A Spacious Place

     Read Psalm 66:8–20

     The writer of Psalm 66 exhorts his readers to “bless our God, O peoples; / let the sound of [God’s] praise be heard, / who has kept us among the living / and has not let our feet slip” (vv. 8–9) But then he qualifies this pronouncement of confidence a little when he writes, “For you, O God, have tested us; / you have tried us as silver is tried. / You brought us into the net; / you laid burdens on our backs; you let people ride over our heads; / we went through fire and water; / yet you have brought us out to a spacious place” (vv. 10–12).

     There is a school of thought in theological circles that claims suffering and evil can be explained by saying that God allows trials and testing as character-building factors. God tests us the way the psalmist says: “You have tried us as silver is tried.” Precious metals such as gold or silver are routinely passed through the fire of forge or crucible to remove impurities and make the resultant metal, once it has cooled, more precious than ever. For these theologians, the things we interpret as evil—e.g., cancer, hunger, communicable diseases—are really only the fire of testing. We will come through these flames stronger and purer than before, even if the end process takes place not in this life but the next.

     I cannot accept this line of reasoning. In my opinion, it falls apart with the first dead child. The little girl who succumbs to leukemia or is abused by a close relative or gets murdered or killed by a drunk driver is not an instrument in somebody else’s character formation. She is a person in her own right, and there is nothing just in her early death. The idea that she is the means to another end is itself an abhorrent notion, and to claim that God uses her as such a means is blasphemous.

     When you get rid of the notion that God is an outside actor who influences events in the world from far away, a lot of the problems related to theodicy—the question of how evil can exist in a world created by an all-powerful and all-loving deity—go away. God is not all-powerful, at least not in that sense of coercion or orchestration of the affairs of the world. God’s power, as I have said many times before, is of the persuasive variety. God accompanies creation as we evolve and change and make vital decisions, and God seeks to lure us into paths that will lead to everyone’s greatest flourishing. We then have the choice of whether to follow God’s perfect will or go our own self-centered and less-than-ideal way.

     In other words, God uses the divine power to lure us forward into a good path, but we have the power to say no and choose differently. And most all of our suffering and what we interpret as evil springs from those choices. God desires for all people to coexist in equal dignity, but some of God’s creatures come up with the absurd notion that those with blond hair and white skin are superior and do their best to eliminate or enslave everyone who doesn’t meet that standard. God wants a cluster of cells to maintain a healthful pattern of reproduction, but those cells, with the limited amount of freedom they possess, become malignant and begin to grow and metastasize. The world (including us) keeps evolving, and mutations happen. But God accompanies us in our evolutionary journey, always seeking our best and, like a divine GPS device, recalibrating when we choose a less optimal route. That’s how I understand the relationship between God and the world. God works in all things to bring about goodness, beauty, and growth.

     It’s true that we will go through many tribulations during our sojourn on earth, and they can sometimes feel like a trial by fire—going through fire and water before God brings us out to a spacious place. But the promise of God is that the spacious place is our destination. God does not design the world to make us suffer, but, circumstances being what they are, suffering is inevitable. Nobody gets a free ride; we all have burdens laid on our backs. But someday those burdens will be lifted from our shoulders, people will no longer ride over our heads, we will escape the net that has ensnared us, and we will gambol like lambs in a grassy meadow. We will luxuriate in the spacious place God has been preparing for us from time immemorial.

     Bless our God, O peoples; / let the sound of God’s praise be heard!