May/June 2002
The End of the Story
by J. Michael Feazell
| But as I struggle to cope with the tragedies of life, I can share a couple of things that I think God has shown me. |
Where is God when bad things happen? When I think of the question, I cannot help but recall the tragic experience in April, 1997, when Anthony Martinez, a 10-year-old boy in the little Southern California desert city of Beaumont, was abducted from an alley behind his home while playing with friends. A nationwide search ensued, and for the next two weeks, news agencies reported prayer vigils and interviewed grief-stricken but hopeful family members, friends and community members. Residents of Beaumont posted flyers and tied yellow ribbons on trees.
I remember my own heartfelt prayers, like those of so many others, that this innocent boy would soon be found safe and unharmed. Many expressed publicly their earnest belief that God was hearing all the prayers and that Anthony would soon be home.
But when Anthony Martinez was finally found 15 agonizing days after his abduction, he was dead, under a pile of rocks in the desert, his ankles and wrists bound by duct tape. When I opened the newspaper the morning after and read the headline, I was stunned. I didn't understand it. I felt rage. I felt helplessness. I felt let down by God.
Why did God let this happen? Why didn't he do something? Where is God anyway? How does the love of God fit with such an atrocity?
A lot of questions come flooding into mind, questions like whether God has any idea what it's like for a family to go through something like this -- to know your child is missing. To be praying and crying out in faith that God will do something to save an innocent child. And then to have him found bound and dead?
The day after reading about Anthony, I heard a radio news report about a 12-year-old girl in Texas who had been kidnapped, and had just been found dead in a pond.
I thought of the killing fields of Cambodia. I thought of massacres of Native Americans and of white settlers. I thought of African men and women chained in the dark holds of ships crossing the Atlantic to be sold like animals into a life of slavery. I thought of Antiochus Ephiphanes, Genghis Khan, Adolph Hitler and Nero. I thought of Charles Manson, of the night stalker, of the hillside strangler and the zodiak killer.
I didn't have any answers then, and I still don't today. But as I struggle to cope with the tragedies of life, I can share a couple of things that I think God has shown me.
One thing I've been reminded of is that sin is very bad and produces bad things. That's why God hates sin. What Anthony's killer did was sin. And sin is what got him in the condition to go that far with his selfish passion to control and possess someone else's life. Our world is broken and corrupt because of sin. It doesn't operate the way God made it.
Another thing I've learned is that God, in fact, does do something about it. Not only does God do something about it, he came down and partook of it. It's natural to ask, and a lot of people do: "Doesn't God know what it's like down here?" And the answer is, yes, he does. He let the natural state of the world have its way with him too. Angry, jealous, corrupt people lied about him, took advantage of him, discredited him, humiliated him and murdered him.
But Jesus' tortured body hanging on a Roman cross was not the end of the story. He rose again to life. And because he rose, so we will rise.
The God who defeated death will raise Anthony Martinez from the dead. Sin and death only seem to have won the victory. But their victory is only an illusion. The war was won 2,000 years ago -- no, even before that -- before the foundation of the world. And in the victory over sin and death of our suffering God, all the prisoners will be set free.
Because God loves us, sin doesn't finally win the day. Sin may get its way for a while, but by the power of Jesus' death and resurrection, the final victory is ours.
-- J. Michael Feazell