A Look at Suffering - Part Two - God's Blueprint?

In Is God To Blame? Boyd tells us a story of a woman, Melanie.  Melanie wanted to be a mother more than anything in the world.  She married later in life and to make sure they had a family they immediately began trying to have a baby.  Though, later, they found out that it would be near impossible for Melanie to conceive due to a medical condition.

But, just when they were about to give up hope - Melanie became pregnant!

All went well with the pregnancy...until the birth.  Due to complications, the baby die during child birth.

To say Melanie and her husband were devastated is clearly and understatement.  Melanie fell into a depression.

To look for answers Melanie turned to a respected Bible teacher they knew.

The answer she got was what she expected:  God has a reason for everything.  There are no accidents in God's providence.  The hand that smites is the hand that heals.  You just have to trust him."

Melanie further asked what good God might have intended with this tragedy.  She was told, "When God's timing is right, and when you have learned what you are meant to learn, God might bless you with another child.  Or it wasn't HIS WILL for you to have children." (emphasis mine)

Boyd learned of Melanie's situation when she came to him for help.  Not in understanding "why" she lost her baby, now she wanted to figure out what lesson God wanted her to learn.

Is it any wonder that Melanie lost her zeal, her love for not only God, but of life?

But that was Melanie's picture of God.  That is many people's picture of God.

Even I had that picture of God.  An all powerful, all knowing God that, if he wanted could stop ANY and ALL tragedies that happen - thus if a tragedy did happen, God had a very good reason to LET it happen.

Many people have lost their passion for God because their picture of God does not foster passion.  They believe, as Boyd writes, "Everything that happens (in the world) would be the working out of His plan."

Including Melanie's tragedy.

Yet, I'm guessing like me, you have a difficult time embracing that view.  "Accepting" the knowledge that God would actually WILL something like that to happen to someone, anyone.

After all, Boyd says, "How can God be all-powerful and not always get his way?"  How could His will NOT be accomplished?

Or how do we "reconcile the picture of God as Jesus Christ with the picture other passages seem to paint?"

These questions are the result of what Boyd calls the Blueprint Worldview.  The belief that EVERYTHING that happens in the world has a specific divine reason - God's reason, God's grand, secret plan.

A belief that even I, in part at the very least, subscribed to.

Though, I couldn't ever seem to make it completely FIT with what I saw in Jesus.

Boyd offers us a different perspective, picture, of God: Warfare Worldview.

Instead of a God with a grand blueprint of life, God is engaged in a battle, a war, with many forces opposing (even thwarting) His will.

To discover this "new" view of God we will have to start at...where else?

...In the Beginning...