WTB 5 - Why Doesn't God Fix It?

A common refrain in the debates over whether there is a God and whether He is good is, "If He's so all-powerful and loving, why doesn't He fix all the bad stuff, or allow it to happen in the first place?"

The answer to the latter is easy: He didn't allow it. He gave specific instructions against it. But first we rebelled by eating from the only excluded tree. Then He gave us a bunch of rules to live by (most of which can be summed up as "don't do bad stuff to each other"), and we rebelled again. Then he took those rules and gave us a living embodiment of himself in our hearts to always remind us and whisper into our consciences. Still we rebelled. He did not allow any of it. What He allowed was the amazing gift of free will. It was us who chose to allow such atrocities against Creation.

It has long been a complaint of mine that in the Great Debates, many who believe in God aren't able to respond to the allegations of a morally monstrous God with accounts of genocide and favoritism amounting to racial prejudice. From the time God established His covenant with Abraham, on a hillside where Abraham slept amongst the butchered bodies of the animals he sacrificed, it was known that the region that would eventually become the land of Israel would spiral into such moral decay as to be deemed evil in every aspect. God had already said Isra'el would be slaves 400 years and only then brought back to the land to claim it because only then would the degree of evil become "ripe enough to punish". That's reiterated in a couple places and came up again in today's writing:

After the LORD helps you wipe out these nations and conquer their land, don't think he did it because you are such good people. You aren't good - you are stubborn! No, the LORD is going to help you, because the nations that live there are evil, and because he wants to keep the promise he made to your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Deut 9:4-6  (CEV)

God also takes care of that argument of favoritism here. Isra'el was and is, indeed, chosen. They were chosen through an express agreement. It's also worth noting that while they had the same free will as anyone else, they were kept on the "straight and narrow" (and prevented from falling as deeply into a pit of evil as all the other nations) by being particularly chastised and disciplined. While other nations had centuries of doing what seemed good in their eyes with no immediate repercussions, Israel was handed over to enslavement, had chasms rip through the middle of camp taking out the tents of those who pilfered, were smote with plagues, and pretty strictly kept in line. They were favored, but never forget it came at a price of having to live up to the reputation of "God's Chosen People". They were the modern day equivalent of the Pastor's kids; still able to rebel but held perhaps a bit more tightly in line because everyone would be watching to see what the walk looks like to go with the talk.

But another thought occurred to me this morning as I was writing these passages. If we understand that the land was filled with people so evil as to do what they did (and history and archaeology in secondary sources tell us it was some pretty horrendous stuff), God was using Isra'el as an extremely targeted, scalpel-like instrument to remove the most evil elements. He was, in short, "fixing it". And look at what many have done with that account a couple millennium later - it is used to show how awful God is and why people should turn away from Him. It is also a historical lesson in 'be careful what you wish for'. I expect if God were to "fix" the many bad things in our world, there would be widespread death and carnage as the negative elements were removed. As we look at the account of Israel moving across the land and cringe, even as some of us try to hold it in a certain context, it is not an easy scene to assimilate. Could we handle that in our own day and age?

More than that, do we understand that the Word we're given is a powerful tool of witness and explanation (not to be confused with defending). In one breath, a person will ask, "If God is so loving, why doesn't He fix the world" and then in the next breath ask, "If God is so loving, how could He have wiped out whole nations of people?" And for us, it is a perfect opportunity to declare that He wouldn't be much of a Creator God if we fully understood His ways, but it sure seems like a case of an unanswered prayer being easier to bare than if He truly fixed it as we sometimes ask...