Robert
Lyon is a retired clergyman who divides his time between
Guelph, Ontario and Melaque, Mexico. He taught high school
English, Latin, Greek and science, and served as an officer
in the Canadian Armed Forces Reserve, retiring in the rank
of Lieutenant-Colonel. His latest book, Don’t
Throw Out Your Bible, from which the essay below is
excerpted, should be available by the end of the year (2022).
His monograph, A Christmas You Can Believe In,
is available on request as a PDF file from graphikos@gto.net.
For
most of the past two years I have been living in Melaque,
a small tourist and fishing town on Mexico’s Pacific
coast. Most of the amenities one wants are available here,
the prices are right, the beaches and fishing are good, we
have an English speaking church and a great sense of community,
and the temperatures offer a welcome escape from the wicked
witch of winter. But even here in paradise, things sometimes
go wrong.
Last
Monday I had to drive an hour from Melaque to the big city
of Manzanillo, where the nearest Apple store is located, because
my MacBook’s newly installed optical drive didn’t
work. Then on Wednesday, the voice chip on my iPhone pooped
out. All the phone’s capabilities are functional except
speaking and listening. But what’s a phone without speaking
and listening? And that happened immediately before my Thursday
trip to Ajijic, five hours away on Lake Chapala.
The
autopista between Melaque and Ajijic on Lake Chapala is a
scenic, state-of-the-art toll road, with two lanes each way
and a hundred yards of grassy median in between. After crossing
a desert that’s actually a dry glacial lake, it approaches
Lake Chapala through the magnificent Sierra Madres, offering
a grandeur that no eye can remain indifferent to. Of course,
I didn’t get there.
It’s
now Friday, and for the second night in a row I’m ensconced
in a hotel room in Ciudad Guzman, halfway to my destination.
A mechanic here spent a day and a half restoring my engine
after it overheated on the highway. If there are no further
hiccups, I’ll be able to resume the journey at first
light tomorrow. Meanwhile, I’m reflecting on this spate
of ‘bad luck.’
If,
as the Bible says (that’s an “if” of logic,
not of doubt), God made the world and all that’s in
it, and described it as “very good” (Genesis 1:31),
then why is it that everything eventually breaks down? Often
at the most inconvenient time! And why, as I read the news,
do many Americans and Canadians think their respective democracies
are also breaking down and tending towards oligarchic power?
But you don’t need my list of “Why?”s. You
undoubtedly have your own, and yours are more important to
you than mine are. So let’s get on with a consideration
of the question: Why do things go bad? Why, as the Scottish
poet Robbie Burns observed, do “the best laid schemes
o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley”?
Certainly,
a lot of life’s ills can be attributed to carelessness,
greed, stupidity and malice. And a lot more can be attributed
to successive generations of inadequate parenting. But if
God made the world “very good”, none of those
reasons can explain the latest drought that appears on your
news screen, or the young skater who was killed by a stray
hockey puck.
Most
of my Christian friends view the vicissitudes of life through
the words of St Paul, who says that “all things work
together for good for those who love God” (Romans 8:23).
(A textual variant reads: “In all things God works for
good for those who love him.”) I believe that –
in the long run – but to many that belief may seem naïve,
because in the short run we very often don’t see how
it can be so. On the other hand, was it just dumb luck that
my car broke down near the only highway vendor within miles,
and that the vendor knew of an excellent mechanic located
near the closest interchange? And was it just dumb luck that
I had in my suitcase the pair of tweezers needed to remove
the piece of broken key when the mechanic was locked out of
his building this afternoon? Was Hamlet right when he said,
“There’s a providence that shapes our ends, rough-hew
them as we will?”
Others
propose that trials are sent by the devil to tempt us, or
by God to test us or to teach us, But those options may also
stretch your “willing suspension of disbelief.”
The famous American preacher A. W. Tozer once told me: “Providence,
young man, is God playing his checkers – not as our
competitor, of course, but to win the game for all of us.
I Like Tozer’s analogy, but I have to admit that the
strategy in God’s checker moves often escapes us.
Next
day, Saturday. Reached Ajijic at last, but not without a two-hour
delay while a tow truck removed from the roadway the second
half of a double tractor-trailer that had somehow managed
to stray into the median off a perfectly straight highway.
Underling
all the explanations posed above, is the idea of the will
and purposes of God. But in the midst of that perspective
– alongside Einstein’s assurance that God does
not play dice with the universe – the Bible offers a
most curious statement that seems to contradict any notion
of providence. The writer says:
I have seem something else under the sun: The race is not
to the swift nor the battle to the strong, nor does food
come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favour to
the learned, but time and chance happen to them all. (Ecclesiastes
9:11)
To
most of us, I expect, the writer’s observations seem
self-evident. They are also consistent with physicists’
discovery of the randomness of elementary particles. (More
on that later.) So although I can believe that God “sustains
all things by his powerful logos” (Hebrews 1:3), that
belief must not be allowed to reduce our picture of events
to a cosmic puppet show, or our concept of God to a Grand
Puppeteer. For the Bible acknowledges that what we have facetiously
come to call Murphy’s Law (with apologies to Murphy,
whoever he was) really seems to happen. The problem, then,
is how to comprehend a world where God is good, wise and powerful,
but “time and chance happen to all.”
THE
BETA VERSION
I
offer for your consideration the thesis that this world, perhaps
this universe, is only the Beta version. Not in the sense
that God was experimenting with an app, of which he’ll
get the bugs out later. But in the sense that this physical
world in which we live out our temporary lives is itself temporary
and a preparation for something greater. That seems to be
where St Paul is going in the following passage:
I consider that the sufferings of this present time are
not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed
to us. For with anxious longing the creation waits eagerly
for the revealing of the children of God. For the creation
was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of
him who subjected it, to give us hope that the creation
itself will also be set free from its bondage to corruption
into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. (Romans
8:18-21)
Actually, you have to admit that, except when Murphy intervenes,
our present Beta version is often pretty good. But like every
good Beta, as Paul suggests, it should make us look forward
to the release of the Alpha. That’s why I waited until
now to mention that the writer of Hebrews 1:3 (above) identifies
the God who “sustains all things by his powerful logos”
with none other than Jesus: the God who came to live our kind
of life, who died (most gruesomely) our kind of death, but
who also rose again, revealing what can be our future kind
of life. Jesus’ resurrection is the prototype of the
Alpha version of our deepest longings. St John articulates
this in his first letter, where he writes:
Beloved, we are God’s children now, and it is not
yet apparent what we shall be. But we know that when Jesus
appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he
is. (1 John 3:2,3)
Even
given that hope, we still need to consider the question: Why
a Beta version? I think that question invites two considerations:
one deals with natural evils, like my car’s engine failure
or the devastations caused by weather events; the other deals
with the evils that people do.
Nature,
the physical world, is a temporary thing. It supports itself
by consuming itself; entropy actually serves a purpose. The
sun, as a result of its task of supporting life, will one
day burn out. Critters in the animal kingdom survive, or at
least some of them do for a while, by being part of one another’s
food chain. Without forest fires, floods, storms, the shifting
of tectonic plates and indeed the expansion of the universe,
the earth would be static and unliveable. In a universe where
nothing like that happened, nothing else could happen. If
the material of which my car’s engine is made was not
capable of breaking down when it overheated, no one would
have been able to fashion it into an engine in the first place.
When physicists discovered the random behaviour of sub-atomic
particles, we finally understood why “time and chance
happen to all.” But more importantly, that random behaviour
is the reason why the world, indeed the universe, is not a
dead place but alive in motion; it is the reason why things
can happen at all.
So
the vicissitudes of life are a necessary aspect of the physical
universe. But what about human evil? Where is the necessity
in that? There is a myth, or at least I think it’s a
myth, about fallen angels who exercised their freedom to rebel
against God. But myth or fact, it’s also a story about
us. As beings created in the image of God, our reason is a
reflection of God’s reason, our best values and instincts
reflect his love, compassion, and righteousness, and –
here’s the critical point – our freedom reflects
God’s absolute freedom. To have freedom in a world without
God would be a world where all things are permissible, but
to have a replica of God’s own freedom in God’s
own creation makes every one of us accountable. Without that
freedom, there could be no ultimate accountability. Conversely,
without the possibility of human freedom, we would have no
freedom.
It
is now Sunday, and time for a conclusion. So I propose that,
in God’s wisdom, this Beta world exists as a sort of
prep school where, in all the exigencies of life, we may learn
how to use the freedom that can become ours in the Alpha world.
If we accept that recurring lesson with appropriate humility,
we are assured that “we shall be like him, for we shall
see him as he is.” In that blessed Presence, nothing
will break down.
