QUESTION AND ANSWER
Is God Cruel?
This is a very serious question for a great many people who find life very difficult indeed. They read in the creed of "God the Father Almighty" and they say: "If I were a father I would not treat my children like God treats me".
There is no doubt that there are very many people who have a most terrible time and one only has to think of the terrible holocaust under Hitler in Nazi Germany to realise that even our most painful sufferings are not to be compared to what so many had to go through as a result of man's inhumanity to other people.
The response of some people - for example David Jenkins - is to suggest that God does not get involved in his world. But, if that were true, what would the whole idea of "god" really mean to us?
The first thing we have to think about is exactly what the omnipotence of God really means. ft does not mean that god always gets his way in the world for, if that were true, God would certainly be a devil. When God made the world He limited Himself by giving man free will and
that involved not only the possibility of a free response to His love but also the liberty to reject God and goodness - and to mess up the lovely world which God had made as well as harm to other people.
But there is another important point to think about when we consider the evil in the world - and especially the evil which does not appear to have been caused by other human beings. We need to recognise the importance of the great stories of the early chapters of Genesis. There we read that man's disobedience caused a major fault in the whole of creation because man is that important. We are made in the image of God and that is why our corporate disobedience had such catastrophic consequences.
But God is still concerned and involved. he does intervene in a way that we cannot always understand and, as it says in romans 8:28, "We know that in everything god works for good with those who love Him". It needs real faith to take that on board but, if we do, we find peace.
John Pearce is Rector of Limehouse.