MISPLACED
If you’ve ever uttered the words “God how could you”, then this article is for you.
One morning in the middle of Pakistan during unrest in the city, a little girl and her mom were baking dinner when there was a knock at the door. The little girl not knowing any better, opened the door to find terrorists standing in front of her. They requested some water so she let them inside. The girl watched her mother be brutally murdered in a scene that is better left undescribed.
The terrorists reached for her to make her the next victim but just as they grabbed her wrist she heard a click. She looked back to see her father. He had pulled a gun, aimed right at the terrorist leader’s head. Checkmate. She was saved by the protection of her father.
But the terrorists did not give up that easy. Their anger burned against the father and the next day when the little girl was at school they approached her kindly and cunningly.
The enemy knowing how much it would hurt the father and desiring their ultimate destruction, convinced the little girl that she should be angry at her father for not creating a safer home for her. They told her that her father, not them, was ultimately responsible for her mother's death because her father had built the house and built the door.
Of course, the reality was that if the door was not built, there would be no freedom for the girl to go in or out. That did not cross her mind because she was so emotionally triggered by the events that had occurred.
He convinced her that what she should do is join their terrorist organization and help them attack other families. After all, there were other negligent fathers who had built doors that needed to learn a lesson so that no little girl would ever experience what she did. He was able to turn all of the pain she was experiencing against them and misplace it towards her father.
As soon as the terrorists got the little girl out of the protection of the father's house and into the Isis camp, they spent every day terrorizing her and making her forget her identity. She believed this was just how life was everywhere and didn't try to escape.
You would think she would run back to the father's house, but instead, her anger towards him burned more with every lashing she received from the terrorists. The father wept and wept and came to the gate every night calling for his little girl. She could hear his voice at first, but then she turned on music to drown it out.
Freedom, love, and healing were on the other side of the gate. She could easily walk to it and open the door but the lies she believed prevented her from doing it. The lies kept her locked in her own death chamber.
God created free will for the same reason the father created a door. It was made for our freedom. His purpose in making it was so that real love could flourish. There can not be true loving relationships without the ability to freely choose to love. A world of robotics would hardly be worth creating at all and definitely not capable of facilitating a world with real love.
Unfortunately, the Bible says that people began to violate the purpose of free will just as the terrorists violated the purpose of the door. The door was there to provide freedom for the girl to go out, but by nature of its existence, it provided a way for intruders to come in. The father could have chosen not to create the door, but by doing that would also have limited the freedom of the girl.
Our free will was created so that love could exist, but we violated its purpose and used it to act selfishly. Those selfish acts cause pain to other people. They caused damage to the natural world and even a curse on nature itself. The evil and pain we experienced were because of a perversion and violation of God’s purposes for freedom. Mankind joined God’s enemy, the prince of darkness.
But the terrorist of our souls (known as Satan) has been successfully convincing people for ages that the one to blame was God, their loving father. He has even convinced them that they should join him in his lawlessness and help in the rebellion against the father.
If we truly knew the intentions of the ‘soul terrorist’ we were serving, we would be sick to our stomach. Just like with the little girl, healing, love, and protection are available to us right on the other side of the gate, but we have turned the music up so loud we cannot hear our father’s desperate pleas for us.
We have forgotten what it means to be human, how we are supposed to be treated, what our inheritance is, and how loved we are. We can't figure out why we are anxious, depressed, and tortured while we are still living in the terrorist camp.
My plea to you today is to turn down the music. Listen to your father's voice. Are you sure you know who you are rejecting?
Analyze the lies you are believing. Do they really make sense? Are you blaming the right person or are you running away from love into the arms of death, willfully staying locked inside its grip.
The enemy has lied to you about the character of your father. He is to blame for the pain in your life. Your identity is as a beloved child of God. You have the power to take off the shackles, leave the enemy camp, and open the gate to your father's protection. As the age old statement goes, the truth will set you free.
As you reflect on this story, I’d like to share 3 powerful insights to guide you through it:
It doesn’t make logical sense
The logical response to pain is to hate the thing which causes pain, namely evil. Distance yourself from evil, not distance yourself from God, Goodness and Love.
The underlying fallacy is a belief that if you are experiencing pain it means that God is ok with that, turned a blind eye to it or caused it. But the scriptures say the opposite.
It says God is not apathetic towards us, rather, his heart breaks with ours. He never leaves us and he longs to gather us under his wings of protection and healing.
The Bible says God is:
The very personification of love
The perfection, fullness and originator of love
God says of you that:
He sustains you (in him we live and move and have our being)
His love and mercy towards you is infinite
It does not make logical sense to say the being who is the author, originator and perfection of love is unloving. The sentence itself is a logical fallacy. Love does not cause evil or harm. It is selfishness that causes evil and it is evil that causes pain.
It is not consistent with his character to believe he delights in or is apathetic towards your suffering. It does not make logical sense to push love away from us during times of pain.
A small caveat - I do believe God allows evil as a necessity of allowing freedom of will.
You can read more about that concept when you click below.
But allowing is very different than causing or being at fault for. God is not to be blamed for pain. Evil is to be blamed for pain.
Pain doesn't come from goodness. Pain comes from evil and lawlessness. I have never been hurt by someone loving me. Love by the very definition is putting someone else's needs ahead of your own.
If someone who claims to love you hurts you, they were not acting in love at the time of the hurt. They were acting out of obsession or selfishness.
What causes pain?
Being abandoned. Abandonment is the loss of love.
Betrayal by someone you trust. Betrayal comes from a lack of love.
Abuse, belittlements, or harsh words. The abuse stems from a lack of love.
If God is the personification of love, then abuse, abandonment, and loss can truly be said to be caused by a lack of God.
Distancing yourself from God because you hate evil and pain is like throwing out your vegetables because you don't like feeling fat and sick. It is the opposite of what you should be doing. Distancing yourself from McDonald’s would be a proper response, not distancing yourself from healthy food.
The fact that you were attacked while in your father’s home does not mean your father attacked you. You were attacked by an intruder. Running from God because of pain and giving your allegiance to the ruler of this world is the equivalent of thinking you can escape from your attacker by running away from the house of your father into the house of the attacker and locking yourself in with him.
It is blaming love for horrible experiences instead of a lack of love.
It doesn't make moral sense
By turning your allegiance away from God in the face of pain, you are literally serving and perpetuating the thing you hate. You may say following God leads to bad things (war, judgmentalism) and you may say self-rule is good, (everyone can decide for themselves what is good or bad) but if you follow this through to its real conclusion you won’t like where it leads.
Self-rule leads to relativism and subjective morality. When you do not give your allegiance to God, but instead decide you will live by your own set of rules and standards, everything becomes subjective. There is no longer any objective morality or truth by which to stake a claim.
The even bigger issue is that when I am at the center of my moral system, my moral system, which is based on self, leads to choices based on selfishness. (this can say when we- or you are at the center of your moral system)
God's system is based on unconditional love. The entire climax of the biblical story is even while we were in rebellion against him, he took our punishment, bore our pain, and died in our place on the cross. He loved us self-sacrificially; he didn't do what was best for himself but chose the thing that was the most selfless loving thing he could have done.
Something in us knows selfless love is deserving of honor. The scriptures say it is only when we mimic this selfless love of Christ that we are able to find our life and experience the richness he created us to experience in the community. It was only by sacrificial love that he could turn our hearts away from selfishness to see the beauty of his ways.
Lawlessness, self-determining morality, and subjective morality lead to evil because they, by definition, stem from selfishness/self-focus.
The center of self-rule is selfishness. You are basing your morality on yourself and the central decision-making factor is what you want, not what is best for others.
Relativism isn't consistent with how you really feel.
It may sound good to say “to each his own” and “everyone can decide for themselves what is good, evil, right or wrong.”
BUT it only sounds good when we are thinking about people who obey their conscience which is God's standards written on our heart.
When people disobey their conscience and cause pain to others, you will begin to find yourself not ok with relativism.
You will complain when someone isn't fair to you, but "fairness" itself is an objective moral principle. A standard set at a higher level than the individual is of God whom you reject. In relativism, if I don’t believe fairness is a moral standard I want to play by, I can just decide fairness is not a moral standard I value, so who are you to tell me to be fair and impose your morality on me? Who gets to decide being fair is a rule we should live by?
You might say you’re ok with that in theory, but I guarantee you will be upset if someone doesn't respect you or isn't tolerant of you. Respect and tolerance in relativism cannot be enforced because they only matter or apply to you if you believe they should have value. In relativism, who's to say one person's morality is less valid than your opinion?
We begin to open a can of worms that can lead to every evil under the sun. And evil, as we discussed, leads to every kind of pain.
It doesn’t make emotional sense
The biggest issue with blaming God for pain is that we are now clinging to a worldview that provides no hope, love, or power. Pushing away from God leads to more pain and delayed healing.
In order to get through the pain, we need a purpose bigger than ourselves to pull us through. Our creator provides this purpose.
We need to trust that we are loved, never alone, and never abandoned.
We need to trust in His power in order to have hope for a better future. Running from him is running from our healer. It is running from the arms of comfort that we desperately need.
***aside *** It has to be true to truly bring comfort. I am not suggesting that we should delude ourselves, but this article assumes that you believe he is real and rejects him on the grounds of pain. If you don't believe he is real, view my other posts to see if you find anything you may find helpful.
If you have been distancing yourself from God because you blame him for the pain in your life, I beg you to re-evaluate how you came to the conclusion that he was the one deserving of blame. I encourage you to restore your relationship with the father who loves you and bask in the healing and comforting arms of the love that sourced all love.