“The Dark Side of God”
by C.S. Cowles
On April 20th, 1999, two teenage boys shot 12 of their fellow high school students and a teacher before turning the guns on themselves. One of these students was Cassie Bernal, 17, who was shot to death while reading her Bible in the school library. The day after the shooting, Cassie’s mother told reporters that the shooting somehow fit into God’s larger plan.
“In order to get Cassie’s message out, and to make the impact that needed to be made and bring the changes that need to be made in our world, it had to be something really big.”
On May 27th, 2001, the year long hostage crisis involving Martin and Gracia Burham, American missionaries in the Philippines ended in a barrage of bullets. Martin was killed, Gracia was rescued. Before undergoing a surgery for a gunshot wound, Gracia said that her husband’s death was part of God’s plan. Upon hearing the news, her sister responded “We have known all along that God was in control. Nothing takes God by surprise.”
On June 20th, 2001, Andrea Yates, “devoted Christian wife” and mother, systematically drowned her five children, even chasing down her oldest, who was 7, when he saw what was going on and tried to run away. At the memorial service, their father, Russell, touched each small casket and said through his tears, “If the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, that is exactly what He has done. He gave me all these children, and now He is taking them away.”
For more than 30 years, Joni Erickson Tada has been a beacon of inspiration and hope to millions of believers. Before live audiences and in many of her books and her daily radio program that is aired through 850 outlets, she never tires in attributing her diving accident at 17, which paralyzed her below the neck, to God’s loving sovereignty. It was His way of rescuing her from a path of self destruction.
During the same year in which “A Purpose Driven Life” was published, Rick Warren’s life was struck by tragedy. From the hospital room where he had moved to be with his wife in her fierce battle with cancer, he sent a Christmas letter to his church body. “This year will be the first Christmas eve services that my wife and I have missed in Sattleback’s 23 years. I have prepared a message entitled, ‘When God messes up your plans’.
There is something imminently praiseworthy about Christians wanting to give glory to God, not only in good times, but in bad. Yet, integrity compels us to ask, if God incited two teenage boys to shoot up their school, if God directed bullets to fatally injure one of His dedicated missionaries, if God compelled a young mother to drown her 5 children, if God arranged the accident that broke a beautiful teenager’s neck, if God inspired Osama Bin Laden to plan the September 11, 2001 attacks and guided the hands of the hijackers as they slit the throats of the pilots and flew their airliners into the prearranged targets, killing over 3,000 innocent people, if God planned that certain children would be born into homes where they would know nothing but beatings, sexual abuse, abandonment, and starvation, and custom made others to be retarded, autistic, and horribly deformed physically, if God messes up a well known pastor’s plans by afflicting his wife with cancer, if all the heart attacks, crippling illnesses, diseases, plagues, accidents, bankruptcies, divorces, natural disasters, wars and untimely deaths that have reeked havoc throughout history and continue to devastate and destroy human beings are God’s doing, then who needs Satan?
