History Is Not a Moral Scoreboard - We are Not God’s Referees
Introduction There is a very human instinct, when something bad happens to someone, to wonder what they did to deserve it. And there is an equally human instinct, when we read the harsher parts of the Old Testament, the sudden deaths, the divine punishments, the apparent scorekeeping, to feel that we understand what is going on: God is rewarding the good and punishing the bad, and we are meant to learn from that. Both instincts feel reasonable; they can even feel religious. But when we take the Gospels seriously, when we let Jesus Christ be the lens through which we read everything else, something unexpected happens. It puts real pressure on them both. Again and again, in His words and in His parables, Jesus dispels the idea that we can read God's verdicts off the surface of events, or that we are qualified to do that kind of reading. This is not comfortable, but it’s deeply reassuring. It means that no suffering person need wonder whether God is punishing them. And it mean...