In The Liberal Mind, Kenneth Minogue speaks of misguided political and social reformers in the line of modern liberal thought:
How many visionaries have unwittingly prepared a hell on earth because their gaze was stubbornly fixed on heaven? And when hell comes — well, there is always some ad hoc theory of sinister interests or Judas-like betrayal to extricate the theorist from his disaster. What his illusions have prevented him from understanding are the forces he in fact served; and good intentions are quite beside the point. Stupidity is a moral as well as an intellectual defect.
Something similar could be said about Christians, not just when they are in the roles of reformers or missionaries but most of all when they think to be worshiping the God of Jesus Christ. They might claim to be worshiping the God of Jesus Christ, but they have their eyes on a different god, one who would never do what is done in Creation, would never pour down lava upon the innocent, would never send tsunamis to destroy entires towns of decent human beings, would never send upon us — his best and most morally pure servants — sufferings. It could only be Satan behind our sufferings because God made a good and peaceful world for us and fallen angels and sinful men caused that good and peaceful world to become something different from what God had intended for us.
I can remember watching a documentary on earthquakes on TV years ago and a geophysicist from — I believe — the University of California at Berkeley made an excellent point. He referred to the beauty and usefulness of the geographic structures of the area around San Francisco Bay and noted that all of this was created by processes which were, and are, violent beyond human imagination.
This is how God works in this world. The violence isn’t something that fallen angels or sinful man introduced into a world in which San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento River and the Sierra Mountains would have come to be by gentle and peaceful processes. Even the rich soils of our best farmlands are formed partly of eroded volcanic rocks. Iowa corn and Hawaiian macadamia nuts are possible because of volcanic eruptions bringing minerals from deep inside the earth.
The universe expanded out of an extremely dense state in an explosion of sorts which stretched out space and time from a small region indeed and also created matter as we know it from some abstract stuff.
Stars and galaxies are the result of gravitational forces which are weak but become strong and violent when enough matter is involved.
Planets likely formed by some sort of crashes and smashes on a meteorite scale, though understandings of such processes are not very solid.
Life on earth likely formed from gunk-like stuff and, over the eons, became a unattractive critters eating and being eaten.
Dinosaurs. Gigantic crocodiles. Saber-toothed cats. These and other monsters came to be in the evolutionary stream of events which led to human beings, including the well-known moral monsters of human history.
Continents smash into each other and into plates underlying the oceans. Glaciers sometimes sweep away huge masses of dirt and rock, Cape Cod and the eastern half or more of Long Island are the result of glaciers retreating and leaving that stuff they scraped from large regions of North America. Someday, storms will scatter the sandy stuff of Cape Cod and Long Island over the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Volcanoes explode. Meteorites hit with enough force to leave huge craters which can be seen millions of years later.
Each of the Hawaiian islands in turn has partially collapsed as it was formed by passage over the volcanic hotspot which sends up the stuff of beautiful islands. The big island, Hawaii, is next. Scientists tell us it will collaps sometime in the next few hundred thousand years and the resulting waves will kill all life on on the entire Hawaiian Island chain, likely sending waves that will leave mudflats in place of Los Angeles. This death and destruction is a part of the process of forming those beautiful islands, not some Satanic add-on to a gentle process of formation.
God sends life-giving showers upon the good and the bad, the malicious and the innocent. He also buries alive in lava the good and the bad, the malicious and the innocent. He sends viruses which don’t just target the criminals and the sadistic brutes.
But modern middle-class men and women would inhabit a different universe, one good enough for us. We serve the bland and the soft and the gentle at the expense of the noble which often comes only by way of suffering. We ignore the evidence that God shapes what pleases Him by processes often violent. When we try to see the world in gentler terms and try to live our lives in those other terms, we serve another master than God. We prepare ourselves for another fate than life without end as companions of the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ.
God is telling the story He chose to tell. It is a story where beautiful mountains and bays and islands come into being through violent processes which leave innocent creatures buried underneath millions of tons of rock or even underneath molten rock. When we judge some of the Creator’s chosen ways of acting as being evil, we are judging God as being evil, if only in part.
We worship and serve an Almighty who’s responsible for all in Creation that we approve of and we have Satan to blame for all the rest. How convenient. How blasphemous.
Surely, this is no more than an intellectual mistake, an error in theology and not one with practical implications.
Not so. We worship a God who encourages a cowardly sort of prudence. We implement the dogmas of such a worship in the form of cradle-to-grave care for all. We entrap ourselves and would entrap all in our countries in webs of mandatory public-education and mandatory health insurance. We mandate the safety and security which we think God intends for us when Satan, or the Commies, or the radical Muslims, don’t interfere. We don’t bother to develop the tougher virtues which would help us to struggle and suffer for what is good and noble, our political freedom as well as our Christian faith.
We’ve messed up badly because we don’t serve the God of Jesus Christ, don’t even see Him or His Creation, don’t read His Holy Scriptures, with the clear eyes of a prophet and the accepting heart of a believer who accepts God and His works with an unconditional faith reather than judging the Almighty and His Creation by our cowardly standards. We want to serve a God who will take better care of us. We have served such a God and we are about to pay a high price for our cowardice and our lack of faith, for our fundamental and self-serving dishonesty. We gave up any noble virtues in the interests of a cowardly quest for safety and material prosperity and soone we’ll have neither the fruits of virtue nor those of a materialistic prudence.
Meanwhile, God goes on creating not only beautiful islands in the Pacific but also that still more beautiful Body of Christ. I intend to stick with that God and to pray He carries me through to the end of this story He’s telling. I’m as cowardly as other modern men but I’m willing to walk out on that limb, giving me no choice but to pretend to be brave and faithful to the Lord.