Part 4 – Word Count – 879          Reading time – 4 minutes

This brings us to the question of the mass killings ordered by God in the Old Testamen of the Bible. While it may be easy to write off the killing of millions of Jews during Hitler’s reign as the work of pure evil, how does one reconcile the military action God ordered against the Philistines that was meant to erase all of them from the face of the earth?  And what is the justification for the catastrophic  event where God rained brimstone down on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, wiping out the populations of both. How could a loving and just God do such things?

Well first, God doesn’t have to justify His action to us. This planet and all that is on it is His creation. That makes Him the Boss of everything. He gets to say what is good and what is evil. He gets to create the laws and determine what is just. He knows the purpose for everything from beginning to end and sees things from a perspective that we are unable to share.

Nevertheless, I find it helpful to look at the whole of humanity the same way one would look at a human body. As an organism comprised of billions of individual cells, each performing a specific function that all work in harmony so the body can efficiently carry out its functions as it moves towards its ultimate purpose. In the body of humanity, we people are the cells, each one adding its own individual energy and ability to the tasks of the whole..

Cancer in the human body impacts the body at the cellular level to the extent that individual cells are devastated. Cancer spreads from one cell to another, causing massive deterioration of whole systems, or groups of cells in the body, leading to death in many cases. When an individual is diagnosed with cancer the common treatment is to destroy the cancer cells to allow the healthy cells to maintain their normal function and enable the body to heal.

In the body of humanity, evil is the cancer that destroys its cells and creates the diseases in our societies that render us incapable of performing at our highest level and if left untreated could potentially bring about the total devastation of morality. Evil is the cancer that corrupts and debilitates individuals, who then spread it throughout entire cultural groups, societies, and even civilizations. As with the human body, the cancer that eats away at the health of civilization has to be eradicated in order for the remaining cells (individuals) to retain or regain health.

When we look at who the people were in the Old Testament that got destroyed we see that they were horrendously evil and had the potential to infect more and more individuals, including the Israelites, God’s chosen people. To me, the eradication of those people was like chemo therapy. Killing off the bad cells so the good cells can be healthy.

So, where is God in all of this? I believe He is present in all of it if we want Him to be. He is there before the suffering. God has provided an instructional manual that spells out what we can do to avoid the suffering that comes from living outside of the will of God. He is there during the suffering. God understands suffering. Christians believe in the triune nature of God, that He exists as 3 separate persons in one Being, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This means that He has not only felt the anguish and torture experienced in the flesh of Jesus Christ during His crucifixion, but He also experienced the heart breaking despair of a father as they witness their child treated with unmentionable cruelty. In the midst of your suffering, you can turn to God for comfort because He is compassionate, and He has felt what you feel. God is there at the end of suffering. Through the work of Jesus Christ on the cross. for any of us God has provided a mechanism that offsets punishment we have earned through our sins, offsetting the eternal suffering that will be imposed on those who choose to reject His help.

Until we are willing to accept our part in a world with so much suffering, and strive to actually do something to improve things we have no right to blame God for not using His power to make things the way we think they ought to be. Besides, if God were to eliminate all the suffering in the world today there would just be more tomorrow. The reason for this is that eliminating suffering is different from eliminating the cause of suffering. Unless we are willing to ask the question, where are we in all the suffering, we don’t have the right to ask where God is in all the suffering. If we all were to turn our backs on evil in this world and live according to God’s law as shown in the Bible we would be able to eliminate most of the suffering in the world.  When we see what suffering remains after we do our part to eliminate it, then we can ask God about the rest.