The "Why God?" Questions: Part One

I want to ask a hard question this morning, and let the Bible answer it for us. Sometimes we have a low tolerance for hard questions, because they force our thought patterns out of their comfort zone. But low tolerance or not, the questions come. If we don’t ask them ourselves, others will ask them of us. Such is the case with the hard question I want to ask this morning. The person who has asked and keeps asking me this question is my brother Stu. Let me tell you a little about him before I tell you the question he asks.

Stu is one year older than me, so we were close as young kids. Once we entered the teen years, he was sort of an athletic/scholastic type and I was a hippie type, so we didn’t relate much. But gradually through our adult lives Stu and I have become more alike.

For instance, he is gradually becoming a vegetarian. Fifteen years ago he visited me at the Country Life Restaurant in downtown New York, and the morning he left to get on the plane we had a beautiful breakfast buffet in the restaurant. I asked him to help himself to the scrambled tofu omelet, the oat waffles and all the other yummy food, and he said, "No, thanks." Later I saw him walk by the window of the restaurant with a Blimpies bag. Blimpies was a hamburger joint in New York, so I assume he was having a hamburger for breakfast. But he has changed. Now, fifteen years later, he hardly ever eats meat, and when he does it’s fish or poultry.

Another discipline Stu practices is that he boycotts businesses he thinks are harming the environment or the world. We talked about investments once and he told me that he refused to invest money in stock portfolios that include the tobacco industry. You know that the tobacco industry is a big money maker, but he is a man of principle. He won’t step foot inside of Walmart, either, because he believes that they ruin small businesses by underselling them.

Stu is a conscientious person. He not only has conscientious convictions, but he lives by those convictions. In this way he is more of a Christian than some Christians, because he is willing to deny himself for what he believes in.

But Stu has real problems with Christianity. And that leads me to the hard question I want to ask. Stu is an agnostic, but if he believed in God, she would be a pacifist. Stu looks at the Christian God, the biblical God, and he asks, "Why isn’t God a pacifist?"

"Why isn’t God a pacifist?" Notice I didn’t say "Is God a pacifist?" The dictionary says that a pacifist is someone who "opposes all war and armed hostility." Does God oppose all war and armed hostility? Absolutely not. Let’s look at a few instances where God sanctioned war and/or armed hostility.

Revelation 12:7:

"And there was war in heaven, Michael and his angels waging war with the dragon. And the dragon and his angels waged war."

Exodus 32:25- 27:

"Now when Moses saw that the people were out of control- for Aaron had let them get out of control to be a derision among their enemies- then Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said, "Whoever is for the Lord, come to me!" and all the sons of Levi gathered together to him. And he said to them, "thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, "Every man of you put his sword upon his thigh and go back and forth from gate to gate in the camp, and kill every man his brother and every man his friend, and every man his neighbor."

Numbers 25:6-8:

"Then behold, one of the sons of Israel came and brought to his relatives a Midianite woman, in the sight of Moses and in the sight of all the congregation of the sons of Israel, while they were weeping at the doorway of the tent of meeting. When Phinehas the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he arose from the midst of the congregation and took a spear in his hand and he went after the man of Israel into the tent, and pierced both of them through the man of Israel and the woman through the body. So the plague on the sons of Israel was checked."

These are only a few examples of times when God sanctioned war or "armed hostility." Note that these passages are not parables, not symbolic, not metaphorical, they are all narrative passages, meaning that their purpose is to report actual happenings. There is no way we can sidestep the fact that God is not a pacifist in the purest sense if we believe that the Bible is God’s inspired word.

Some of us are bothered by these types of passages. I have struggled with these and others like them for years. Generally when confronted with this punitive side of God’s character, we will do one of three things:

1. Avoid the issue

2. Try to explain it away

3. Reject the Christian God and the Bible

Friends, these are not three options so much as they are three consecutive steps in a process. First we ignore it, hoping it will go away like a bad headache. But it doesn’t. Then we try to brush it off, explain it away with, "Well, the passage doesn’t really mean that, it means something else." But denial only works for so long. Finally, if the question is left unanswered, we become frustrated and reject the Christian God and the Bible totally. What I am saying is that avoiding the issue will ultimately lead us to reject the testimony of scripture.

So let’s not do that. Let’s face the issue and go ahead and ask God the question, "Why aren’t You a pacifist, Lord?" But we need to direct our question to God’s complaint department. If you have a hard question to throw at God, throw it at the cross. It will come back answered.

"But their minds were hardened, for until this very day at the reading of the old covenant the same veil remains unlifted, because it is removed in Christ. But to this day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their heart. But whenever a man turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away" 2 Corinthians 3:14,15.

This verse is talking about the reading of the old covenant, or the Old Testament. Referring to the legalistic Jews of Paul’s time he says that there is a "veil. . . over their heart." Likewise legalism will keep us from understanding the truth of the Old Testament, and of the Bible as a whole, unless the veil is "removed in Christ." But the good news is that the veil is, in fact, removed in Christ.

And at what specific time of Christ’s life was the veil in the temple literally torn in two? When Jesus "yeilded up His spirit." (Matthew 27:50). When Jesus died, the veil was taken away. God was saying, "You can now look upon my Shekinah glory, my character. You have seen my character in its fullest manifestation in the death of my only Son. Look no further. All your confusion is settled, all your hard questions are answered right here."

In order to answer the question "Why isn’t God a pacifist?" we need to establish some facts about His character. In order to do this, let’s look at a few verses;

"The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, in which the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be burned up" 2 Peter 3:9 and 10.

This passage is saying two basic things. One is that God wants all people to be saved. The second thing is that the earth will indeed be destroyed at His coming. The context is clear that "ungodly men" will be destroyed at that time (vs. 7). So in this passage we see the final judgement within the context of the thought that God wants everyone to be saved. There are others that say the same thing;

"This is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth" 1 Timothy 2:4.

"Depart from me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels" Matthew 25:41.

The fire was not prepared for any human being, but for the devil and his angels. God indeed wants all people to be saved! But how badly does He want that? That is our next question.

"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life" John 3:16.

In this one text we see just how badly God wanted us to be saved. He was willing to give that which was more precious to Him than anything, "His only begotten Son," so that we would "not perish."

I was on a bike ride with my youngest daughter Kimberly this week and I started to think about all I have been through in life. One of the hardest things I have had to bear is the voice problems I have had. I started developing respiratory problems about twelve years ago. I’ll spare you the details, but my voice has taken a beating. I totally quite singing twice. Even now I have certain handicaps because of the condition, although it has improved. The loss was hard for me to accept, and actually took a few years. But now I have accepted it and I am at peace. On the bike ride I boasted to the Lord a little, saying, "I can take the loss of anything, Lord, and stay faithful to you. I don’t think there’s anything you could take away that would cause me to turn my back on you. . ." Suddenly the Lord seemed to point to Kimmy, floating along on her little bike. I got the message. I don’t know if I could take the loss of one of my children.

But God was willing to lose His Son, His only Son, not just for a while, but in a sense for eternity, so that we could be saved. In this one fact is found the measure of God’s love for us.

"He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?" Romans 8:32.

The fact that God gave Jesus is proof that He will give anything. If God would give that which was most precious to Him, He would withhold nothing. The cross rings with the message, "I want to give you eternity!"

Now that we have established the fact that God wants more than anything for us to be saved, we can go back to the question "Why isn’t God a pacifist?"

If God would spare nothing to save us, we must assume that if He destroys someone, they can’t possibly be saved. Otherwise it would be like spending my life savings upon a beautiful house, then dousing with gasoline and taking a match to it. Our first answer to the question is that some people will never be saved, and God knows it.

But the destruction of wicked people is more than cleaning up refuse. The fact is that, when a person hardens their heart against salvation, they prevent others from finding it as well. They become a destructive force in the universe, leading others into the same eternal ruin that they themselves have chosen. So, when God destroys, He is destroying the destroyer. This is in keeping with His desire to save, because destroying the destroyer is actually a saving act.

Let me illustrate the difference between selfish destruction and God’s destruction which saves. I receive and email from time to time with a warning not to attend parties with people you don’t know. It goes on to relate one man’s experience. He met a girl and attended a party with her only to pass out because of a drug she put in his drink. He wakes up in a bathtub full of ice water and sees a sign on his chest, "CALL 911!" Below the sign he sees an incision across his abdomen. What happened was that he was drugged and his kidneys were harvested to sell in the black market. I suppose we should say it was nice of those people to put him in ice water and tell him to call 911.

In contrast to that, a friend of mine recently had total kidney failure. She had been functioning on one kidney for most of her life, and now the other was failing. It wasn’t only useless to her, it was diseased and bringing disease upon her whole body. So she went into surgery and the doctor performed exactly the same operation upon her that the people at the party performed on the fellow whose kidneys were harvested.

One operation was motivated by selfish greed. The other by the noble desire to save life. On the surface, it was the same "violent" act. But God’s violence is not like human violence. God destroys that which destroys, and therefore God saves.

At times people take this principle of destroying that which destroys, and they bomb abortion clinics or engage in other forms of holy war. The problem is not with the idea of destroying that which destroys, but with the fact that they take upon themselves a prerogative that belongs only to God. There are no examples in the Bible of times God sanctioned people deciding by themselves to kill or otherwise harm another. All the examples of destruction that saves are either performed by God Himself or people acting as God’s instrumentalities.

When we see the punitive side of God’s character in the light of the cross, we realize that God destroys only as a saving act. We are told of the destruction of the wicked, "this is not an arbitrary power on the part of God" (Desire of Ages, 764). Arbitrary means by definition, "something based on whim or impulse." In contrast to this, the destruction of the wicked is according to fixed natural and supernatural laws.

We must help people depersonalize the final judgement.