Among so many tragedies: where is God?

by Marcelo Brandão·March 20, 2019·4 min read

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The breakup of the Brumadinho dam and the massacre in the Suzano school, in Brazil. The cyclone in Mozambique. The fall of Boeing in Ethiopia and the mass shootings in the USA. It seems that I am citing some tragedies that have occurred in the last decade. But unfortunately they are some of what happened in 2019. And we are not even in the fourth month of the year!

I feel completely desperate when I find myself thinking about each of these situations. And I am also completely distressed when I repeatedly hear from Christians and non-Christians the same phrase. “Where is God in the midst of so many tragedies?”

I confess that when the Lord put in my heart that this should be the theme of this week’s post I felt distressed. It’s a very delicate subject and I asked God to tell me about anything else, so I’m afraid. However, I was extremely annoyed by the Holy Spirit to talk about it.

How does God think?

In our simplicity of reasoning and endless distance between the way we think and how God thinks, we try to question Him about why so many bad things happen in the world. We become pessimistic and annoyed at seeing so much suffering repeatedly. We ask ourselves and others about the fact that God is so good and does not interfere in these cases and we end up in doubt about whether He is really good or not.

One of the biggest problems is that we always try to put God inside a moral box created by ourselves. Mere mortals and devoid of knowledge. We try to judge God’s actions according to our law and our ways. And we still try to have our reason overriding the reason of Him.

When God speaks through the prophet Isaiah that His thoughts are higher than ours, He does not intend to just say that we can not see the wonders He has kept for us. But how we do not have the capacity to understand his judgments and his wisdom, much less judge his actions.

Is 55:8 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.
(9) “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts”.

Rm 11:34 “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?”

Is it really God’s fault?

Once we understand that the wisdom and justice of God are far greater than we can imagine and understand, we must also speak about our part in all this. It is much easier and more convenient to put the blame on someone else or to make some excuse when we do something wrong. To exempt oneself from guilt in order not to suffer the consequences is something established within the perverse heart of the human being. You may wonder, but what does this have to do with these disasters? I answer: absolutely everything.

Gn 1:26 “Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground”.

God loved us so much that He made us mankind ion His image. We are like God, that is, completely free. This means that we have the option of treading our ways in doing what He tells us to do or go in the opposite direction. Many, however, rejected the Creator to live their own ways. And this has a direct impact on many of these tragedies. To blame God for human negligence on the safety of a dam or even on aircraft is much easier than blaming ourselves for having been negligent in these details. Maybe we did not overlook something that had such an impact. But do we often do so in lesser situations?

To blame God for a young man shooting in a school is also much easier than to accept that we do not always strive to take the love of God or even to pray for so many young people and adults who do not know Heavenly Father’s love.

May the grace and the mercy from the Lord be with you all, in Jesus name! Amen.