When I was college, I used to work with our local electric company in the summers. I lived in Kentucky then, and we would drive out to these remote spots in the countryside to do jobs. One area we worked in would always take us right by this sign by the highway. I knew the sign well, as when my family would drive to Cincinnati, my sisters and I would talk about the story behind the sign. It was there in 1988, that a man was driving drunk and crashed into a school bus full of teenagers on a church youth group trip. Many of the children died in the crash, and it was a horrible tragedy. How could God allow this to happen? How is this fair and right that these children died due to the actions of just one man?
The Bible is full of stories where the actions and sins of just one man (or woman, we want to be equal opportunity here) completely affect and cause suffering for many. In Kings and Chronicles, this is obvious in the lives of the kings and rulers like Ahab, Jezebel, Ahaz, Manasseh, and David. We have already established that God doesn’t punish or judge people for the sins of others (Ezekiel 18). However, God does allow the consequences of other people’s sins to affect both Christians and non Christians. He is not “teaching us something” or “disciplining us” and it isn’t Satan directly doing something to us. It is simply a world in which God allows man freedom of choice.
In Romans 1:18-22 Paul states that man has rejected God for idols, thereby bringing God’s wrath down upon himself. What does this wrath really look like here? It is not lightning bolts or enemy armies that we see in other judgment passages. In 1:24-25, Paul gives God’s judgment, “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever!” God’s judgment was to let us do exactly what we wanted to do. The chapter continues with lists of worse and worse sins. Look what we do to each other, “They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.”
So, to take away horrible bus crashes and many of the horrible atrocities that happen, God would have to take away free will. We want to blame God, but we need to blame ourselves. Of course in the case of the bus crash, the real issue isn’t whether the drunk driver is to blame, it is how God could allow this? how is this fair? The hard answers are that God isn’t fair and there are no satisfying answers as to why God didn’t stop this tragedy from happening. In Romans 9:16, Paul understands the question of God’s fairness, “So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy.” God is just and merciful, not fair.
God created the world in His image and it was all “very good”. Man didn’t like that world, wanted to be his own god, and so we have remade the world into our image. That world is full of gang violence, wars, genocides, and death. We can’t blame God for this suffering, as He “gave us up” to do what we wanted to do. We want to think only of ourselves and drive drunk, regardless of the consequences it might inflict on others. It scares me to death thinking about the times I drove drunk in college and what horrible things I could have done. God will end this suffering when sinful nature is taken away at the end of time. Until then, we again should be there for people when things like this happen, without having to tell the person who to blame. Until then, I will think of that sign beside the road and think carefully about how my actions can bring suffering to others.
The Bible Nerd 