Does God intervene when bad things happen?
- May 10th, 2012
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I recently set up a facebook page with an athiest friend of mine called The God Question specifically for debating the theological.
On that page I posted a link to a program I’d found interesting that I’d seen the previous evening on BBC4: Ancient Apocalypse: Sodom and Gomorrah – Were Sodom and Gomorrah real cities, destroyed by a landslide caused by an earthquake?
And then my atheist friend posted this comment:
Odd that a supposedly merciful god should have been so upset by what happened in Sodom and Gomorrah, yet evidently felt no need to intervene in the holocaust. I’ll deliberately invoke Godwin’s law on this one. Did god think the nazis weren’t bad enough to warrant intervention, or did he not exist enough to intervene?
There’s an awful lot covered in that comment so I felt the need to put my thoughts down in this blog instead. I hope he enjoys reading it.
So first off, the Sodom & Gomorrah incident happened in Old Testament times.
The Old Testament was always meant to be superceded by the New Testament. The Old Testament was the old way, the old covenant, the old promise. That promise being that if a person seeks righteousness he will inherit God’s blessing. Unfortunately, being human, that promise was never going to be fulfilled properly, because people being people, even the best of us so often choose to go our own way instead of doing the right thing.
The Old Testament demonstrates that we don’t have it within ourselves to exceed our nature. It demonstrates why we needed a New Testament where we are reliant on God’s grace and forgiveness, and not our own efforts. After all, even in the supposed “civilised” western world, we still have the poor, we still have wars and we still have oppression. The biggest business on the planet is the arms industry which continually develops ever more efficient ways to kill people and in ever bigger numbers too.
Before Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed Abraham talked to God and asked him if he found any righteous people in the cities, would he still destroy them? Abraham knew his relative Lot lived there, so I guess he was worried. In any case, God said that he wouldn’t and so Lot escaped.
God does care about us all, but he gave us free will too. We can seek to do the right thing, or only look out for our own interests, which causes pain and grief to others. If we know what’s right, yet we still willfully continue to go our own way, then punishment shouldn’t come as a surprise. The people of Sodom and Gomorrah were a scourge upon the rest of the earth, and so they were culled.
Why does this not happen nowadays? Because we now live in the time of the New Testament, and we have the Old Testament to look back on for reference.
Previously, very few people directly benefited from the blessing of God’s holy spirit. Generally these were the prophets, whose job it was to lead the Jewish nation. Since Jesus’ time though, as part of the new promise/covenant/agreement, God’s spirit has been poured out in abundance on many more people. Paul refers to this as some sort of down payment, or guarantee and you can see this in born again christians today. Atheists tend to refer to these people as “faith heads”, those who have an unshakeable belief in God, and it is the job of these “faith heads” to represent God on earth.
As we know, evil prospers when good men do nothing. Part of a faith head’s job is to stand up against such evil as the third reich, although that’s not something exclusive to them. Many times people of all creeds have felt the need to make huge personal sacrifices for the common good showing enormous courage and heroism in the face of such threats. That is the spirit overcoming the flesh, or God intervening.
That’s not a cop out though, because I believe God also still intervenes directly in everyday life as well, and the extent of that also depends on us.
As mentioned earlier, we do not seem to be able to escape the darker side of our nature by ourselves, but this is where God’s mercy comes in. Despite failing to reach his perfect standards, we can choose to seek him out and accept him into our hearts whereupon he will freely give us the gift of his spirit. This is entirely regardless of our past misdemeanors.
That God intervenes in this way in people’s lives is beyond doubt, and you only have to talk to any born again christian about their conversion experience to hear how it totally changed their lives. Their family and friends will also bear witness to these people changing dramatically after this event in their lives. Whether you believe God exists or not, these people have found “God” and it has touched them.
Unfortunately, the Nazi’s were not the kind of people to seek out God being far too interested in themselves and their own “Master” race so they never felt God’s touch on their hearts. Neither did they learn their lesson from history. Their evil will not go unpunished if not necessarily in this life.
God also answers prayers. Now I’m sure many skeptics will debate this, and there have been many studies done into whether prayer helps ill people get better or not, with varying results, and both sides to the argument claiming victory. With Fabrice Muamba’s recent ill health, this topic has become current again, as his fiance claimed she could feel people’s prayers working. Certainly, he has made nothing short of an amazing recovery.
You may think that’s controversial, well how about this: God answers atheists’ prayers too. I have personally known several people, previously atheists, who reached out to God and experienced him come in to their life. I believe that any athiest who is truly searching for the truth should genuinely try this and ask God into their lives. Certainly, I can’t think of a better way of answering the question as to whether or not God still intervenes in people’s lives.
God Bless All.
