The Cure

On Sunday, a student asked me how we can really believe God is loving when he sends people to hell.  I know this student's home life, how much she loves her older sisters and wishes they would come to church with her.  I know how much it must hurt her to look at them and think that, based on what she believes, one day she will be rejoicing with Jesus in heaven and they will be suffering in a terrible place far from God.

Since reading David Platt's Radical a couple years ago, I have been struggling with similar questions.  In his book, Platt drills home the point of our hopelessness, how we were born evil sinners without hope outside of Christ.  He tells his readers that we are enemies of God, living in opposition to and hatred of him, working against his purposes until we are saved by the mercy of the cross.  I struggled to reconcile God's hatred of sin and his love for sinners.  I struggled to balance verses that tell me things like God created my innermost being with ones that tell me I was born a sinner.  Why did God create me with the capacity for such evil?  I had it twisted and felt at times that if God created me and knew the evil I would harbor in my heart, he must have created me to be the wretched sinner I am and have always been.

While I wrestled with these questions, little by little I have been discovering new truths and working out the rough spots in what I believe and what I don't understand.  Thankfully, that student asked me her burning question, and God gave us both an answer.

I didn't have this answer prepared, I never had 100% clarity about the answer until she asked and I started speaking.  Words came out of my mouth that surprised me like I was hearing them for the first time just like she was.

I told her that God created two healthy humans and gave them the power to choose so that their choices could mean something.  Then, an enemy brought poison to the garden, and with their choice the healthy humans drank the enemy's poisonous lies.  The poison gave them a disease called sin, a disease that is degenerative, contagious, and fatal.  To see how truly insidious the disease of sin is, just look how quickly a sin of simple disobedience (I mean, really- they only ate an apple.) evolved into the sin we think of as one of the worst.  It took one generation for Adam and Eve's disobedience to progress to their son murdering his brother.  God flooded the world and saved only Noah, which looks so mean to us but was really a great picture of love.  Noah was the only man on earth fighting his infection while everyone else was accelerating the effects of the disease, like continuing to smoke when you have lung cancer.  Using the flood, God wanted to slow the epidemic because he knows how quickly it spreads and how deeply it destroys.  After watching his people indulge the disease for years and years, God knew that this ruthless infection was too much for humans to fight on their own.  He came to us in the form of a doctor, a healer, with the only known cure.

Now, our choice looks different.  We are dying from what was previously deemed a hopeless and fatal disease but we have been given a vile of hope.  Just like Adam and Eve chose to drink Satan's poison, it is up to us to drink the cure of Christ.

Then I asked the student, "If someone was sick and the doctor gave them medicine but they wouldn't drink it, would you blame the doctor?"  She smiled and said no.  "Would you say he was a good doctor or a bad doctor?"

"He's a good doctor, but his patient is stupid!" she said.  I told her that we don't always know why people don't accept the cure for sin that Jesus gives us, but we know it is because God loves us that he has given us a cure and every opportunity to drink it.

Some people don't know they are spiritually sick and dying.  Some people know and drink poison for all their days anyway.  I know people who only act like they've taken the medicine.  I've heard of others who have been suffering from the sickness their whole lives and take the medicine right in the nick of time, getting their second shot of life in heaven.  Some think they will cure themselves by doing their best to be good and healthy people, but stage 4 cancer will not be cured by eating right.  There are those who swallowed the medicine long ago and still daily choose to lie in their death beds, letting their now healthy muscles weaken and atrophy.  While some took the medicine and are healed, they are not living healthy lives.  The disease is gone, but they are not taking care of themselves as if they've been given a second shot at life.  Others still are stingy with the cure.  There is enough to go around, but they keep the answer to themselves.

In any zombie or epidemic movies I've seen, which admittedly is not many, the main characters try to outrun the disease and fight off the infected for as long as they can until eventually they are infected themselves.  Imagine how those stories would be different if, in one of the final scenes, the group somehow finds the antidote.  They find that not only does this disease miraculously heal those who have been infected; it offers an immunity to the effects of the disease.  Now, the group could rejoice in their good fortune and breathe deep sighs of relief, and it could end there.  The credits could roll, and the small posse of friends could walk into the sunset toward their happy ending.  But what would turn that good story into a great story is if, with their second shot at life, the group departed on a mission to cure everyone else.  Now they are not only lucky; they are heroes.

A couple of weeks ago I started writing a post for this blog about how it was so nice in high school.  I was lamenting about how much easier life was then and how much I took it for granted.  I was wishing I could go back there, be the person I was allowed to be then, not have to deal with real, raw life.  I didn't post it because it was a glorified pity party.  

Interestingly enough, a couple weeks ago I also started reading the story of the Israelites' wandering years.  Though they had been liberated from the Egyptians and had been able to overcome many obstacles with the LORD their God on their side, they whined and complained for what seemed like the entire 40 years.  

What always struck me in this story was that those silly Israelites actually wanted to go back to Egypt.  

They griped and wailed, saying, "We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost - also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic.  But now we have lost our appetite, we never see anything but this manna!"

In fact, just as soon as leaving Egypt, the Israelites wished they had died under Egyptian rule because at least there they had pots filled with meat and all the bread they wanted.  Sure, they were dying in captivity, but at least they were well fed.  

Though I have never spent time being captive under a foreign nation, I do finally empathize with the Israelites' wishes to return to an "easier" life, however harsh and meaningless, because it was one where they never had to step up or take responsibility for anything.  They forgot that they had cried out to God to rescue them from that life, they forgot that they had prayed for something more.  

I can connect much better with the Israelites now that I have been wandering myself.  I have been living in the in-between.  Leaving something wanting more, but not yet being given the more.  

I can empathize, too, with the spies who were sent in the promise land and came back warning their own of giants.  I can understand how scary the promise land looks from the desert.  God had been training the Israelites to be the type of people who could survive in the promise land, and still they complained, and still they cowered in fear, and still they lacked faith.  

Man, how I hate to identify with these people.  And I have been wandering for four years, not forty, in the comfort of home not through the wilderness.  And my giants are only metaphorical, not beings that see me as a grasshopper.  

But I am in the in-between.  Though I called out to God for something more, I am now wanting to turn back to the place where the fish were free and the meat was plenty.  Somehow nostalgia turned those into good times.  And I am looking ahead to this scary new life where the bills and responsibilities and choices all look like giants.  I need the faith of Caleb who looked at those giants and said, "Surely we can conquer them!" because he knew all that mattered was their trust in God.  

God hasn't specifically promised me a future flowing with milk and honey, but he has promised me a life full and overflowing with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control.  I believe he has offered me a place in his story, and while it is overwhelmingly frightening to try and figure out where that is leading me, including possibly far from home, I want to follow.  

I want to look at the giants and say, "Surely we can conquer them!"  Because it doesn't matter who I am, but who I am following.  

Now if only I could start living like I believe that.  

I think I know what it looks like, though.  Living on the manna of God's word, trusting in his provision and protection.  Proving that I can be trusted with little so that I might be entrusted with much.  Rebuking fear and not focusing on the size of the giants but on the size of my faith in a big, big God.  Praying for faith like Caleb, reliance on God like Moses, and preparedness training for the promise land.  

I want to get to there, wherever it is.  But I won't get there by turning back or being afraid.  I hope to somehow find contentment in this training ground of the in-between.  I hope even more to walk courageously into the future, transformed because of my time wandering.