From my Brazil Times blog of September 24, 2014
Where is God in all this mess?
If you have not been watching the news lately, don’t.
About once a week there is a report about a forest fire which has broken out and caused massive damage. Then, almost incidentally, it might be noted that this fire is just one of 30 or so burning across the nation.
Turns out this fire phenomena is illustrative of what’s going on from one end of the earth to the other. The whole world seems to be burning, with no limit to the number of fires demanding attention, and no shortage of break-outs to report.
Someone has said that the world stands at the greatest moment of calamity in human history – even more dangerous than Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 when thermonuclear war was at stake. In that crisis at least there was some one reasonable, logical person with whom to negotiate.
None of the world’s fires now faced seem to have any reasonable, logical person with whom to negotiate.
Someone once told me that if a Christian wants to know where God is in all this mess they ought to have an understanding of what might be called a “Christian philosophy of history” of what He has been and is doing through history.
Now, any philosophy should not be thought of as a doctrine of the church. Rather, philosophy is best thought of as a search for truth; a search with which anyone is free to disagree, or misunderstand.
An overview of Christian thought over 2,000 years seems to indicate that Christianity says history goes in a straight line and can be summed up with: I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last (Rev. 22.13, KJV). That is, all history began with: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth (Gen 1.1, KJV). And, that all human history will end with: In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed (I Cor 15.51, KJV)
Christians generally have held that all human history from Alpha to Omega is in the hands of an all-powerful, all-knowing, ever-present loving heavenly Father who has a plan and is in control of the final outcome; that nothing happens to His children which does not first pass through His permissive will.
No one is obligated to accept that history teaches that we are going from point A to point B, nor to think that God is in control of it all, or even to take hope that He wins in the end.
But, if this Christian approach to reading history is not true we are in big trouble.
We are not going back to America as we imagined it being in the 1950’s. The world is getting darker and darker, fires are burning from one end of the earth to the other, and there is no reasonable person with whom to negotiate.
If a Beginning-to-End Christian philosophy of history is not correct, then don’t watch the news.
David L Lewis is an observer of and sometimes commentator on life who may be reached at thedaddy1776.gmail,com.
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