Outlaw Christian: Finding Authentic Faithናሙና

Sick of Hearing “God Has a Plan”? Surprise! God is Too

Have religious folks ever tossed clichés at you when you were grieving? If they did, then whether they knew it or not, those folks were doing theology by constructing a theodicy. Theodicy is a shiny twenty-five-cent vocabulary word with a very simple meaning. A theodicy is a justification of God’s goodness, justice, and omnipotence in the face of the world’s radical evil and suffering.

Theodicy struggles to explain how all of the following three claims can be simultaneously true: First, that God is perfectly good, loving, and just; second, that God is all-powerful; and third, that evil and suffering exist in the world (in extraordinarily large quantities). Theodicy addresses the timeless quandary: How can we continue to believe in a God who is Love in a world where we experience so much evil and hurt?

Do theodicies comfort you in your darkest moments of grief? When your friends, coworkers, and family members said these theodicies to you in the past, did their words make you feel better? Or did they just make you more miserable, further from God than ever? For many people, though they may never confess it, the answer is no, these pious clichés do not bring comfort.

Job’s words here remind us that miserable comforters—who 99 percent of the time are sitting pretty and not suffering themselves—make themselves feel safe from contingency by always asserting that people get what they deserve. Like many of us, Job’s friends want to believe that their good fortune is earned, which means that by extension, everyone else’s bad fortune has to be earned as well.

When we spew clichés about suffering, we act like we are defending God, but really this is a ruse. In actuality, we are defending ourselves and our own relative prosperity. Outlaw Christians are wise to this trick and can spot it in themselves as well as others.

The next time you are suffering and feel your chest being mortared by theological clichés about “God’s plan,” please remember that you are not, and were never, alone. The book of Job shows us that even God rejects these painful clichés as not speaking rightly. We owe each other more than clichés masquerading as compassion. We owe each other—and God—nothing less than ourselves.