Answering the "Why?" of life

Answering the "Why?" of life<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

 
Prisoner 174517 was one of 650 Italian Jews transported to <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Poland in 1944. Only 3 survived the Nazi extermination camps. This respected Jewish Scientist and writer was sent to the dreaded Auschwitz death camp. One day, to quench his thirst, he reached outside his barracks and broke off an icicle. Before he could get it to his mouth, a guard took it from him and smashed it on the dirty ground. "Why?" the prisoner cried out. With heartless brutality the guard responded, "Here there is no why". 
A peaceful day in rural Amish country (Lancaster, Pennsylvania) turned into a nightmare beyond imagination. On October 2nd 2006, Charles Carl Roberts IV (32), entered a one room Amish schoolhouse armed with a shotgun, a semiautomatic pistol and a rifle. To the neighbors he was known as a milkman and a father of small children. Yet on this tragic day, full of anger and self-hatred, this man terrorized the children in this schoolhouse and shot (execution style) 10 little girls (ages 6-13), instantly killing four of them before killing himself.  A 5th girl died the next day and five more were wounded and hospitalized. According to the National School Safety and Security Services, this was the 24th school shooting in the Nation. An entire community and many throughout the world were deeply perplexed by this horrific crime. "Why?" we asked ourselves. 
For bucolic Lancaster County Pennsylvania, this was the third grizzly murder scene in less than 12 months-each drawing national attention. The community of Lititz was shocked by the shooting of Michael and Cathryn Borden–murdered by their daughter's eighteen year old boyfriend (both teenagers were home schooled). Soon after, the community of Leola was stunned by the brutal slaying of six family members in their home (including a grandmother and a little girl).
When students went to class on April 16th 2007, I am sure it felt like any other day at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia. But this seemingly normal day gave way to unspeakable tragedy. No one anticipated what would become the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. When it ended, a mentally unstable student, Seung-Hui Cho, killed 32 people (mostly fellow-students) and then turn the gun on himself. When I looked at the pictures of those who lost their lives, it broke my heart-so young, so full of potential. Why? How senseless! How tragic! The world grieved.
Turning to more recent events in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on May 2nd 2007, three young men (18, 20, 21) and a 16-year-old boy were looking for some drug money. Randomly choosing a home on a secluded country road inElizabethtown, Pennsylvania (a safe place to live by all standards), they shot and killed Ray P. Diener. Diener (65) was a grandfather, devoted husband and respected local business owner. Those who knew him described him as gentle and good-hearted man. As I read about this horrific murder and looked at the faces of the four accused of the crime, I found it incomprehensible. "Why?" I asked. What a tragic, senseless waste of life! One life ended in death; grieving family and friends and a neighborhood in shock. Four more lives ended (for all practical purposes) and more grieving family members and friends.
On May 12th 2007, in the early hours of the morning, at the urging of her mother, 20 year old Maggie Haines rushed to a neighbor's house to call for help. When police arrived, they discovered a grizzly murder scene inManheim, Pennsylvania. Tom (50) and Lisa Haines (47) along with their 16 year old son were stabbed to death by an intruder who apparently entered an unlocked back door. By all reasonable standards, this was a safe neighborhood in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Yet, by all appearances, this was a random triple murder. Nothing was stolen from the house and no suspect or motive has been discovered. Yet random is hard to accept. We want to know why someone would do something so horrible. There must be a reason-or at least we feel we need one.
For prisoner 174517, "the guard's answer, 'There is no why here' was the essence of the death camps-places that defied all explanations for their absolute evil. In the face of their horror, explanations born of psychology, sociology, and economics were pathetic in their inadequacy." (Os Guinness, The Long Journey Home).
Have you ever felt that life is too confusing and unexplainable in its suffering and misery? When I hear of people who go into crowded markets or café's with bombs strapped on committing suicide and mass murder, I find it too hard to understand or imagine.
The unexplainable is what makes life confusing. It is also what makes belief in God confusing. Is it right to expect that if there is an all-powerful, benevolent Deity; he would have at least made a better world than this one. Where is the intelligent design? As one author recently acknowledged, "Many feel as if there has been just too much suffering and cruelty for the idea of a powerful and caring God to make sense. Under the sheer weight of human tragedy the providence of God buckled and was crushed into implausibility" (Dick Keyes, Seeing Through Cynicism).
But, perhaps, as Keyes proposes, "A 'straw God' was asked to account for extreme suffering and he collapsed. People then were pressed into the false choice between belief in a God who might have meant well but was powerless before human evil and natural disorder, an evil God, or no God at all."
Frankly, I find the biblical account of our story to be the most helpful and hopeful. It is helpful because it tells the story of our beginnings, our God-given ability to choose, our rebellion and God's mercy for the fallen. It is hopeful because the story doesn't end with this world as we know it.  
When asking, "Why do bad things happen to good people?", Os Guinness wisely cautions us to go to the next question: "What does it say of us as human beings that the people who do these things are the same species we are?" "Most of us," he wrote, "know ourselves too well to demand that life judge us according to our deserts."
A prisnor in the Auschwitz death camp turned to another prisnor asking, "Where is God?" The prisoner replied, "Where is man?" It wise to remember that, "Far from being essentially good-and improving all the time, with occasional lapses on the upward evolutionary path to perfection-our human nature is blatantly contradictory. Its nobility and evident goodness are offset by an equally evident propensity to plan and carry out acts of the most malevolent and destructive kind-whether brazenly monstrous, devilishly subtle, or yawningly routine" (Os Guinness, Unspeakable: Facing up to evil in an age of genocide and terror).
Humans are beings made in God's image and fallen from it. This truth from the bible best explains our story. But when turning to the bible to answer the "Why?" of life, "The Bible does not give us a quick and easy answer to why God allows evil to continue in his world. But if we think back about how God involved himself in such a costly way in the ultimate defeat of sin and death (crucifixion), then whatever reason he may have, it is not that he is indifferent to the human race" (Keyes). 
"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him" (John 3:16-17). 
Steve Cornell 
 
 

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