This thoughtful, insightful message by Rick Kretschmer of Clayton, North Carolina, was shared with me by a mutual friend … and my immediate re-action was – with his permission – to share it with you:
“So tell me how your god can allow for the slaughter of children if it is some sort of all-knowing, loving being?”
“How can you believe there is a God when 6 and 7 year old children are allowed to be slaughtered by the wrath of one?”
These are questions I’ve been asked by two of my friends. Legitimate questions from hurting people. Below is how I answered each of them privately. I thought I would also share what I wrote with the rest of my friends, in the hope that it might provide some comfort and understanding to others of you. What follows is my response:
I will try to sincerely answer this question to the best of my ability and understanding, despite the fact that I do not presume to fully understand how God thinks or operates, and despite not believing for a minute that I can provide an adequate spiritual explanation for senseless tragedy.
God in his infinite wisdom has given Satan dominion over the earth (John 16:11), and has given each person on this planet a free will. God longingly wants us to choose him (1 Tim 2:4), but he knows that if it is anything less than a free choice, it is hollow and meaningless. If we could not choose to sin, then neither could we willingly choose to obey and love him.
Since God allows each of us to disobey him, he also allows the logical consequences of that disobedience to occur. For example, if we steal, someone will suffer loss; if we murder, someone will die. Since we live in a sinful world, we are all subject to the sinful actions of others. On rare occasions, God may choose to intervene miraculously, but most of the time he allows natural events to run their course. He does not stop people from committing acts of evil, and he does not suspend the laws of physics. He allows natural consequences to occur. Often that means bad things happen, even tragedies such as today’s massacre.
Does that make God unloving or inadequate? Maybe by human standards, but God clearly does not conform to the box our finite human minds try to put him in (Isaiah 55:8-9). God is much more interested in our individual hearts than he is in shielding us from consequences. He wants to comfort us (2 Corinthians 1:3) and wipe our tears away (Isaiah 25:8) when life goes wrong, rather than make sure we never cry in the first place.
Not that I want bad things to happen to myself or anyone else, but I believe that adversity makes us better and stronger people (James 1:2). It makes us so much more sympathetic and able to help others in similar situations. If we will trust God to see us through it, it will strengthen our relationship with him as he guides us through our grief and loss (1 Peter 1:6-7).
One other point I want to make is that the problems we experience on this earth are fleeting and temporary from the perspective of eternity. I believe that children are taken to heaven if they die before they are old enough to understand about God. I don’t know what the cutoff age might be, but I take comfort in believing that the children who were killed today are now in God’s loving presence in heaven (Matt 19:14). They may have suffered momentarily, but they are now in a far better place for eternity.
So where was God on the morning of Friday, December 14? I like the words of Anne Robertson, who wrote this in her blog:
“God was not absent from Sandy Hook Elementary School. God walked into school with every last one of those children as well as every teacher. I believe that God even walked beside Adam Lanza, trying all the while to convince him to turn away from such a terrible abuse of his God-given freedom. And then God sobbed for all of them, as we all did.”
For me, this tragedy did not shake my faith in God for one moment. Rather, it re-affirmed to me how desperately this world needs God. All of us.
© 2012 Rick Kretschmer
As Christians, we all struggle to answer when non-believers challenge us at times and in situations like this. I appreciate his writing this and having had the opportunity to read it. Would you have made the case for God any differently? If so, please let me hear from you. Thank you.
