Good Will Hunting
A newborn shivers as she lies abandoned in a dumpster. A child gasps faintly as starvation takes his last breath. A woman screams as she fails to fend off an intruder and knows she is about to be violently taken. A man buys sleeping pills as the heartbreak from his wife’s death seep away the will to live.
This is the ugly reality of our world—people hurting, grieving, dying everywhere, and why? Why is there so much pain? Why must life be such a struggle? If the God we know is indeed omnipotent, are we left to assume that His will for humanity is to suffer like this?
I would hope not—honestly, I couldn’t love a God like that.
The Bible says in 1 Corinthians 13:5 that love is not self-seeking. If love doesn’t seek after itself, it must be seeking after others. And if God is love (1 John 4:16), whom else could He be seeking after but us! One might ask, what about tragedies like the ones mentioned above? How could an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God claim to love us so much when He doesn’t even prevent a malicious person from hurting an innocent one? But that’s exactly it: it’s because God loves us so much that He doesn’t intercede in what could be at times some truly appalling situations.
In order to understand the last statement, we first need to understand love. Love can never be forced; it can only exist alongside the option of rejection, dictated by free will. If your parent or spouse put a gun to your head and demanded that you love him/her, would you be able to? You may serve them out of fear, but that's not love. Love is only true when an individual is inspired of his/her own volition.
So you see, because God loves us and seeks to be loved in return, He will never obligate us. He gives us the free will to do as we please—even if that means rejecting Him. Divinely intervening to stop a person from committing a heinous act would nullify the element of free will and with it the conditions required for love to be possible. Furthermore, God wants to extend this possibility to all His children, not just the “innocent” ones.
Before you write God off as aloof and unengaged, imagine Him doing everything in His power to help everyone--even the potential victims. He does this by pressing upon the hearts of the offender and others in attempts to counter the impending crime while honoring the free will of all those involved. A dumpster-diver discovers the abandoned infant. An aide worker gets lost and comes across the starving child. An officer making his rounds hears the woman’s cries. The man runs into an old friend and finds new reasons to live. Miracles happen, right? I can’t help but wonder what atrocities could’ve been avoided if we weren’t so blindly caught up in the pursuit of our own desires, totally numb to God’s nudges. When we reject His will, that’s when sin abounds and suffering ensues.
Even if you don’t get your miracle, there must be hope! For however horrible the circumstances we find ourselves in, John 16:33 says that we can be of good cheer, for God has overcome the world and will lead us through it. He can’t deter the awful situations that may come our way, but that doesn’t mean that He isn’t going to be right by our side, waiting for us to call upon Him so that He can heal and prosper us (Jeremiah 29:11). It’s what any father would want for his ailing child, and God is not just any Father.
I disagree with the popular belief that everything happens for a reason. I can’t find a single good reason for which anyone should have to endure violence, starvation, or the loss of motivation to live, can you? The best answer I can come up with is that horrible events are the unfortunate results of people seeking after their sinful desires instead of God's good and perfect will. So the next time you find yourself struggling to move forward in life, instead of blaming God, I encourage you to call upon Him, asking for endurance and guidance so that you can rise above the adversity and develop your character to be more like Him (Romans 5:2-5). For in this world of suffering and madness, maybe God is good-will hunting in you, so that you can be the miracle in someone else’s life. Maybe…just maybe.
David Koh is currently serving the Greater New York area as an ambassador for Christ. He enjoys discovering new depths to God's love and dispelling notions of an arbitrary God of appeasement.