Editorial for February 2, 2006
By Jim White
On January 25, Ed Scott, chairman of deacons at the Ochwilla Baptist Church in rural Hawthorne, Florida, learned that seven grandchildren, aged 20 months to 15 years, the children of his two daughters, had died earlier that day in a fiery automobile accident. A little later, Ed died, too, of an apparent heart attack.
His bivocational pastor, Johnny Goodwin, was with him when he learned about the deaths of his grandchildren. He remembers that Ed remarked, “Pastor, I'm hurting all over so bad and I don't know if I'm going to make it.” In a single day two women lost their children and their father.
The seven children were in a car being driven by a 15-year-old girl who had only a driver's permit. She had stopped behind a school bus while students got off when a tractor trailer traveling at a speed estimated by a Florida state trooper to be between 50 and 65 mph rear-ended the Pontiac Bonneville in which the children were riding pushing it into the bus and causing it to burst into flames. Nine children on the bus, the bus driver and the truck driver, who had previous moving violations, were injured.
According to news accounts, the children were on their way home to get ready for church.
“Why!?”
The question has reverberated through the millennia. Through the blur of their tears, Adam and Eve must have asked it of each other when Cain, their oldest son murdered Abel, their second son. From the very beginning, the Bible lays bare the awful pain woven into the fabric of
human experience.
At times we look for answers to our “whys” actually expecting to find them. In the tragedy cited above, one could say, “The girl was driving illegally. That's why it happened.” But it isn't. The state trooper said it did not contribute to the accident.
Someone else, with some justification, might point a finger at the truck driver. He was apparently distracted by something and did not even apply his brakes. That's why it happened. But factual knowledge is not really what we're looking for. It is insufficient to know simply that eight family members died on a single day as the direct or indirect result of negligence.
The answers we seek when caught in the teeth of tragedy are more cosmic in nature. Rob Bell, pastor of the Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Michigan, understands this. Citing the Trees of Life found in Genesis and Revelation, he says all human existence is the time between the trees. For eternity on either side of the trees, life is as it ought to be. God rules. Nothing happens that shouldn't. Injustices don't exist and the charge of “unfair” is never leveled. Death doesn't end life and no tears of grief are ever shed.
But here. Ah, that's a different story. Here we live a form of life that has experienced the perversions of the evil one. It is not life as it was intended but life as it has degenerated. Impacted by every whim of evil from our own individual sinfulness to the threat of global terrorism and everything in between, we suffer the pain of our fallen state.
If we can see the bigger picture, we will notice that the life between the trees is temporary. It had a definite beginning and however long it may last, it will someday end. But life on the other side of the trees-that is real life. This life between the trees, where we experience all this heartache, is a transitory blip.
This time between the trees is not all pain and tragedy, of course. The presence of God's Spirit mitigates the awful pain evil contrives. The Scriptures affirm, “It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not
consumed, because his compassions fail not” (Lamentations 34:22). It may be difficult for a family that just lost eight members to hear, but imagine how much more terrible would be the pain of evil without the goodness of God to counter it.
As in the case of Ed Scott and his family, one might reasonably say, “But they were serving the Lord! Ed was chairman of the deacons. The children were on their way home to change for church! Where was God when this happened?” God was where God has always been. Right in the middle of their pain.
In Calvin Miller's The Singer, the Christ figure, the Singer, has discovered a hopeless little girl with twisted limbs and confronts the
Satan figure, World Hater. “Can you have no mercy? She's but a child. Can her wholeness menace you in any way? Would it so embarrass you to see her skipping in the sun? Why hate such little suffering life?”
World Hater replies, “Why chide me, Singer? She's Earthmaker's awful error. Tell your Father-Spirit he should take more care when he creates.”
“No,” retorts the Singer. “It is love which brings a thousand children into life in health. It is hate that cripples each exception to eternal joy. But why must you forever toy with nature to make yourself such ugly pastimes of delight?”
Paul declared, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12).
If in heaven God rules and only what should happen does, in hell only things that shouldn't happen do. Eternal injustice. Unfairness forever. Tragedy without termination.
There was another tree in the middle of the other two. A tree called Calvary.