Trusting God through Tragedy

This has been a terrible week. We all feel distraught, troubled, and emotionally wrung out by the catastrophe we have witnessed. Some of us even had friends or family in close proximity to the scene, which has added to our anxiety and concern.

But whatever we have experienced has been nothing compared with the terror, suffering, and agony of those who were at the epicenter of the atrocities committed in New York City, Washington, and Pennsylvania.

One of the members of the church I pastored in Long Island is married to a New York City police officer. This man lost forty of his friends on the force.

Our hearts go out to the victims and their families; people whose lives will forever be scarred by this awful tragedy. And our prayers are with them. We pray that God would comfort them, shelter them as they walk through the valley of the shadow of death, and give them inner peace and hope for the future.

All of us have been deeply affected by this tragedy. The unblinking eye of television has taken us, over and over, back to the scene of these horrific events.

And we found ourselves suffering from a kind of “information overload”. Our eyes and ears took in more this past week than our minds could process. As a result, I’m sure that you, like me, are still struggling to come to grips with what we have witnessed. We grope to find some explanation for it; we wrestle to extract some meaning from it, but ultimately we fail.

What happened last Tuesday is beyond comprehending, beyond understanding, and certainly almost beyond believing. It had that unreal quality that nightmares have, but when we woke up the next morning, the awful facts were still there.

As a rational human being, you may be haunted by the questions that waft around this catastrophe like the smoke that still wafts up from the ruins of the WTC. You may lie awake at night, mulling it over and over in your mind.

Why did God allow this? Where was God when those airliners were hijacked and smashed into the twin towers, and the Pentagon? Why didn’t he do something to stop it? Where was God when those immense skyscrapers came crashing down on top of thousands of helpless people?

I don’t claim to have any glib answers to those questions. I don’t know where God was, or why he didn’t intervene. I don’t know why he stood by and allowed it all to unfold as it did. I don’t know why God sometimes – like last Tuesday – chooses to leave us with the impression that evil is more powerful than good.

But I do know one thing: our NOT knowing the answer to those questions is NOT what’s important right now. And that is the first lesson we need to take from this week.

There is a time to do theology; there is a time to wrestle with questions like these. But the time is not right now; not in the midst of the tragedy. Disaster is not a time to do theology; it is a time to do “faith”, a time to trust God even when we have no sensible or satisfying answers to our questions. Faith is believing the truth about God even when you have no evidence for it; even when everything in your world seem to scream the opposite.

The essence of being a Christian is not about having rational answers in your head; it is about having resilient faith in your heart.

God tells us over and over in the Bible that he loves us. He says “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” He says that nothing can ever separate us from his love. And he’s proved that love: he sent his son Jesus Christ to come and die for us, that we might live and have fellowship with him.

Jesus said “Greater love has no man than this: that a man lay down his life for his friend” and that is precisely what Jesus did for us when he came from heaven to earth to die on the cross. Like the NYFD rescuers this week, he was running into the stricken building, knowing it would cost him his life, in order that we might be saved.

So God loves us. But there are times in our world and in our circumstances when we wonder whether he really does. We’re not always sure. We’re not always certain of his presence, of his power, of his providential care. And at such times, we must hold on with the fingers of faith.

Catholic scholars have been poring through the journals of Mother Teresa. They have made a startling discovery. It seems that the journals reveal that this little woman who left such an impact for good in our world – this little woman who is being considered by the Catholic church for sainthood – often went through dark times when she doubted God’s very existence. In these times of darkness, she found it difficult even to pray. That doesn’t sound very “saintly” does it?

She wrote in her journal: “I feel just the terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not really existing. Darkness surrounds me on all sides. I can’t lift my soul to God: no light, no inspiration enters my soul.”

I imagine that many people feel like that right now as a result of the events of this past week. Perhaps you are one of them.

But as she struggled with these times of darkness and despair, Mother Teresa found her faith growing. Near the end of her life, she was able to write “I have begun to love my darkness, for I believe now that it is a part, a very small part, of Jesus’ darkness and pain on Earth.”

She was reflecting on the fact that when Jesus came to earth, he himself was not immune to the pain and suffering and loneliness and despair that come with being human. And she was learning by faith to rejoice in the fact, as the Apostle Paul put it in Philippians 3:10, of “knowing Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings…”

When we suffer, when we are cast down, when we feel abandoned without answers, we are simply standing where Jesus has already stood – and he is standing there with us. He said “Lo, I am with you always; I will never leave you or forsake you.”

God knows, God cares, and God feels the pain you have in your heart from this week’s events.

There is a second great lesson that became obvious this week. And that is the fact that, as the Bible has said all along, evil is real and present in our world. We got a very strong taste of it in what happened this week.

In the heat of the moment, President Bush made the statement that America was going to rid the world of evil. Well, those are noble sentiments, and we think we know what he really meant. But not even America with all its resources, with all its might and determination, can rid the world of evil.

The Bible says that evil is of supernatural origin. There is a very real, supernatural person behind it; a creature the Bible calls the devil. And the devil has succeeded in sowing evil in the hearts of men. The human heart is the soil where evil finds its root and where it produces its bitter fruit.

The Bible says that “the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can know it?” Who can understand it? Who can fathom it?

One of the disconcerting things about the terrorist attacks of this week is that there was a disturbingly inhuman quality about them. It is inhuman to voluntarily and deliberately plan to kill oneself in order to kill thousands of others. This seems to be a different kind of evil from what happened in the Holocaust of World War Two. What the Nazis did to the Jews was appalling and morally repugnant. What the terrorists have done is morally incomprehensible. There is something deeply troubling about this level of evil. It is sinister and alien to our human understanding.

We look at the pictures of the terrorist suspects who stare at us from the pages of our newspapers. We look into their eyes and ask ourselves “What kind of men are these? What could have given birth to such hatred, such determination to inflict suffering and death on others, that they would willingly sacrifice their own lives to this cause?” This is powerful evil.

And yet this evil, like all evil everywhere, contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. You see, even though evil is present in this world, it is still God’s world. And even though evil dwells in the hearts of men, we are still creatures who have been created in the image of God. That means that, although we are fallen creatures, we still respond and resonate to God’s principles of justice, truth, and love. And these will always be more powerful than the weapons of evil – cruelty, hatred, and deception.

The terrorists succeeded so well in their mission that they have now turned the whole world against them. The people of the world recoil in revulsion and righteous anger at what they have witnessed. The cry for justice rises from millions of hearts. We pray that justice will be done.

Jesus came to eradicate evil; he came to break its grip on our hearts. And only by yielding to him can we know deliverance.

The Bible says that the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

There is a final lesson we must ponder from this week’s events. And that is that life is very brief. We are living – all of us – on a razor’s edge. We are just one breath, one heartbeat from eternity.

The people who showed up for work at the WTC and the Pentagon last Tuesday morning; the people who buckled into their seats in those four airliners were simply beginning a routine day. None of them had any inkling that they had just minutes left to live. I wonder how many of those people started that day in prayer?

When things began to go awry on those airliners and it became obvious that something was terribly wrong, a few of the passengers and flight attendants were able to get on their cell phones. Who did they call? They called their loved ones. What did they say? They said “I love you.” And then they said “God help us”.

When those planes smashed at full speed into the WTC and the Pentagon, what did the people who saw it say? They said “Oh my God!”

When the people in the twin towers were scrambling desperately down the dark stairwells, smelling jet fuel, and hearing the ruined building creak and groan ominously, what were they doing? They were praying “Dear God, help us get out of here!”

Why is it that when we are in trouble, God is the first person we turn to? And why is it that, when things are going well, God is the last person we turn to?

The Psalmist says “My times are in your hands, O God”. My life is in your hands.

Are you ready to die? Do you know where you are going when you die? Many people believe that we all go to heaven when we die. I don’t know why they believe that because that is NOT what the Bible says.

The Bible says that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.

1 John 5:11-13 God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.

Jesus said “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Are you depending on your own good works to get you to heaven? If you are, you’re depending on the wrong thing. You’re like those people in the WTC who stayed put on those upper floors, thinking they would be rescued, believing the building would stand. They put their faith in the wrong thing.

You need to put your faith in Jesus. You need to build your life on him as your sure foundation. Jesus said “Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.

“But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.

A lot of us are building our lives on temporal things: money, success, power, relationships. I think what happened this week should show us that the things we think are strong and stable can come tumbling down.

If you want to build your life on Jesus, if you want to give your life to him, you can do it right now. Just tell him that you want to receive him as your Savior and Lord. Invite him into your life. Then you’ll be ready for eternity.

Prayer