The Ebola Epidemic and the Want of Life

Why?  Why God, why?

If there is a God, why does God let this happen?  This is a typical question that Believers are asked by atheists, agnostics, and skeptics alike, in the face of natural disasters or deathly plagues that take hundreds if not thousands of lives, desolating whole communities.  And it’s a good one.

First, let’s look at the same question from the other side.  If there is no God, what is death but a return to emptiness, a black hole of nothingness, the total loss of all contrived-meaning that humans have striven to put into their lives.

Death is invasive and intrusive.  It is unwelcome and uninvited.  Death is painful, ripping our hearts by snatching away our loved ones.  Death is inevitable.  We are powerless to prevent it.  We may postpone it, slow it down, but we can’t stop it.  Death is shrouded in mystery.  Death is personal and individual.  Every single human being must cross the threshold of death, “alone.”  And death is final.  There is no coming back.

It is because we want to live that the idea of death is so repugnant to us.  What we are saying is this: “Death ought not to be!  Death is wrong.  Death is bad.  Life is right.  Life is good.  Thus, if God is, and God is right and good, then God should prevent death.  God should be a God of life, not death.”  And that is exactly what the Bible says God is.

At the time of Jesus, there was a group of religious leaders, called the Sadducees, who had no belief in the resurrection of the dead.  They challenged Jesus, using Old Testament Law and tradition to try to entangle him in contradictory assertions.  Here’s how Jesus responded: “You are mistaken because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.  …As for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,’ He is God not of the dead but of the living.”  (See Matthew 22:23-33.)

Shakespeare’s Macbeth holds the opposite view to that of Jesus: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.  It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  Nothing indeed!  Alas, ‘tis true, if there be no God!

We cringe at the thought of annihilation.  We long for immortality.  “Whence this secret dread, and inward horror of falling into naught?  Why shrinks the soul back on herself, and startles at destruction?  ‘Tis the divinity that stirs within us; ‘Tis Heaven itself that points out an hereafter, and intimates eternity to man.  Eternity!  Thou pleasing, dreadful thought!”  (Cato, Act V Scene1 by Joseph Addison).  God Himself has put the sense of immortality in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

A woman lost her fifteen-year-old son in an auto accident.  She was afraid that he would soon be forgotten by most of his friends.  She wrote frantically.  She was going to ensure his memory would be kept alive.  And then she realized.  Her son was still alive.  He was not in the realm of nothingness, un-Being, annihilated.  He was alive with Christ.  How did she know?  Because of Christ and His resurrection power, her son too was alive.

Someone made the following observation:
We can give medicine when sickness comes,
Food when hunger comes,
Help when weakness comes,
Love when loneliness comes.
But when death comes, we can give
Only sympathy, only compassion,
Never the gift of life.
Only God can do that.

Jesus turns the experience of death upside down:

• Instead of being powerless before death, Jesus proves to have power over death.
• In Jesus, death is no longer viewed as final.  By demonstrating that He is more powerful than death itself, Jesus also demonstrated that death is neither an end nor a completion but rather an entryway to a whole new beginning.
• Jesus has ripped open the curtain of death and therefore has removed its mystery.  Jesus Himself died, came back from death and will lead us through death into Life.
• Because of Jesus, death no longer holds the power of endless grief or painful abandonment.  There is a promise we will see loved ones again.
• In the face of Jesus’ own death and resurrection, Jesus validates our own specific and personal individuality.  We do not lose ourselves or our identities on the other side of death.

This is the Christian answer to the question with which we started.  If there is a God, why does He allow natural disasters and plagues and other terrible things to happen to human beings?  God loves us and would not have us annihilated into nothingness.  God IS a God of life, the Life Giver, who has provided a true means of salvation and redemption to escape final condemnation.  An answer is given.  And one that is not difficult to understand, if it is given serious consideration, respecting the human condition and human nature.

Open up the New Testament.  See what Jesus has to say about life, death, pain and suffering.  Read the Gospel according to John, for example.  Check it out for yourself.  Consider Jesus and what he had to say about such things.  You may be surprised by what you discover.