Where is God in a Coronavirus World? by John Lennox

Author:John Lennox
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: The Good Book Company

WHY THINGS ARE THE WAY THEY ARE

Think of it this way. When God created human beings to live in his “very good” creation, he endowed them with the marvellous gift of free will that made them into moral beings. Because of that, there was a possibility of moral breakdown through misuse of that freedom. And that is what happened—as the third chapter of the first book of the Bible, Genesis, so vividly depicts.

Genesis 3 says that human disobedience arose from a fundamental disagreement with God over the nature of life and the serious possibility of death. God had explicitly warned the first humans, Adam and Eve, that if they ate fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which he had told them was off limits—in other words, if they acted in downright disobedience to him and independence of him—then they would certainly die (Genesis 2 v 17).

We need not discuss what the nature of the fruit of the tree was, or to wonder what quality it must have had so that eating it should produce the knowledge of good and evil. To interpret it that way is to miss the point of the story. To eat from any tree—indeed, to do anything at all, from whatever motive—that is contrary to the will and word of our Creator and the Ruler of this world is itself lawlessness. It is a frame of mind that asserts the creature’s will against the Creator’s—that pushes the Creator aside and makes central to everything the pursuit of one’s own egotistical interests and interpretation of life. That is, in principle, what “sin” is.

And sin, as God warned those humans, automatically leads to death. There is nothing wrong with physical enjoyment or aesthetic pleasure in themselves—nor with the acquiring of moral wisdom and knowledge. But to suppose that these things are the sum total of life—to suppose that, as long as one can enjoy them, one can enjoy life to the full, independently of God and in neglect or defiance of his word—is a fundamental and tragic deception. God is not only the source of all the good things we enjoy; he is the supreme good that gives ultimate meaning and significance to all the lesser good gifts he gives us.

What happened in Genesis 3 was that the humans rejected God, and sin entered the world. The consequences were huge. There was death—first in the spiritual sense of a rift in the relationship between humans and God, and, later, physical death.

Moreover, nature itself was fractured by that same event—and that takes us back at once to our main theme. Genesis tells us that, upon their rebellion, though humans had to leave God’s presence, they were not immediately ejected from their role of administrating the earth under God. They were allowed to keep their job of developing the earth’s potential. At the same time, however, “creation was subjected [by God] to ineffectiveness, not through its own fault, but because of him who subjected it” (Romans 8 v 20).

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