Q: If God really can bring an end to war so easily, then what is he waiting for? After all, the longer he delays, the more generations live and die in suffering.
Yes, they do, but it is reversible through the provision of resurrection. In time, former distresses will be forgotten, as though a bad dream.
One must not rush a trial. One must allow it to play out, distressing as it may be to those under the gun. For Witnesses, the question to be determined arose at the very beginning of human creation, with Adam rejecting God’s right to rule for his own. God could eliminate them and start again, but who’s to say the next pair won’t raise the same point? Better to let it play out.
The overall Bible tale is that, starting with this rebellion, God allows humans to make good on their claim of independence from him. He allows them to devise their own governments down through the ages, their own economies, justice, ethics, inventions—organize or disorganize any way they will. Only when the results become the absolute trainwreck that human rule is today does the question begin to be answered. Questions answered and precedent supplied, then God can forcibly bring about the rule by his Son.
It’s the theme of a book I wrote not too long ago, entitled “A Workman’s Theodicy: Why Bad Things Happen.” A theodicy is a theological term referring to the attempts to answer how a God of love would coexist with evil and suffering. It is among the oldest questions of time, and likely the most important:
This ‘Workman’s Theodicy’ is centered in free will. Is such a vital component of life or not? Free will does make a bad course possible, but it also makes a good course so much more meaningful. How meaningful is someone’s love if you know they have been programmed so that they cannot respond in any other way? The trial has to play out. The consequences of human independence from God must become manifest.
God has chosen not to be an enabler, allowing human rebellion but making sure nothing REALLY bad happens. Those who deal with harmful and/or addictive behaviors know that enabling is a dead end. Enablers allow, and even encourage, destructive behavior, charging someone else to prevent the mess that inevitably results. Such ones don’t actually hate what is bad. They just hate the symptoms of what is bad and want someone else to clean those up. There are critics of the Witnesses who complain about “manipulation” and “control,” but appear to want manipulation and control to be woven into the very fabric of life, so that humans never have to face the consequences of their destructive conduct.
There are no end of negative consequences from going independent of God. Were their wish to come true, that the really bad consequences of independence from God were wiped away, complaints would soon coalesce about the next worst things on the list—why doesn’t God prevent those, too? No. This is just recommending that God be an enabler. It is something he will not do, for our sakes as well as his own.
“A cat that sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again”—attributed to Mark Twain. “Nor will it set on a cold stove, because they all look hot.” That is the goal: to keep humans away from the “stove” of self-rule, cold that can so easily turn to hot, with all its inherent hobbling consequences.
A million years into everlasting life, when people have been unshackled from sin to be all that they can be, the intense suffering some underwent during a few of their 70 or 80 years will not be something they hold a grudge over. It is as that illustration goes that Witnesses sometimes use: parents will submit a child to a painful operation if they know that it is necessary to future happy and healthy life.
****** The bookstore
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