Mark's Notebook


	Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt. - Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

Where Was God?

New York Times Opinion

Monday 10 January 2005, 11:15 am
Keywords: Christian Topics , News Articles

By William Safire

In the aftermath of a cataclysm, with pictures of parents sobbing over dead infants driven into human consciousness around the globe, faith-shaking questions arise: Where was God? Why does a good and all-powerful deity permit such evil and grief to fall on so many thousands of innocents? What did these people do to deserve such suffering?

Turn to the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible. It was written some 2,500 years ago during what must have been a crisis of faith. The covenant with Abraham - worship the one God, and his people would be protected - didn't seem to be working. The good died young, the wicked prospered; where was the promised justice?

The first point the Book of Job made was that suffering is not evidence of sin. Victims of this cataclysm in no way "deserved" a fate inflicted by the Leviathanic force of nature.

Job's gutsy defiance of God's injustice shows that it is not blasphemous to challenge the highest authority when it inflicts a moral wrong. Questioning God's inscrutable ways has its exemplar in the Bible and need not undermine faith.

Job's moral outrage caused God to appear, thereby demonstrating that the sufferer who believes is never alone.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/10/opinion/10safire.html?th