about Genesis 1:29 and 9:3 falls under my general response that this is the wrong way to read the Bible. The Bible isn’t a manual of paleontology. It’s not about the diet of early humans. Those early chapters in Genesis, especially, are about the early spiritual story of the earliest spiritually aware humans. Reading it as if it gives us information about early human diets is a mistake right out the gate. It’s the same trap that the fundamentalists and creationists fall into.
And . . . women are humans, not animals. Women going on all-fours is no more “acceptable” than men going on all-fours. If you really want to find a good wife in this life, I would suggest that you adjust your attitude about women. What decent woman is going to want you if you think that women are almost like apes and monkeys? Women evolved an upright posture right alongside men, because women are human females, just as men are human males. Sheesh!
And if I am honest, I will say that you have fallen prey to materialistic creationist talking points because your mind tends toward materialism and literalism.
You’ll have to make up your own mind whether you want to continue on that materialist track, but I would advise against it. If you do, you’ll fall prey to all the fallacy and falsity that the fundamentalists and creationists are continuously spouting. You won’t even be able to read and understand what the Bible says, just as they can’t, because you will be making the same mistake that Eve did, eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil because it looked good and pleasant to her eyes. She followed her physical senses instead of listening to the word of God coming from a higher and deeper place within. If you do that too, then like Eve, your “childbirth” will become difficult and painful, meaning you will have a hard time coming up with anything good and true because your mind will be clouded by the darkness of materialism.
People who can think only materialistically search and search and search for “evidence” that their materialism is correct. It’s not much different from atheists searching for reasons that the Bible is wrong because many of its literal statements are demonstrably false. Creationists and atheists are two sides of the same coin when it comes to the way they read the Bible. In fact, there is a direct line from the materialism of the fundamentalists to the atheism of the atheists. One leads to the other.
The grammatical structure of the early chapters of Genesis is irrelevant to whether it is meant to be taken literally or spiritually. Read Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.” It is written as if it were an ordinary poem about walking in the woods and deciding which path to take at a fork in the path. But nobody thinks it’s about walking in the woods.
I didn’t say that women ARE almost like apes and monkeys. I just wondered WHAT IF women walked on all fours.
Why did God even give Genesis 1:29 and 9:3 when there were always intended to be carnivores and predators? Why did God say in those verses that creatures were originally intended to be vegetarian? Is that even necessary? What if those verses were not in the Bible?
And what if Genesis chapters 1-11 were written with a much lower WCI (waw consecutive imperfect) count? I promise you, I am honest, if Genesis 1-11 had a much lower WCI count, I would not take it literally, regardless of what Jesus says in the New Testament like “as in the days of Noah.” If it wasn’t for the Wayyiqtol conjugation
Hi World Questioner,
The fact that you even raised the idea of women going on all fours like apes and monkeys shows that your mind was moving in that direction.
And the answer to your question about Genesis 1:29 and 9:3 is the same as I gave before: God gives those verses because they are about our spiritual condition. They may draw on earthly themes, but those themes are simply vehicles for deeper meaning.
As long as you keep trying to make it literal, you’re bound to get tangled up in this sort of confusion. Really, I can’t help you there. Go talk to Ken Ham. He’s got glib (and fallacious) answers to all these questions. But if you want real answers, stop trying to take it all literally.
And I’m sure you’re sincere in thinking that if it were written differently, you would take it spiritually and not literally. But that is simply not the case. Why do you take it literally, but I take it spiritually? The difference is not in the Hebrew words and idioms used, which are the same for both of us. The difference is in our minds, yours wanting to make everything literal and material, and mine wanting to see the deeper spiritual meanings in the text.
If you are basing your understanding of the Bible on WCI count, then you have seriously missed the point of the Bible. That’s like watching a baseball game and basing your entire understanding of the game of baseball on the number of left-handers vs, the number of right-handers. It is the ultimate case of missing the forest for the trees.