"God isn't Fixing This"

Does God Care? 

After yet another grievous shooting, the NY Daily News is releasing a controversial cover, proclaiming in plus-sized font "God isn't fixing this." Clearly this is meant as a rebuke to those who claim "their prayers are with the victims" yet don't do the things the NY Daily News feels they should in order to reduce gun crime. I'm not interested in the politics here, let alone the grandstanding. "He who sits in the heaven laughs," not at the plight of humanity, but at those who would mock Him or set themselves against His authority. More interesting is that scripture clearly both states that the wicked will receive what they deserve, and has the Psalmist crying out asking God why that doesn't seem to be happening.

For the issue at hand, it suffices to say that as Christians we know men are sinful by nature, and are not corrupted by the tools around them. Perhaps we should investigate the breakdown of the family, the increasingly nihilistic worldview poured into the minds of our children, and a society become so antagonistic to human nature that mass percentages of people feel it necessary to be on antidepressants, before we start blaming tubes of metal for magically corrupting humans that secular society supposes are inherently neutral or even inherently good.

But what I'm interested in here is their intentionally provocative claim. Is God really doing nothing? Is He indifferent to humans killing each other, or is He powerless to interfere in our free will? This is often posed as an unanswerable question (Does God lack the will to stop evil, in which case He is not good, or the ability to stop it, in which case He is not great), but actually there is a perfectly good answer, that can be expressed in various ways.

So then, if God does care, and He is powerful enough to act, then...

Why God Doesn't Stop Evil or Fix the World (My personal analogy)

Ancient Chinese weaponry: one iron and two bronze swords

A Bit about Bronze

In Taipei, there is a fascinating museum of Chinese antiquities. Called the "National Palace Museum," some of China's great cultural treasures are stored there, brought by the nationalists both to hang on to them and ostensibly to keep them from being destroyed by the communists, for whom desecrating symbols of class oppression was a popular pastime and sometimes required symbolic act of allegiance.

In this museum you can see everything from very ancient jade wheels to the gold and pearl finial topping an Emperor's crown, to a piece of stone shaped exactly like a piece of pork and the most famous of all, the jade cabbage. (The food culture here goes back a very long way)

Another thing you can see are ancient bronze weaponry: swords, spear points, etc.

Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. A game-changing discovery of antiquity, it afforded its users an advantage over those using merely copper weapons, and remained popular even well after iron weapons were developed.

Among the various reasons that iron weapons -initially inferior to their well-developed bronze counterparts- superseded them, was due to cost issues. Once iron-working was developed, the abundant iron ore meant iron weapons were cheaper than bronze, which required the importation of tin.

Why couldn't you just get tin from used bronze weapons? Because it doesn't work that way. To separate metals once they have been alloyed is an expensive and complicated process, and at least to my knowledge there was no way to do this on a large scale (possibly at all).

Even today, with complicated procedures that can do it, it's obvious that to remove the tin from a bronze weapon destroys the weapon for all practical purposes.

Alloyed with Sin

This world was made good. Humans, in choosing to sin and step outside of God's will for them, not only destroyed their own spiritual life, but wrecked up the world too, meant as a beautiful home for people living in harmony with God and each other. Sin is not evil varnish, it is a flaw that goes to the core of people and the world. To remove it, you cannot strip it off, you cannot cut it off like a frostbitten finger; to get rid of the sin, the thing once pure and now an alloy of itself and sin must be unmade.

This is true of both of us and the world. To be made new, as Christ makes all things new, we must first be Unmade. Dying that we shall live; baptism is the earthly acting out of this truth, but then for the rest of our lives we must be melted down, put into the fiery furnace so that God may skim off the dross, and coming out each time more pure. This is sanctification.

While Christians are typically aware of this, I find that many are unaware that the world is in an analogous situation. We aren't fallen people in an unfallen world, we brought the world down with us. It too must be unmade and cleansed from the corruption of sin, but that will be the end.

"Fixing" the alloy of sin. True gold fears no fire; don't be dross.

One Day

When tin is removed from the bronze sword, the sword is no more. When sin is removed from this world, the world will be no more. Suffering and injustice will be judged and come to an end, but so will everything else.

I think what people are really asking is more like: "Why doesn't God take all the bad parts out of the world and leave the good parts?" That question is easy:
1) He made the world without any bad parts, but free will meant we could screw that up, and we did
2) Outside of Christ, you are a bad part that would be taken out.
3) He's giving everyone a chance to choose His side before he does exactly what you are suggesting

The fiery end that Peter speaks of (2 Peter 3) will happen, and a new heaven and new earth will be made including all that was pure from the last one. There's a reason that day is spoken of both with hope and with respectful fear; when it happens, it is final. The beginning spoken of in Genesis has its ending in Revelation, and what happens after that is part of the next book.  Hope your name is in it, or rejoice if you know it is.

Until then, as Peter speaks of in that same passages, that God is delaying in destroying the world to burn the sin out is a mercy to those who still have a chance to choose Him, and neither weakness nor toleration of sin on His part. If the end came now, there would be no more suffering, but no longer any opportunity to repent while there is still time.

So we pray: Come Lord Jesus. But increasingly I find myself saying "but not just yet"--I have too many friends who may yet choose God before the end, and I still hope to see it. Ending the suffering in the world today means denying them of that chance, forever.