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October 7 - November 16, 2019
It’s not surprising Teri lost faith in men. In her mind, they were interested only in their own pleasure. It’s also little surprise that Teri has trouble believing in God. Her Sunday school teacher said God was king, the authority to obey, the one in ultimate control.
James’s wife asked me a particularly difficult question. “If God has a plan for everyone, was suicide His plan for James? If God doesn’t want suicide,” she wondered, “why didn’t He stop it?”
An elder said God allowed miscarriages to make Maria a better person. “God never gives us more than we can handle,” he said, “and this will help you mature.” According to him, miscarriages were a divine strategy for building Maria’s character.
Although Maria believes in God intellectually, it doesn’t affect how she actually lives. She’s got no idea what God does. Mysteries don’t help Maria.
Well-meaning people say these things, and I’m not questioning their motives. But these answers don’t make sense. Some include truth, but none satisfy entirely. Appeals to mystery are especially useless.
The first is that God loves us all, all the time. God loves everyone and everything, all creatures great and small. God never stops loving, even for one moment, because God’s nature is love. God listens, feels, and responds by acting for good.
The five ideas in this book also assume evil is real. Some suffering, destruction, and harm are unnecessary. Some pain is pointless. Genuine evil makes the world, all things considered, worse than it might have been.
A loving God simply cannot do some things. Preventing evil is one of them.
To put it more precisely, God can’t prevent evil singlehandedly. Putting it precisely is important, and I’ll explain why as we move through these chapters. God cannot stop evil by acting alone.
Despite believing loving people wouldn’t allow the evil they can block, many believe God allows the evil God can block. They think God permits needless suffering and avoidable horrors despite being able to stop them.
My answer starts with the Bible. It surprises many to discover that biblical writers say God cannot do some things. “God cannot lie,” says Titus (1:2). “God cannot be tempted,” says James (1:13). “God cannot grow tired,” says Isaiah (40:28). I especially like a statement from the Apostle Paul: “When we are faithless, He remains faithful,” Paul writes, “because God cannot deny himself” (2 Tim. 2:13).
These statements — in the Bible and by leading theologians — assume truths about God’s nature. Inspired writers and wise saints identify actions God cannot take and things God cannot do because of who God is. God cannot oppose God’s own nature.
Who we think God is makes an immense difference for what we think God does. So … who is God?
Besides, it makes no sense to say we believe in God but say we have no idea who God is!
Love does not overrule or override. It does “not force itself on others,” to quote the Apostle Paul (1 Cor. 13:5). Love does not manipulate, dominate, or dictate in ways that allow no response. Love does not control. When I say God “can’t” prevent evil, I mean God is unable to control people, other creatures, or circumstances that cause evil. Because God always loves and God’s love is uncontrolling, God cannot control. The God who can’t control others or circumstances can’t prevent evil singlehandedly.
It’s important to recognize that I am not placing limits on God. Rather, God’s loving nature determines, shapes, or governs what God can do. External powers, natural laws, or Satan do not essentially limit God. Constraints to God’s power don’t come from outside.
Because God’s love self-gives and others-empowers, and because God loves all creatures from the most complex to the least, God cannot control. God loves everyone and everything, so God cannot control anyone or anything. This means a God of uncontrolling love cannot control evildoers to prevent their dastardly deeds.
I call this view “essential kenosis.” The word “kenosis” comes from the Bible and has been translated as self-giving or self-emptying. Jesus’ servanthood and death on the cross profoundly illustrate God’s self-giving love (Phil. 2).
Anyone who fails to prevent preventable evil is not consistently loving.
Theologians often say God is “incorporeal,” which means without a body, or “immaterial.” Because God is a universal spirit, God doesn’t have shape, height, and weight like we do.
Can humans love something incorporeal?
Here’s where “God is a universal spirit without a physical body” matters. God has no divine hand, literally speaking, to snatch us from the path of oncoming cars or grab us before entering a fire.
A bodiless, universal spirit cannot do what embodied creatures sometimes can. Despite having no body, God is present and active in all situations. Divine power is direct but persuasive, widespread but wooing, causal but uncontrolling. God’s loving activity makes a difference without imposing control or using a divine body.
It’s tempting to think the Bible says God alone made something happen, but the Bible never explicitly says this.
“It may sound shocking or off-putting to assert that God can’t do something,” Jessica admits. “But consider this: if God could prevent a rape, stop a bullet, or heal a malignant tumor, but won’t, he’s failing to demonstrate love.… And if we know anything about God, it’s that he is love.”7
The Shack doesn’t answer a question, however, those who suffer often ask: “Why didn’t God prevent the evil I endured?”
Several times in The Shack, God says to Mac, “You misunderstand the mystery.” At one point, the Spirit says, “You’re trying to make sense of the world looking at an incomplete picture.” Wisdom questions Mac’s ability to judge good and evil, implying that he’s not competent to make such judgments.
In The Shack, God scolds Mac for thinking he can judge good and evil. Mac reasons from an incomplete picture, he’s told, so he can’t know what is ultimately loving. But it’s disingenuous for God to encourage Mac to believe in love and then question Mac’s ability to know what love is. That kind of mystery makes no sense.
Caring parents — Papas — express loving influence that neither overrules nor withdraws. Loving mothers and fathers don’t micromanage or rule with an iron fist. They aren’t absent or MIA either. Loving fathers and mothers guide, instruct, persuade, call, correct, convince, encourage, nudge, teach, warn, and more. None of those activities involve control.
Perhaps the best word to describe ongoing parental love is “nurture.” Nurturing involves cultivating the lives of children by providing positive experiences, wise instruction, and forgiveness. But nurturing implies working alongside the agencies of others, not controlling them.
A major part of recovery came as she changed her view of God. “The day I realized I had choices was the day I understood God was not controlling,” writes Janyne. “He did not control me on the cliff; I chose to turn and live.
Janyne rejected the idea that God had a predetermined plan that included abuse. She came to believe God was always involved, calling her to decisions in light of positive or negative circumstances. God is a loving guide not a coercive manipulator. And not even God could control Janyne’s abuser.
Janyne found comfort believing God could not have stopped her abuse alone. A loving God who could have stopped it should have.
The second idea I invite you to consider is that God feels your pain. God is neither aloof nor indifferent, not a distant stepfather nor an absentee mother. God relates intimately with survivors of evil, and God feels what they feel.
Psychologist Carl Rogers defines empathy as entering the “perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it.”
The Golden Rule says we should do to others as we would have them do to us. What I call “The Crimson Rule” says we should feel with others as we would have them feel with us. God follows The Crimson Rule, and we should too.
Compassion is a powerful form of love that involves empathy. Two parts of this Latin word — “com” and “passion” — literally mean to “suffer with.”
The Apostle Paul says we have a “God of all consolation who consoles us in all our afflictions” (1 Cor. 1:3). Consoling is not pity from a distance but empathy through presence. The perfect Lover is everlastingly sensitive and universally compassionate.
“I’d always assumed, unconsciously I guess, that God was in charge and emotionally divested,” he said. “So imitating God meant I ought to be in charge and devoid of feelings.”
One unhelpful view says God is present but remains unaffected. God does not empathize, console, or feel pain, according to this view, because God is “unmoved.” God is like The Force in Star Wars: always there but impersonal and uncaring.
Another unhelpful view says God created the universe long ago but is no longer present.
Scholars call this view “deism,” and the deity it describes is detached.
third unhelpful view says God acts only with the big picture in mind, never getting involved in the details.
The fourth unhelpful view says God determines everything.
The final unhelpful view says God’s holiness keeps him from associating with sinners like you and me.
As my friend Tripp likes to say, “God’s at least as nice as Jesus!”
Unfortunately, however, some think we can solve the problems of evil by only believing God suffers. In both popular and academic publications, one finds people saying the conundrums of evil disappear if we just believe God suffers with sufferers. But empathy is not enough.
Likewise, a God who could singlehandedly rescue but only empathizes isn’t perfectly loving. The God who could control a person or situation to prevent evil but chooses instead to feel the survivor’s pain isn’t expressing steadfast love. Empathy with victims isn’t loving if preventing their agony is possible.
I turn from the idea God always feels our pain to the idea we can sometimes feel God’s love. Notice the words “always” and “sometimes” in that last sentence. We can believe God always empathizes … even if we only sometimes feel God’s love.
I began answering Amy’s questions with what may seem obvious, but I thought it needed saying. “Feeling God doesn’t mean actually touching God,” I wrote. We can’t perceive God with our five senses, because God is a universal spirit. “When people say they feel God,” I said, “they’re not talking about fingertip sensations or cuddling.” Feeling God involves intuitions and non-sensory perceptions, I told Amy, and these sometimes stir our emotions. Theologian John Wesley called such perceptions “spiritual sensations,” because the Spirit communicates without engaging our five senses. Biblical writers
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My counselor friend Brad stresses what he calls the “ministry of human presence.” He means that a therapist’s physical presence can be the conduit of God’s spiritual presence to those in pain. Therapists can act as Christ’s empathetic heart.
