why God did not spare Haiti

Please understand from the onset that this is not, in any way, meant to dismiss the incredible amount of suffering and pain that has occurred, and will continue to occur, in Haiti.  I call upon all believers in Christ to respond with compassion and care for this suffering people.  Pastors and Church leaders too often arrogantly and self-righteously pronounce  that God is judging a people because of their rebellion and sin without once lifting a finger to care for them in their time of need.  The Church must receive and deliver a fuller vision of God’s work on this earth and this is my full intent today.

I entitled this post “why God did not spare Haiti” in hopes that it might cause some of you enough discomfort to read the blog.  My hope was such because I suspect that most people in the world, including most Christians, would have some difficulty with me “blaming” God for what took place in Haiti.  When natural disasters strike the earth, we tend to fall into two camps: First, there are many who turn against the notion of God altogether and proclaim that such events clearly indicate that He cannot exist.  ”If God is good and God is great then the persistence of evil and the death of the innocent clearly indicates that there is no God,” they say.  Secondly, there are those who eagerly try to protect God and remove Him from the scene.  ”Because God is good and God is great and because He loves people so much, there is no way that He could ever have anything to do with something that took the life of so many,” they state.

There is much to say in defense of the biblical teaching that God is sovereign over all of creation, over all of nature, and over every breath that comes in and out of His creatures [Daniel 2:20; 4:17; Proverbs 21:1; Psalm 2:2-4; Psalm 33:10-11; 135:5-7; 148:7; Job 1 & 2; 42:11; 1 Peter 3:17; Deuteronomy 32:39; James 4:13-16; Mark 4:39].  But I’ll simply allow these verses to defend such for now.  There is also much to say in response to, what I believe, are 2 erroneous responses given above.  To adequately respond to such would take a large amount of space and words that blogs do not allow.  And so, I’ll send you to a more in-depth resource to study if you so desire to look deeper into these things.  [http://www.desiringgod.org/media/pdf/books_bssg/books_bssg.pdf]

For now, I feel I need to give answer to the title of the blog, “Why God did not spare Haiti”:

1) God did not spare Haiti because He is a holy God and is just and true.  God is in control and He justly deems what is right and good and true to do and does it.  The creature has no right to question the Creator’s divine will.  (see the Lord’s long response to Job’s similar doubts – Job 38-41).

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?  Tell me, if you have understanding.”

We too often see what takes place in Haiti and squirm because God would dare bring harm to His beloved humans.  Such a view indicates that we have far too high a view of humanity and to low a view of God – one of the true curses of being born in the 21st century Western world.  As sinful beings, we deserve nothing but death.  That God’s grace allows Haitians, or North Carolinians for that matter, to continue to live in direct rebellion against His perfect law is the real mystery.  We’re asking ourselves, “why Haiti?”.  We should be asking ourselves, “why not me?”  Sadly, our humanistic society has placed man at the center of worship and, therefore, man struggles with any harm he encounters because of this distorted view of reality.  But God does not exist to serve man.

2) God did not spare Haiti because He loves the Haitian people. We live in darkness – blinded by our fleshly appetites, enslaved by worldly vices, and comforted by deceptive security.  Apart from God penetrating into our rebellious condition and enlightening us to see our need of Him (see 2 Cor. 4:4-6), we all are certain to die not once but twice.  The second death (Revelation 20:14) awaits all those who refuse to turn from their wickedness and trust Christ alone for their salvation.  And God’s voice is able to be heard much more clearly in our most painful circumstances.  C.S. Lewis reminds us,

“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pain:  it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

He desires that the people of Haiti turn from their wickedness, repent of their sins, and experience the abundant life that only Christ can offer (John 10:10) and thus He willingly subjects them to tremendous pain and suffering – that they might turn their hearts to Christ.

3) God did not spare Haiti because He loves the rest of the planet.  This is not just about Haiti any more than 9/11 was only about America.  On 9/11 God was saying the same thing to Europe, Africa, and beyond that He was trying to get through to us:  ”Repent and turn to me or you also will likewise perish” (see Luke 13:1-4).  The sudden nature of a terrorist attack or an earthquake are meant to cause all the world to examine the fragile nature of their lives and to take stock in who or what they’re living for.  They are meant to stir us into falling on our faces and turning to the only One who can save us and extend mercy and forgiveness to us.

4) God did not spare Haiti in order to bring glory to His Son.  Jesus is magnified through the death and suffering in Haiti in many ways.  First and foremost, we are reminded of His own suffering and death.  We are reminded that the God of the universe suffered, bled, and died that we may no longer live our lives for our own selfish pursuits but for Him.  He alone deserves to be worshipped.  He alone deserves our adoration and praise.  Secondly, suffering around the globe gives opportunity for Jesus to be magnified through His people.  As His chosen ones extend themselves, sacrifice their resources and time, and in His Name love those who are suffering, hearts are turned to the Savior.  Finally, suffering gives those who are suffering the opportunity to proclaim to the rest of the world, “take my possessions, my loved ones, and everything this earth has to offer me.  I still have Jesus and so my heart will rejoice for I treasure Him most.”  (see Philippians 1:21; Galatians 2:20)

We must begin to see God’s sovereign purposes in suffering, examine our hearts and our lives, repent of our own sinful rebellion, suffer in such a way that Christ is magnified as the one Treasure of our lives, and respond to the suffering around us by offering the love of Christ to those in need.

my prosperity gospel nausea

I recently came across this quote from Joel Osteen, best-selling author of the book Your Best Life Now and pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston, TX.

“I’m not called to explain every minute facet of Scripture or to expound on deep theological doctrines or disputes that don’t touch where people live.  My gift is to encourage, to challenge, and to inspire.”

Hmmmm.  Have I pointed out that Osteen’s church meets in an arena that seats 16,000 people and that each week 40,000 people come to hear him speak?  Have I shared that, according to Nielsen Media Research, Osteen is the most watched inspirational figure in America each week?  That his sermons are viewed in every television market in America and watched by 7 million people every week and viewed in over 100 nations around the world every week?  That he will be speaking at Dodger stadium in April of this year?  That Your Best Life Now sat on the NY Time’s bestseller list for more than 2 years and has sold more than 4 million copies to date?   That Barbara Walters named him one of the 10 most influential people in 2006 and Church Report Magazine named him their most influential Christian in the same year?

I could write pages on why I believe the prosperity gospel is simply a man-centered way of turning God into the benevolent genie-in-the-sky we all want Him to be.   But, I’ll just take issue today with a man who represents God, weekly speaks on God’s behalf to millions across the world, and produces a best-selling book under the guise that God is speaking through him – a man of God who confesses he is no theologian (one who studies the nature of God) or is concerned with the “minute facets of Scripture”.  Seriously? Pastor Osteen stands in front of millions around the world every single week and isn’t concerned about who God really is or what God has to say.

I suppose if the one message you’ve got sells out arenas and sells best-selling books and allows you to live in a 5000 square foot house in one of Houston’s most luxurious neighborhoods – then why dig any deeper?  After all, trying to discover who God is or what God wants or what the Bible in its totality has to say might cause you to stumble across God saying things like, “it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” [Matthew 19:24] or “whom have I in heaven but you?  and earth has nothing i desire besides you” [Psalm 73:25] or “in this world you will have trouble” [John 16:33] or “now I rejoice in my sufferings” [Colossians 1:24].

Tertullian once wrote, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”  When we look at this in light of Christ’s ministry and John 12:24 – “…unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed.  But if it dies, it produces many seeds” – it seems to me to indicate that God’s plan from the beginning has been that life would come from suffering and death;  that Christ’s death produced life for those He redeemed and those He redeemed are to sacrifice their lives in order to produce life in this world.  For two thousand years, the kingdom has grown as the genuine faith of suffering saints was being put on display to a lost world.   The world observed that these persecuted ones treasured Christ above all things.  And now, a new kingdom grows on the expanding wallets of prosperous saints whose eyes are still fixated on the treasures of this earth.

What kingdom is this?  And who does it belong to?

a plea to parents

I apologize for the length of this post.  I challenge every parent to take the time to read it though.

I sat stunned.  Attempting to muster words was a bit difficult and I still to this day regret my response.  I simply laughed.  A small suppressed giggle quickly became a full-blown-knee-slapping-I-feel-like-my-ribs-are-broken roar of laughter.  Now she was stunned.  She quickly reached for her purse, grabbed my office door, and slammed it on the way out.  Sadly, she would avoid contact and communication with me for the last 7 months of my tenure.  Sadder still – we barely saw her son after that point.

Her son Billy (the names are being disguised for obvious reasons) had begun to fall in love with Jesus.  Quite honestly – I’ve seldom been witness to such a dramatic transformation.   Billy was, in every sense of the word, a superstar on his high school campus.  Handsome, athletic, funny, and smart are pretty favorable marks for the judges that make up the all important peer competition committee.  He was living the American dream.  Billy was juggling a beautiful girlfriend, a sport each season, a difficult academic load, various extracurricular school involvements, and an occasional church commitment with remarkable consistency and fervor.  Who knew he was dying inside.

Billy had surprised me, and others, with his acceptance of my personal invite to our summer youth retreat  between his junior and senior year of high school.  Youth group was probably the only place Billy’s star did not shine.  He had largely neglected his peers at church – attending Sunday School fairly regularly but little more than that.  He would later admit that he had always viewed this group as a collection of social misfits and high school rejects and had little desire to taint his image by including them in his life.  That and his schedule simply wouldn’t allow it.  So, his  willingness to come was both stunning and incredibly exciting.  I prayed for this kid and this retreat with a renewed sense of passion.  I sensed God had to be doing something if Billy was willing to lower himself to join us for a week at the beach.

And the Lord was.  It took less than 24 hours for Billy’s magnetic personality to cause the students to rally around him.  It wasn’t clear at first whether Billy was getting anything out of the talks but enjoying those around him was most definitely not a problem.  It wouldn’t be until the last night of our trip that I discovered Billy had been paying attention to God for quite a while.  We had finished our final session by taking a realistic look at how Christ suffered during the passion.  Many of the kids and adults were moved to tears.  The expression on Billy’s face led me to believe that I had lost him in the end.  He seemed bothered by the emotions surrounding him and unmoved by the message of the cross.

I could not have been more wrong.  The kids had long dispersed and headed for their final night on the beach and I sat alone on the steps of the cottage – trying to still my heart long enough to embrace the Lord in the first quiet moment I had been blessed with since my arrival 6 days earlier.  I soon saw a figure walking towards me from the beach and was quickly  able to tell by the athletic gait that it was Billy.  ”Oh, great, he’s clearly had enough.  Here we go,” I briefly thought to myself.  And then it happened.

“Todd, do you mind if I talk to you?” came from a trembling voice that was clearly lacking the boldness and confidence it had carried throughout the week.  Billy would spend the next hour pouring out his heart and revealing an emptiness inside that no one else could see.  He had been living his life to please his parents, girlfriend, coaches, teachers, and peers and the constant demands of such had left him wanting something more.  And he had found that something this week – not merely in the fellowship of believers but in Christ himself.  ”I just realized this week that my entire existence is being lived for Billy or for others and not Christ.  I just want to be free from all this other stuff and live my life like this.  I want to spend time with these guys everyday and hear you talk about Jesus everyday and read my bible every morning and…” his words had begun to produce tears now and as I placed my hand on his shoulder, he began to sob.  Several minutes passed before he was able to gain control of his tongue and his heaving lungs produced, “Jesus has done so much for me and I’m able to somehow ignore him and love everything else but him.”

I prayed with Billy that night and counseled him further on what life could look like back home if he seized the opportunity to live the radical life Christ had called him to live at home, school, church, and in his community.  I remember driving back home and looking in the rearview mirror at his beaming face in the back row of the van and having to fight back the tears as I considered the work of the gospel of grace in his heart.  I was so excited to get home and to pour more and more into Billy and watch him impact his world for Jesus Christ throughout his senior year.

A month had gone by when his mother knocked on my door and asked if she could speak with me.  I had been expecting her visit and anticipating a joyful email from her for quite a while.  I should have known better.  ”Todd, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way.  I really do appreciate all that you’re trying to do for Billy,”  her trembling voice began.  She would spend the next several minutes explaining how she and her husband were simply concerned that Billy was beginning to lose his focus and “throwing his life away”.  Yep.  I don’t remember many of her words verbatim but that line has stuck with me throughout the years.  She further explained how Billy’s decision to end things with his girlfriend, cut down on some of his extracurricular involvements at school, and not play baseball in the spring had been “unsettling” for the family and that while they believed Jesus and church and such were obviously very important, “to just up and leave the rest of his life behind seems irresponsible and Jesus wouldn’t want that, would He?”.

She shared more but my mind had rudely gone to other places.  This was my first real encounter with something I would come to experience on numerous occasions in my 20 years of youth ministry – parents producing and maintaining idols in their kid’s lives.  Billy’s parents were determined for their son to be successful and popular.  And his social status in the world had become more important to her and her husband than the Lord they claimed to serve.  I don’t remember if she said something funny that caused my heart to laugh uncontrollably at her.  I know it was rude.  I know I now regret it.  I wish instead I would have simply cared for her and shared with her the many times in the gospels in which Jesus calls his disciples to leave all and follow Him.  Maybe Matthew 10:37 would have been appropriate, “Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me…”.

I only laughed.  She stormed out of my office.  Her husband wrote me a stern rebuke.  And Billy faded into the sunset of the American dream.  I sat in my office yesterday thinking about Billy and whether his adult years had distanced him enough from the idols of his parents that his passionate pursuit of Christ had been able to take place.  Or if he, too, had settled in and was simply adding another stone to the castle walls in his own kingdom.

tiger and piper

I had the opportunity last week to watch Tiger Wood’s press conference in which he admitted to being unfaithful to his wife and disappointing family, friends, and fans.  The press conference took an interesting turn several minutes into it when he turned his attention to his once held religious beliefs that he had failed to maintain:

“I have a lot of work to do, and I intend to dedicate myself to doing it.  Part of following this path for me is Buddhism, which my mother taught me at a young age.  People probably don’t realize it, but I was raised a Buddhist, and I actively practiced my faith from childhood until I drifted away from it in recent years.  Buddhism teaches that a craving for things outside ourselves causes an unhappy and pointless search for security.  It teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint.  Obviously I lost track of what I was taught.”

I’m not writing today in hopes of critiquing Tiger’s press conference or his sincerity.  I’ll let the many talking heads around me enjoy that feeding frenzy.  Instead, I’d like to simply say that while I’m appreciative of Tiger’s confession of wrong and desire for change – I’m saddened that the help he has chosen to seek at this time is still severely lacking the power needed to produce real, lasting change.

I agree that following every impulse of his flesh and developing self-control is most definitely a positive step.  But I’m afraid he’s missed the mark with his assessment that his desires for something outside himself are what have caused this downfall.  Instead, I would advise him that it is his own inwardly focused desires that have produced this destruction.  Tiger has become convinced, like so many Americans today,  that the power that he needs to overcome all obstacles is within him and that he only needs to reach deeper inside to the depths of his good and glorious spirit to produce the good that his mama knows is there.

Tiger, go as deep as you possibly can and you will only find more filth at the core of who you are.  Desire is not your issue.  It is that your desire centers on Tiger and not the One your soul thirsts for (Psalm 63).  Meditation and therapy are not your answers if both only turn you inward.  Dive deep into your being, see the depths of your depravity, and then look outside to the One who can truly satisfy every longing – Jesus Christ.

I firmly believe John Piper has it right when he says in his book A Hunger for God,

“If you don’t feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are satisfied.  It is because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world.  Your soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great.”

Sadly, I’m afraid too many of us are so consumed by our own greatness and our own worship that we never find that which was meant to satisfy us from the foundation of the world.

and so it begins

I asked a friend this simple question the other day, “how have you reconciled Paul and Jesus?”.  I had much to say on the subject.  You see, Jesus had spent the last few days prior to my question challenging me to question again the level of my commitment to Him.  And I had been so stirred that I decided to grab a red-letter Bible and determine just what the Lord’s general theme was.  It had been a while since I spent quality time in the gospels.  And so over a period of 2 days, I read Matthew and John.  And I came away asking myself the difficult question I posed to my friend.

The Lord’s message is consistently incredibly challenging.  He turns to those who seem to be eagerly desiring to follow Him and states that there is an incredible cost to following Him and it should be counted.   He must become more important than parents, family, children, lovers, comfort, security, riches,  indeed – everything.  And yet, I so often live my life and see my brothers and sisters living their lives as though Jesus expects nothing from us.  Right?

So, we’ve concluded that Paul speaks of God’s glorious work of grace as God delivering this message:  God expects nothing from you.  And we read the gospels and we have to come away believing that Jesus expects everything.  He never seems comfortable enough to give people the opportunity to make Him their part-time Lord.  So, what gives?  Did Paul misunderstand Jesus’ teachings?

Clearly, he didn’t.  The same God who blessed the pen of the gospel writers blessed the pen of the apostle Paul (see 2 Tim. 3:16).  I’m afraid God’s message hasn’t changed.  We’ve simply begun to interpret it differently.  We’ve begun to rely on a “grace” that isn’t entirely in line with how the Bible defines it.  We’ve begun to teach and preach what Bonhoeffer would describe as a “cheap grace”.  We’ve begun to convince people that how they live matters not simply because God is now in their debt because of their conversion experience.  In other words, God owes them forgiveness and must shower them with this form of grace the rest of their existence and into eternity.

It matters not that their appetites still rest in the things of this world and have not been cultivated for Christ.  It matters not that their actions reveal that they treasure the things of this world and not the Lord of the universe.  They have no love for God, no love for His Son, His people, His word, or His work on this earth.  But none of this matters because God owes them for their “faithful” response to Him.

This, to me, is a very unhealthy view of grace.  It is correct to say that we are saved only by the grace of God.  Paul in Ephesians 2:8-9 could not make this any more clear:  we are not, nor ever will be, saved by our good works.  Our only hope is the shed blood of Christ on the cross.  But grace extends far beyond this and we must begin to teach and preach it.  Grace is God coming to a people who do not love Him or want Him – a people enslaved by sinful appetites and guilty consciences.  And to some of these people (the Bible defines as His elect), God graciously pours out His Spirit.  And His Spirit does this incredible work in the hearts of God’s elect:  regenerating them, giving them new appetites that long for God and hate their sin, sanctifying them by the power of the Word that they might participate in the work God has prepared them to (see the verse immediately after Paul’s claim in Ephesians 2:8-9 that salvation is by grace through faith), enabling them to shine like stars in the universe (Philippians 2:15), holding them firm in their faith until the end, and then glorifying them with new bodies completely free from the presence of sin in the age to come.  This is God’s work and any work God does on our behalf is grace.

You may be comfortable claiming the Name of Christ and living like a pagan.  You may be comfortable speaking of God’s grace as though God owes you something and ignoring His commands to turn from your idolatry and live a life set apart for Him because you have a firm hold on the grace card that will allow you to enter eternity one day.  You may be comfortable with unchanging desires, appetites, and actions.  I’m afraid I can’t join you in that comfortable state.  Works will never be the cause of salvation and yet, at the same time, they will, according to the whole of Scripture, accompany such a salvation that God brings about in those He has chosen.