Thoughts I’ve written as I’ve thought about evil, injustice, race, and we who cast stones:
We don’t have to live long in this world to see injustice. It looks back at us from the mirror.
When I fail to understand how I contribute to the broken portrait of our world I cast the first stone.
Until I understand what my heart is capable of, I will never be able to have wisdom and understanding of the problem of evil.
When people are hurting, they don’t want discussions, or lectures, or why’s. They want us to sit with them in their pain, hold them in their hurt, whisper to them in their tears.
The western church talks about mutuality and complementarianism, about sex and marriage, about rights and needs….and all the while a world hurts and begs for a Saviour.
We look for the needs of our heart to be solved with human understanding, with justice, with policy changes but the fact remains: No amount of human justice will ever satisfy the needs of the human heart.
I see essays called “Dear North American Church” and all I want to do is delete the essay, scoop up said church, and plop it into the slum I recently visited in India, or the refugee camp in No Man’s Land between Turkey and Syria, or the hospital in Peshawar where burned children scream out their pain– because no blog post will change the church. Ever.
We who cast stones need a Saviour. Those who feel our stones need a Saviour.
At the end of the day we are not promised fair, or easy, or simple. At the end of the day we are promised this: that He is with us always – to the end of the age.*
I see the Cross and the love that endured the cross as the only solution to evil. Responding to evil by the power of a love that conquered death.
“We do not worship a deistic God, an absentee landlord who ignores his slum; we worship a garbageman God who came right down into our worst garbage to clean it up. How do we get God off the hook for allowing evil? God is not off the hook; God is the hook. That’s the point of a crucifix.
The Cross is God’s part of the practical solution to evil. Our part, according to the same Gospel, is to repent, to believe, and to work with God in fighting evil by the power of love. The King has invaded; we are finishing the mop-up operation.” Peter Kreeft
Matthew 28:20