Thursday, October 14, 2010

What Went Wrong With the World?

In our last post, we mentioned several worldview questions that help us discover what we really believe. For example, the question, "Why am I here?" plays a key role in the marriage of Amy and Layton from my book, Living Between the Ditches: When God Makes No Sense. How Layton answers that question has a lot to do with whether or not God is knowable—someone with whom you can have a personal relationship—or whether God is far away, having distanced Himself from this planet long ago.

Layton also wrestles with a second worldview question: What went wrong with the world? And something is wrong here on earth or five major religions and countless other sects, cults, and traditions wouldn't all be telling us what to do about what's wrong!

As Layton suffers one setback after another, he looks for a source for all his troubles. Not so unusually, he finds a perfect scapegoat: God Himself! Layton concludes that God took from Him all that is valuable—his wife, his mom and dad, and now possibly his child. Lots of people blame God for their misfortunes. Layton is in good company. If God were truly on His throne, if He were in charge of the universe, and especially if He cared anything about me, He would have ... (fill in the blank).

Where did we get the idea that God owes us? Jeremiah compares this line of thinking with the pot telling the potter how to shape it. Job asked, "Shall we accept only good from God and not trouble?" Instead of asking for favors, Jesus said, "I do only what my Father tells me." Here was God's Son, without a permanent home and one tunic to His name, teaching people how to be happy (blessed) and telling them how much His Father loved Him! Obviously, Jesus' life doesn't support the contention that God owes us health, wealth, human companionship (His friends deserted Him), or long life.

So what is God's role, then, if not to please us? If God chose to reveal Himself to us (God seeking man rather than man seeking God), then God must have had something to tell us. Next post we'll talk about God's view of human life. Is life all about us or is it possibly all about Him?