God's Problem (32 page)

And when, for the Jesus of our earliest Gospels, will this time come, when the Son of Man arrives in judgment and brings a reversal of fortunes to all who dwell on earth? As we have seen, Jesus thought it would be very soon, before “this generation passes away,” before his disciples “taste death.” That is why he repeatedly says, “What I say to you I say to everyone: Watch!” (Mark 13:33–37); “Watch, therefore, for you do not know the day or the hour.” That is also the point of many of his parables:

No one knows when the day will come, says Jesus: but it is soon. That’s why everyone must constantly “Watch!”

The Relevance of an Apocalyptic View

How are we to evaluate this apocalyptic point of view, with its conviction that this rotten course of affairs, this miserable world we inhabit, is very soon to come to a crashing halt? We live nearly two thousand years after Jesus is said to have spoken these words, and, of course, the end has not come. Still, throughout history there have always been people who have expected it to come—within their own generation. In fact, nearly every generation of Jesus’ followers, from day one until now, has had its self-styled prophets—there are many on the scene yet today—who believed they could predict that the end, this time, really was imminent.

One of the times that I saw this for myself, most graphically, was when I moved to North Carolina to take up my teaching position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That was in August 1988, and there was a bit of a media frenzy at the time involving the imminent end of the world with the reappearance of Jesus. A former NASA rocket engineer named Edgar Whisenant had written a book in which he claimed that Jesus would soon return to earth and take his followers out of the world (the so-called rapture), leading to the rise of the Antichrist and the coming of the end. The book was entitled, cleverly enough,
Eighty-eight Reasons Why the Rapture Will Occur in 1988.

There is no point in recounting all of Whisenant’s eighty-eight reasons here, but I can mention one. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus explains to his disciples what will happen at the end of the
age, and they want to know when it will happen. Jesus tells them: “From the fig tree, learn this lesson. As soon as its branch becomes tender and it puts forth leaves, you know that summer is near. So also you, when you see all these things, you should know that he is near, at the very gates. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away before all these things take place” (Matt. 24:32–34).

But what does all this mean? In his book, Whisenant points out that in Scripture the “fig tree” is often an image of the nation Israel. And what does it mean for the fig tree to “put forth its leaves”? This is referring to what happens every spring; the tree has lain dormant over the winter, as if dead, and then buds appear. When does that happen to Israel? When does Israel come back to life? When it is restored to the promised land and once again, after lying dormant for so long, becomes a sovereign nation. And when did that happen? In 1948, when Israel became a country once again. “This generation will not pass away before all these things take place.” How long is a generation in the Bible? Forty years. And so there it is: add forty years to the year 1948 and that brings us to 1988.

Whisenant was convinced on the basis of this prophecy—and eighty-seven others—that the end of the world as we know it was going to occur in September of 1988, during the Jewish festival of Rosh Hashanah. When other Bible-believing Christians pointed out that Jesus himself had said that “no one knows the day or the hour” when the end would come, Whisenant was not at all fazed. He did not know “the day or the hour,” he claimed; he just knew the week.

Whisenant, of course, was convincingly proved wrong. Jesus did not return. In response, Whisenant wrote a second book, claiming that he had made an error the first time around because he had failed to remember that there was no year “zero” in our calendar. As a result, all his calculations were off by a year. Jesus was to return in 1989. But, of course, he didn’t.

Whisenant had two things in common with every other of the
many thousands of Christians over the centuries who thought they knew when the end would come. To a person, they have based their calculations on “undisputed” prophecies of Scripture (especially the book of Revelation, which we’ll consider in the next chapter). And every one of them has been dead wrong.

But maybe the point of apocalyptic teaching in the Bible—even on the lips of Jesus—is not about the calendar, about the actual timing of the end. Maybe it’s about something else.

Jesus and other apocalypticists in the ancient world were dealing with the very real problems of pain and suffering. They did not think that God was causing suffering—either to punish sinners or to test his people. At the same time, they believed that God was ultimately in control of this world. Why then is there suffering? For mysterious reasons, God has handed over control of the world, temporarily, to the powers of evil, who are wreaking havoc here, especially among God’s chosen ones. But God in the end is sovereign. And evil is not the end of the story. Pain, misery, and death—these are not the last word. God has the last word. God will reassert himself and wrest control of this world from the forces that now dominate it. And those who suffer now will be rewarded then, in the good kingdom that God is soon to bring.

This may not be a view that people can accept today, without adopting an ancient, rather than a modern, view of the world. But it should not be ignored, for all that. As I will show in the next chapter, the apocalyptic view predominates throughout the New Testament, and it is a message designed to provide hope to those who suffer, a message designed to keep them from despair in the midst of the agony and misery that belong very much to a world that seems to be controlled by evil forces that are opposed to God and his people.

More Apocalyptic Views: God’s Ultimate Triumph over Evil

 

After preparing to write this chapter yesterday, I went off to lead an undergraduate seminar on the apocryphal Gospels—that is, the Gospels that did not make it into the New Testament. I am on sabbatical leave this year from my position at the University of North Carolina but had been asked to be a scholar in residence for a week at nearby High Point University. During the seminar, yesterday, a student asked if I was writing anything now, and I told her yes, I was writing a book on biblical answers to the problem of why there is suffering. As I expected, she was ready and eager to tell me “the” answer: “There’s suffering,” she said, “because we have to have free will; otherwise we would be like robots.” I asked her my standard question: if suffering is entirely about free will, how can you explain hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, and other natural disasters? She wasn’t sure, but she felt pretty confident that it had something to do with free will.

As we have seen, the “free will” answer is not nearly the focus of attention for the biblical authors that it is for people today. But there are a lot of things that are not in the Bible (or are not the main point of the biblical writers) that people mistakenly
think
are in the Bible. I remember growing up thinking, along with just about everyone else, that one of the central verses in the Bible was “God helps those who help themselves.” As it turns out, while the phrase
may be ancient, it is not biblical. It was popularized, in America at least, in Benjamin Franklin’s 1736 edition of
Poor Richard’s Almanack.
So too the free-will argument—or maybe we should call it the robot argument. Very popular today, it was not heard nearly so often in biblical times.

The free-will argument can, of course, explain a good deal of the evil in the world around us, from the Holocaust to the disaster of 9/11, from sexism to racism, from white-collar crime to governmental corruption. But it also leaves a lot out of the equation.

I think I first realized this in a big way right around the time I was teaching my course on “The Problem of Suffering in the Biblical Traditions” at Rutgers in the mid-1980s. I had not paid an inordinate amount of attention to natural disasters before then; I was aware of them, felt sorry for those involved, wondered how a poor fellow like me could do anything to help, and that sort of thing. But they didn’t really affect me too much personally. Then one happened that haunted me for weeks and months.

On November 13, 1985, we learned that a volcano had erupted in northern Colombia, South America. The mudslides that resulted blanketed and destroyed four villages. Nearly everyone in these villages was killed in his or her sleep, as the mud rushed down at something like thirty miles an hour, dwarfing the flimsy huts and suffocating the people inside. The total death toll was put at more than thirty thousand people. That number really stuck in my mind: thirty thousand people who were alive one minute and dead the next, killed in their sleep, horribly. That’s more than ten times the number of people who died in the attacks on the World Trade towers on 9/11. The latter has occupied our thoughts—rightly so!—for the last several years since the terrorist attack. The other we barely remember and more or less shrug away. Poor souls; shouldn’t have lived so near a volcano.

But natural disasters can’t be passed over so lightly. The thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people affected every year, injured, maimed, killed; homes destroyed, unsettled with nowhere to
go and no one to rely on; for many, a hell on earth. The ones closest to home, of course, are the ones we’re most concerned about. But even with these, there are a lot of people who seem to be less than sympathetic. Take those who have suffered from the devastations of Hurricane Katrina. We mourn those who died and scratch our heads in wonder at the incompetence of the federal bureaucracy that makes it impossible for New Orleans to rebuild and for its people to get on with their lives. We seem to be able to send entire fleets of ships into the Persian Gulf without much problem, and that costs
tons
of money. Why can’t we devote adequate resources to helping people living near our own gulf? Even though the Katrina aftermath continues to be in the news a year and a half later, the reality seems to be that most people wish that New Orleans would somehow just get solved. And some people are all too willing to blame other human beings for what happened. The levees were poorly constructed, and everyone knew it. What right did they have to build New Orleans there anyway? Surely people knew this was going to happen—why didn’t they just move away? And so on. I suppose it’s easier to blame the victims when we think mainly about ourselves:
I
would have gotten out of there!

That’s easy to say when you can afford a bus ticket to anywhere in the country or can easily pack up and move without noticing a serious drop in income. It is harder to say when you can’t afford to put food on the table, let alone go out for a nice meal once in a while—and how, exactly, is someone like that supposed to move to a safer place? And what place, really, is completely safe? I lived in Kansas for most of my early life, but it wasn’t until I moved to North Carolina that I almost got nailed by a tornado. The point of natural disasters is that none of us is safe.

As devastating as Katrina was and continues to be, it pales in comparison with the other horrendous disasters that have hit our world in recent years. On December 26, 2004, a devastating earthquake struck in the Indian Ocean, its epicenter off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. It triggered a tsunami (or rather, a series of
tsunamis) along the coasts of most of the countries bordering the ocean and destroyed villages and towns and human life all across south and southeast Asia, especially in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand. The body count will probably never be complete, but the best estimates put the total at around 300,000. If the Colombian mudslide destroyed ten times more lives than the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the tsunami destroyed ten times more lives than the mudslide. Not to mention the millions affected in other, extremely tangible ways, people forced, like those in New Orleans, to pick up the pieces but, unlike those in New Orleans, for the most part unable to yell and scream at governmental officials for their crass insensitivity and inability to deal with the situation. Most of the people affected are helpless and hopeless, dependent at best on the beneficence of international relief efforts.

And so it goes, one disaster after another. It’s enough to make an apocalypticist out of you. These disasters—and the countless others like them, since time immemorial—are not created by human beings but by the forces of nature. Unless you want to think that God is the one who called forth the demons behind these attacks, it is hard to know what God had to do with them. One of the virtues of the apocalyptic perspective embraced by many (most?) of the New Testament authors is that it insists quite vociferously that God does not bring disasters; his cosmic enemies do. Not just earthquakes and hurricanes and tsunamis, but sickness and disease, mental health problems, oppression and persecution: it is the Devil and his minions, the demons, who are at fault. This is an age in which they have been given virtually free rein. To be sure, God sometimes intervenes for good—for example, in the ministry of Jesus or of his apostles. But the evil forces of this world will not be taken out of the way until the end, when God unleashes his wrath upon them and those who have sided with them. And then there will be hell on earth in ways that have never been seen before.

This is the message delivered by Jesus in the Gospels, as we saw in the preceding chapter; it is also the message of the Gospel writers
as they remembered the key events of his life, of the apostle Paul living after Jesus, and of the author of the book of Revelation, a book that provides a fitting apocalyptic climax to the writings that form the canon of the New Testament.

Remembering the Apocalyptic Life of Jesus

Jesus’ life as it was remembered by the Gospel writers of the New Testament was all about suffering—suffering of others that he relieved, and suffering of his own that he endured. In some ways the essence of Jesus’ life is summed up in the mocking words spoken against him by the Jewish leaders as he was hanging from the cross in Mark’s Gospel—words that, for Mark, tell the truth in ways that the speakers appear not to have understood: “He saved others, but he is not able to save himself” (Mark 15:31). The word
saved
here does not have the connotation that it does to many modern evangelical Christians, who ask “Are you saved?” in order to know whether you have done what you need to do to go to heaven when you die. The Greek word for “save,” in this and other contexts, refers to restoring a person to health and wholeness. Jesus “saved” others because he healed them when they were sick or demon-possessed. He is unable to save himself—not because he lacks the ability to come off the cross (in Mark’s view) but because he must do the Father’s will, which is to suffer and die for the sake of others. In other words, to bring about salvation, Jesus cured those who are suffering by what he did in his life; ultimately, he cured them by what he did in his death.

With respect to his life, the Gospels recount one miracle after another in which Jesus dealt with the ailments, misery, and suffering that he saw around him. The earliest traditions of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are quite clear that Jesus did not do miracles for his own benefit, to help himself out. That is, in part, the point of the temptations that Jesus experiences in the wilderness when the Devil tries to get him to satisfy his own hunger by turning stones into
bread (Matt. 4:1–11). No, his miracle-working abilities are not meant for his own good, but for the good of others. And so the Gospels record his miraculous life as he goes about during his ministry in Galilee restoring people to physical and mental health—“saving” them. So much does his miracle-working ability characterize his ministry that you can scarcely look at any page of the Gospels without reading about him healing one person or another.

He heals a man who has spent his life paralyzed, making him stand up and walk away from the crowd, carrying his pallet; he heals a man who has a withered hand; he gives sight to those who are blind, even to those blind from birth; he makes the lame walk; he heals a woman who has been hemorrhaging blood for twelve years; he gives the mute the ability to talk; he cures lepers. Sometimes his miracles demonstrate his power over nature: he stills a storm at sea; he walks on water. Sometimes his miracles demonstrate his divine character, as when he turns the water into wine. Often his miracles are done on complete strangers; at other times he does them for his friends. On occasion they are done for the crowds: once he feeds five thousand who are hungry in the wilderness; at another time he feeds four thousand. His miracles deal not only with physical ailments but with what we might think of as mental disease as well: he casts out demons from people, demons that create schizophrenia or demented personalities, or demons that drive people to harm themselves.

His most spectacular miracles are probably his resuscitations of the dead—a twelve-year-old girl whose parents are grieving; a young man whose mother is now left alone; his close friend Lazarus, whom he raises theatrically before a large crowd in order to show that he, Jesus himself, is the “resurrection and the life” (John 11:25).

For the Gospel writers, Jesus’ life-giving miracles show that he is the long-awaited messiah. When John the Baptist sends messengers to Jesus from prison, wanting to know if he is the One who was to
come, Jesus replies: “Go, report to John the things you have seen and heard: the blind see again, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor hear the good news. And blessed is the one who does not stumble because of me” (Luke 7:22–23). This is an apocalyptic message. For apocalypticists, at the end of the age God will once again intervene on behalf of his people who are suffering; he will deliver them from the powers of evil that have been unleashed on this world. It is the Devil and his demons who create such hardship—blinding, mutilating, paralyzing, overpowering people. Jesus is portrayed as God’s intervention, who has come at the end of the age to defeat the powers of evil, in anticipation of the imminent arrival of God’s good kingdom in which there will be no more sin, sickness, demons, Devil, or death.

Although Jesus relieves suffering, his own life climaxes in a moment of intense suffering. Throughout the Gospels he repeatedly tells his followers that he must go to an excruciating and humiliating death on the cross, a death that is necessary for the salvation of the world. He did “save” others, but he “cannot save himself.” To do so would be to fail his ultimate mission, which was not to bring temporary health and well-being to people who would, after all, eventually grow frail and die anyway. His ultimate mission was to suffer himself, so that he might restore all people to a right standing before God and give them “salvation” in the ultimate sense. For the Gospel writers, those who “believe in” Jesus as the one who was sacrificed for others would be restored to a right standing before God, so that they might enter the Kingdom of God that was soon to appear. His suffering would substitute for their own; his death would be a sacrifice for the sins of others. Jesus shows that he has the power over sin by healing those who are sick. But ultimately he overcomes the power of sin by himself dying for sin. He suffers the penalty of sin that others might be forgiven and given eternal life in the kingdom that is soon to arrive. That is the ultimate message of the Gospel writers who remember Jesus’ life.

Suffering in the Writings of Paul

The Gospel writers’ ultimate message is also the apostle Paul’s ultimate message. Next to Jesus, it is Paul who dominates the pages of the New Testament. Of the twenty-seven books in the New Testament, fully thirteen claim to be written by Paul; one other, the book of Acts, is largely written about Paul; and another, the letter to the Hebrews, was accepted into the canon because it was believed (wrongly) to have been written by him. That makes fifteen of the New Testament books directly or indirectly related to Paul. And who was Paul? Above all else, he was a Jewish apocalypticist who had come to believe that the death and resurrection of Jesus restored people to a right standing before God here at the climax of the age, before the apocalyptic day of judgment arrived and the end of the world as we know it occurred.