A friend recently questioned my idea that a “good father” (as evangelicals claim their version of god to be) would not allow bad things to happen to his children, and asked how I reconcile stories like Job, Ruth & Naomi and even Jesus’ brutal execution on the cross. Well, there are multiple answers to these questions, but the easier one is: I don’t have to reconcile these things, evangelicals do.

I’ll explain a bit, but first let me say, my theory actually is not that a good father would never let bad things happen to their kids. Every child wonders why their father allows the doctor to poke them with a needle and we all know there is a greater good to be had from that shot for the child. What I’m actually talking about is can a god be good if he demands praise for helping a person find a lost earring or spot a shady parking spot at the mall, but demands no blame for not preventing a child from getting pediatric cancer. What greater good comes out of a child dying of a dread disease? Why would a good god give a prophetic message to a preacher to share from the pulpit on a Sunday morning, and not spend the week telling that same pastor to stop molesting a child or to not abuse a woman in their church?

Why would a good god give a prophetic message to a preacher to share from the pulpit on a Sunday morning, and not spend the week telling that same pastor to stop molesting a child or to not abuse a woman in their church?

To my friend’s question, I believe Job is a poem, not an historical narrative. The Bible says Satan was cast down to earth, but now we see him in heaven? And negotiating with God as to who he can steal from or injure or kill? And Job, at the end of the story says “i had a whole bunch of children killed, but now I have a bunch of new children, so it’s all good because God was able to win his bet with the devil…”??? Even though, as my friend pointed out, Ezekial seems to mention Job as a real person, alongside Noah and Daniel, it still well could be Ezekial is using a fictional character to make a moral point, just as we would with Paul Bunyan, or Hamlet, or Aslan from The Chronicles of Narnia. Or, maybe Ezekial didn’t know Job was a poem and believed a fictional character was real? I would wager Ezekial thought the earth was flat and that the sun revolved around us, so is it so outrageous to believe he might have mistaken a fable for an historical narrative?

All of that aside, evangelicals must explain why they believe in a god who would tell prophets that Trump will win the 2020 election (as happened in a 2019 “prophetic conference) but neglects to tell them about COVID (not a single prophetic word at the conference that the world would be shut down)? How does an evangelical believe a good god would beat the shit out of his own son and turn his back on him as a blood sacrifice to satisfy a law code he set up, to pay for sins committed from proclivities he created, in beings he knew ahead of time would burn forever, yet he still created them? How can that be a good father?

Jesus himself said if a child asks his father for breakfast that the father would not then give the child a scorpion. Yet, here we are, never having asked to be born, still the “good father” in heaven gives us childhood trauma, molestation, disease, starvation (or at least chooses to limit himself from preventing those things) and demands we don’t blame him for any of that, yet commands we must give him worship for everything good that happens and live our life in servitude for that torture he put upon his own son or else he will set us on fire (or, at least, let us walk ourselves into that fire - something I would NEVER allow my own children to do) - that he will stoke to torture us for millions and billions of years? And if he’s omniscient, then we believe he created hundreds of millions of human beings knowing they would be tortured in that fire for eternity. How do you call that god a “good father?”

For Ruth, Naomi and Jesus, they suffered in a world that truly has moments of suffering. It’s a part of the bargain of walking through this beautiful thing called life. A journey in which, together, we all can see the beauty of its resilience, restoration and sozo. Carrying those pains together as family, friends and communities is a wonderful thing. It takes religion to make us categorize that pain as “deserved punishment.” In fact, religion told me for some 50+ years that my suffering was due to me being such a rotten person. I was made to believe the “good father” in heaven and my “good father” who was his servant on earth deemed that I was deserving of the trauma I received. How is it that the being that blames me for my trauma - on earth or in heaven - is a “good father?”

Sadly, my friend blamed this conundrums on me, claiming I wanted to “create a god” to fit my paradigms and that’s OK. When clinging to a religion or exclusive community, one must blame the questioner for the questions. I completely get it. Is it ok, though, for the paradigm of evangelicalism to be “i don’t need to wrestle with the quandary of a good god who rejoices in the extreme harm to infants voiced in poetry in the most graphic of ways, or one who orders to genocide of a people - every man woman and child ordered wiped out?”

My journey has required me to gather more information and not just settle for “God’s ways are higher…” I’ve had thoughtful conversations with Jewish teachers who describe their view of their own sacred text (the Torah is not a “Christian” text nor an “Old Testament”) that the scripture travels in message with humans, not with a requirement of humans to adhere to some literal (cultural) translation of the text.

I prize the Bible. I always have since I started reading the little KJV my parents gave me with my name gold embossed on it when I was 4 years old. And even then I realized there were many parts that didn’t make sense, but, at my dad’s “god’s ways are higher” dismissals of my inquiries, I stuffed my questions because I knew god was so good and we were on the right side of things. Even in my pastoral biblical training, and I began to learn things like the messy process of canon compilation and the horrific change in translation of Revelation in the 70’s, I still put the dissonance away because we were good and so was god.

But still there was always the pain in my heart “I wish I could love people, but God… he killed many many ‘bad’ people…”

Then, in recent years, it continued to become more and more evidence that the American Christian church wasn’t actually “good” and we weren’t on the right side of things. It became clear the output of American Christianity was no longer hearts of love for people and I realized this idea of god’s higher ways of relishing the deaths of those he didn’t like wasn’t “good”, then the dissonance could no longer be stuffed.

I don’t need to explain my view of the Bible, it’s Christianity that needs to explain its definition of a good god, because it is a dissonant belief - making it fit into their theological paradigm and trying to force that dissonant paradigm onto an entire culture. This desire for religious power over others through bad theology is destroying the lives of real human beings - and I believe that’s what Jesus stood against, so I am too.  Because, while I think I don’t have to buy it when the Bible says “God is in favor of genocide & crushing infants,” I do believe it means what it says the nearly 2000 times it says to seek justice for the poor, foreigner, outcast/marginalized and widow/economically disadvantaged. Which our church lineage diametrically opposes in its politics.

And btw - my passion for truth in order to be free to love my neighbor and myself would never be abhorrent to a real omnipotent, omniscient, eternal god. It requires a very small god to want to burn me for eternity for such a quest. I think there’s a much better Divine Spirit of Heaven than that and a much bigger Divine love available to us.

What do you think? Love to hear your thoughts in the comments here or on our private Facebook Page.