I read a post by a children’s book author this morning . In the post she laments that she has no god to hate. She doesn’t believe in God, so she can’t hate him.

She’s a smart lady. A poetess, I believe, with deep thoughts and desire to express them. She’s much smarter than I am. I bump into this all the time–smart, well-educated people who are faithless. I feel so sorry for them, and I feel a little foolish for pitying them because I know they would hate me for it, after all they are way smarter than I am. But I can’t help but feel sorry for them. And I can’t help but thank God that I’m a Polly Anna able to take God at his word and accept that he is good even when logic would seem to say that he who is in control is guilty if he allows suffering.

An acquaintance once told me he hated the Reformed theology of suffering, and then he defined that strange term as meaning that Reformed people believe that suffering is something to be thankful for. He thinks the Reformed delight in evil. He was a Word of Faith man and thought we should claim God’s promise to heal, instead of praying “Thy will be done,” because God is good and he hates illness and it is always his will to heal.

And when I asked my dad, an ordained minister and missionary in the Reformed Presbyterian Church Evangelical Synod, why he has turned away from the Bible and now believes it is full of error, he answered with a question. “What do you make of the children of Israel killing the babies in the surrounding nations?”

Obviously the problem of evil and suffering is a huge one. Many wise men have wrestled with it and written books about it. It disturbs people. They can’t justify an all-powerful God who is good, with the suffering they see in the world.

I can’t solve the lack of faith of the world. I can’t open blind eyes and breathe life into stone-dead hearts. I believe the world’s error is that it starts with man and not God. In the beginning God…. If we start with God we see the tale unfolding logically. If we start with ourselves as if we are the center of the universe, then God does tend to seem like a brute.

But the reason I wanted to delve into suffering is that in the Christian world I keep bumping up against three ways of looking at suffering. One is that God is spanking us for some sin we’ve committed to a) punish us and b) teach us, the second is that suffering falls randomly upon the children of God simply because we live in a fallen world, and the third is that Satan is attacking us.

I know many Christians who hold these three views simultaneously. So when their car breaks down, ideally they would first look at their own lives to see if they’ve been sinning, maybe spending unwisely, maybe refusing to helps someone, and then, finding nothing, they would assume it was either a random act of suffering brought about by Adam’s original sin, or Satan has attacked them because they were on their way to church or to take dinner to a neighbor and he didn’t like that. And whatever they discover about the cause of the suffering they enter into prayer–they either repent, or they ask God to deliver them from Satan, or they ask for money to fix the car since it randomly broke down.

I’ve seen this sometimes work out in another way. Mary’s car breaks down and Josie assumes that Mary is in sin and God is spanking her. “I knew when she bought that expensive car that God would punish her for spending the money on it.” A week later Josie’s car breaks down and she assumes Satan is attempting to overthrow the world by thwarting her as she drives to church.

Is God fair?

How can Job think so? His friends are telling him that God judges the wicked and blesses the righteous. The Bible even tells us that. But Job is, by God’s own account, the most righteous man on the earth. How then can it be fair for God to punish him so severely and let others go free?

The answer has to be in God’s grace.

Job is a sinner. He’s human, conceived in sin, needing to be saved by the blood of Christ. He is born destined for hell and it is perfectly just for God to kill him and send him there. It is also perfectly just for God to give Job suffering here and now.

Well, is it fair for God to give Job what he deserves and to withhold suffering from people who are far more evil?

That’s the question that the workers asked when the eleventh hour man got paid the same wages as the rest. “We’ve born the heat of the day,” they said. “Why don’t you pay us more?” And the landowner said, “I have given you what you deserve. Do you call me unjust because I am merciful to some?”

God gave Job what we all deserve. Should we call him unjust because he’s merciful to us and doesn’t make us suffer to such an extent? When we do suffer, should we find him unjust because he’s merciful to others?

I don’t think we can leave it there, though. What’s going on with Job is not judgment at all. I think chapter one makes it clear. I just needed to get the judgment thing out of the way. God is just even when we see him treating one person one way and one another. He will have mercy upon whom he has mercy. We are created and it’s up to him to dispose of us as he will.

But what I really think is going with Job is mercy not judgment.

I think that most of the trials we suffer in this life are not judgments at all. Not individual judgments, anyway. We are born in trial. Birth is traumatic. That curse is a result of judgment, but it’s not a judgment on the baby being born. He’s done nothing wrong. So for him the suffering is not punishment for personal sin. It’s training. The suffering we have here, which starts at birth, is designed to teach us who God is and who we are.

But I suspect that most of us are hounded when we suffer. I suspect that doubts come in to sit with us the way Job’s three friends came in to sit with him. “Repent and God will quit making you suffer.” Even one of my all-time favorite authors, Horatius Bonar, in his Night of Weeping, writes a whole book on how, if we’d only learn our lessons early, God could take away most of the suffering. But because we don’t listen when we have a sore throat, God had to give us a full-blown cold. And if we don’t listen to that we’ll get something worse.

I can see where this thought comes from. We know that God will not be mocked and each one reaps what he sows. And we see with our own eyes that this is how life works.

Don’t we?

If we eat Big Macs every day, we gain weight. Duh. It’s not too hard to figure out.

We have this cause and effect thing down. Spend foolishly, fall into poverty. Smoke, die of lung cancer or heart disease. Drink and drive, go to jail.

The problem with this, I think, is that its not true. Many people smoke and don’t die of lung cancer or heart disease. Many people don’t smoke or drink and they die anyway. Something kills them. Even though they drink carrot juice and work out three times a week they still die. What’s up with that?

Some people spend and spend and spend and they never fall into poverty. The wicked often prosper–that’s why we’re told not to envy them. If they never prospered Psalm 73 wouldn’t make any sense.

What about all the people who die in tsunamis? Are they more wasteful of water than I am? They are taking too many showers perhaps, so God sends a big wave–”Heh, you want water? I’ll give you water!” Kind of like when he rained the quail down on the Israelites.

We see in scripture that God does punish sin here and now, sometimes. What I don’t get is how, with all the mercy in the Bible, we tend to get stuck on the punishment part.

How many times is God merciful to his people as opposed to how many times he punishes them? He is sloooooowwwwwww to anger, abooooouuuuuunding in love.

Why then do we so often see suffering as punishment and health and wealth as blessing?

We tend to have a slave mentality instead of a beloved son mentality.

I think.

And a good time was had by all. I hope. I’ve certainly enjoyed myself, anyway.

To celebrate, on my children’s book blog, All About Children’s Books, I’m giving away a copy of a middle grade novel I liked. Jimmy’s Stars, written by Mary Ann Rodman. It’s a historical novel. WWII. Quite good. So if you know anyone who might be interested, send them over.

Oh, it’s a gorgeously written book. Maybe the best I’ve ever read. This woman has a voice like you won’t believe. Even when she’s being shocking and crude you can’t help but admire her voice. It’s perfect.

As I read I couldn’t help wondering, as I often do, at the God who bestows such lavish gifts on men. And so often he bestows them on men who don’t thank him or even recognize the Giver.

Jennifer Donnelly is not friendly toward the God of the Bible, I don’t think. Her main character wonders if perhaps that God is a fantasy made up by men to keep women chained to their beds, their stoves, and their plows. She swats at the Bible and Christians in the story, as frequently as they appear. She sees Christians as no better than men who use and abuse girls. The only difference between the two is that there are at least some good men in the story. There are no good Christians.

And so A Northern Light made me sad. Here’s a book written by one of the most brilliant writers I’ve ever read and it’s faithless and hopeless and ugly and false. It’s deep and moving and there is so much truth wrapped up in it that it will surely affect its readers. And yet it will lead them to false conclusions. It leaves us with no hope. In the end, the character chooses a path that will lead to her destruction.

The author thinks, no doubt, that she has given her character wonderful growth. Throughout the book the girl is struggling–looking for the right path. In the end, she chooses what the author has been leading her toward–liberation. She walks away from her family to pursue her dreams. Three cheers for women everywhere!

But the author has failed to understand that self-sacrifice is the only thing that liberates. That in losing your life you find it. She has completely misunderstood the Bible and the loving God found therein.

So I started the book envying the writer because, oh, how I would love to be so wealthily endowed that I could write with such beauty and grace and raw power, and I ended the book seeing that riches here and now are not as important as the final end of a man. Or a woman. (Psalm 73)

And what’s more, the assurance of future riches–that inheritance incorruptible, kept in heaven for us–gives joy and liberation now.

What Donnelly’s adorable character needed was to learn to submit. Only then would she have found fulfillment. Because it’s what we are made for. We are made to submit to God and to each other. And we can never be happy when we are fighting against that purpose.

It would be like a bird, created to soar above the world, to ride the currents with ease and joy, insisting upon walking everywhere. What a sad, sorry thing that would be.