Responsibility

A few weeks back I went to the worshipcentral conference up in London (oh yeah, that reminds me, I must book tickets for the next one...) and I went to a seminar entitled "The Fall and Evil". The speaker was Mike Lloyd, the tallest theologian I've ever met! Anyhow, the seminar was about why there is evil and suffering in the world. He explained that there are some staple answers given by Christians, which are "useful but ultimately disappointing" (I believe those were his words!)

The answers given are normally:

Free will - which explains human effect on each other and the environment, ie all our actions cause a reaction etc, but this does not explain ilness, disease, or death.

"The public School" answer - I.e. God causes us to suffer as He will teach us through it. This is very hard to come to terms with when God is a God of love, not suffering, and although there are times (such as in Job) when God may allow an individual to suffer, at no point will he cause the suffering.

Adam and Eve - They rebelled against God and as a result Creation was damaged. This is difficult to understand from a non christian point of view. I mean, try explaining to a non christian (or even many christians) that the reason they are ill/or their parents or children have died is because 2 people thousands of years ago ate a fruit that they were not allowed to eat and that somehow this has caused suffering to be unleashed on the world... I must admit, I've never understood that answer myself...

Mike Lloyd put forward a very interesting suggestion:

His suggestion was that, yes, free will is to blame for the suffering in the world, but not simply the free will of humankind, but the freewill of angels. He explained that God, as a loving being, could not simply build robots to worship him (and we know the angels worship him as it is written in the Bible, just read Revelations to get a picture of the thousands of angels worshipping aound His throne). He gave them free will thus allowing them to genuinely love Him. Angels, being spiritual creatures, play an active role in the spiritual side of creation. They, like us, are linked to it and affect it. When Satan rebelled against God, disharmony was brought into creation. Lloyd explained that a good picture to use was one used by Tolkien (yes, the creator of the hobbits) in the Silmarillion, where God is singing creation into existence and the choirs of angels are joining Him. When one rebelled and sang a different tune, disharmony came in to creation and pulled it in a different direction to that which God had intended.

When God created humans He told them to "multiply and fill the Earth and subdue it" implying that the Earth needed subdueing. (is that how you spell it?)

Before their sin, Adam and Eve were very close to God and had dominion over all the creatures of the earth. They could sit with Lions without fear of becoming dinner!

Lloyd explained that Humans were given the job of correcting Creation. We were meant to be healing the sick, destroying disease, and righting the wrongs in Creation. But, instead, we turned our back on that responsibility, we created a divide between us and God and joined the rest of creation in it falleness. That is why we are able to say "it's all our fault" (Genesis 3). It's our fault because we did not do what we are meant to.

God sent Jesus, not only to bridge that divide, but to show us what we should have been doing. Jesus healed the sick and the blind, He fed the hungry and loved the rejected. He corrected Creation. He was, as a human, what we should have been from the start.

What a responsibility we have been given. We should be out there correcting creation. We should be feeding the hungry, healing the sick and making this world right.

Billy Kennedy, the pastor at New Community, Southampton, has been preaching recently on "Being the Message".( see www.newcommunity.org.uk) He is right, we should be the Message. We should be like Jesus - The Word who became flesh. The message who became flesh. He gave his all to bridge the gulf that separated us from God.

Now, we have the responsibility to do what we were made for. We must live in this world as ambassadors of God, doing what we were intended to. We must do what we can to make creation right. We must live like Jesus.

What a responsibility.