“While everybody was asleep an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat.”
Recently, in the middle of the night, Lee Strobel’s interview of Charles Templeton came to mind. Templeton was a Canadian journalist in the 60’s and 70’s, well known for his atheism. He had been a preacher, at one time the pulpit partner of renowned evangelist Billy Graham, but something had happened and Strobel wanted to find out what.
Templeton told him the turning point came when he saw a photo in Life magazine. It pictured an African mother during a horrible drought holding a dead baby and looking up to the sky with the most forlorn expression. And Templeton lost his faith in a loving God. All this woman needed was rain and God didn’t deliver.
I then thought of a picture that had haunted me. It was also from an African drought. A small starving toddler crouched on the ground, obviously near death, while a vulture stood beside him, waiting.
We are moved at such sights of dying children, but they are just graphic extremes of the fate we all share. Is not the sight of a demented mind in an old, withered body crying out and drooling in a nursing home likewise tragic? Death, and most likely suffering, await us all.
When God is so seemingly absent, how can we think He cares about our individual life and intervenes in it?
I believe Templeton, and probably most of us, make a critical error. We presume God is in absolute control of the world. But is He?
In his parable recorded in Mat. 13:24-30, Jesus says “an enemy” sowed weeds among the wheat. This, of course, is an illusion to the work of the devil in the world. It started with the serpent sowing seeds of doubt about God’s goodness in the minds of Adam and Eve. Those seeds flourished and blossomed into all the pain and suffering we see. God was not in control of the serpent’s nor of Adam and Eve’s actions.
When God created the world, he chose NOT to be in control of everything. He could have made humans to be automatons that move at every command he whispers, but without a choice, there is no love. A response done out of instinct cannot be love. Despite the proliferation of so-called AI girlfriends, a digitally produced “I love you” is meaningless to us.
And so for the sake of love, God risked taking his hands off the wheel to let others drive. He created God-like beings capable of love and therefore with the capacity of free will. Although it was a huge gamble–one that opened the possibility to the terrible consequences of sin, evil and pain–God apparently felt that having children like you and me was worth it. Furthermore, if there was a crash, he had a plan.
God created us out of love and he redeems us out of love. When the workers in the parable realize weeds are infesting the field, they ask the farmer if he wants them rooted out. Similarly, we are tempted to respond to the work of the enemy by asking God to use his power to blast away all pain and evil . But God says, “No, for then I would hurt everyone. It would not be love.”
We tend to conceive of a controlling God, a God of power, sometimes a God to cringe before in fear. But Jesus turns our understanding of God upside down. The splendour of God’s essence is not power but love (scriptures on the preeminence of love). God subordinates his power to his love.
So instead of coming as a mighty conquering warrior, Jesus came in weakness. Instead of annihilating suffering, Jesus makes himself vulnerable to it. Instead of destroying his enemies, he allows them to kill him in the most excruciating, humiliating death–all for the sake of love.
Clearly, in many ways, God lets this world be. Wars, violence, pain and suffering go on unabated. But God has a plan. Evil will be vanquished, but not by a way which humans understand. It will be destroyed God’s way, a way that is seen in his marching orders to us, “Do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good (Rom. 12:21)” “As you do,” he promises,” I will be with you–even through the valley of the shadow of death.”
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