Chloe was a smart, personable, and devoted Christian student from
South America whom I had the pleasure of teaching in several theology classes.
In one meeting, Chloe confessed that, despite the confident appearance that she
projected, she actually lived with a sense of guilt and had never felt like a
good Christian. In fact, Chloe said she had never been confident she was “truly
saved.” She knew that salvation is based on our faith, and she knew that the
essence of faith is trust. But trusting God was something Chloe said she always
struggled with. “Everyone else at this college seems to trust God for everything
in their life,” she said, “but I just can’t!”
Chloe seemed baffled when I asked her what she felt she was
supposed to trust God for. “You know,” she said, “I’m supposed to trust God to
bring the right man into my life to be my husband, and I’m supposed to trust
that he’ll lead us into the right ministry together and that he’ll bless and
protect our family.”
“Protect?” I asked. “As in, protect your children?” We sat in
silence for a moment before I continued. “You’re having trouble trusting God to
protect your children… as in, protect them from things like child
molesters?” Tears began to well up in Chloe’s eyes, as she had shared with me in
previous meetings about personal experiences around this issue. I leaned
forward, grabbed Chloe’s hand, and said, “Chloe, maybe it’s time to stop beating
yourself up for not trusting God for something you already know he can’t be
trusted for. If God didn’t protect you when you were nine, it’s little wonder
you have trouble trusting him to protect you and your future children when
you’re twenty.”
Chloe was stunned. I had broken an unacknowledged rule among
Christians like Chloe who try to find security in the magical promise that, if
they can just “trust and obey,” God will bless them and protect them and their
children. The unspoken rule is, don’t notice the obvious. And the obvious
reality no one is supposed to notice is that the magical formula contradicts
the way the world actually is.
At one point in Job’s dispute with his “friends,” Eliphaz
rhetorically asks Job, “Who, being innocent, has ever perished? Where were the
upright destroyed?” (Job 4:7). Only a person who wore magical glasses that
deleted out innocent people perishing and upright people being destroyed could
ever say something so absurd. Anyone looking at the world with any degree of
objectivity sees that innocent and righteous people perish and are destroyed as
routinely as guilty and unrighteous people.
This is a scary world to confront, however. We would all feel more
secure if we could trust that the world is actually fair and that we will be
spared its random nightmares if we just “trust and obey.”
Living under the illusion that trusting God about such matters
ensures our safety allows some people to enjoy a false sense of security, but as
Chloe’s story illustrates, it can also be a source of tremendous pain. Many
struggle, as Chloe did, with guilt and doubt simply because their own experience
refutes this magical worldview. Though they may not break “the rule” by
admitting the obvious, they know, on some level, that there are a multitude of
variables other than God’s will or our own faith that influence what happens to
children, marriages, careers, finances, health, and every other aspect of our
lives.
As much as we might wish it were otherwise, the truth is that in
an unfathomably complex world in which every human and angelic decision ever
made exercises an ongoing influence on what comes to pass, there is no magical
formula that can guarantee things will turn out one way rather than another.
To
try to find security in anything outside God’s character is to reflect both a
lack of understanding and a lack of trust. It is to treat God’s covenant
promises as if they were contractual deals.
—adapted from Benefit of the Doubt, pages 223-224, 230
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