God is Our Loving Heavenly Father, Not Our Loving Heavenly Grandfather

God the Father by Cima da Conegliano, c. 1515

Some people point to life’s harsh reality as evidence that God could not exist. The suffering that is so prevalent in the world — from hunger, disease, natural disaster, and human carelessness or cruelty — is simply not compatible in some minds with what an all-powerful, loving God would allow to happen. But just because something doesn’t conform to our expectations doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. It probably means that we need to change our expectations.

After all, we could make the same argument about our parents. There is a famous story in my family about when I accompanied my mom to a store. She told me that I could have one toy that cost $2. What I wanted, though, was an Voltron robot that cost $20. My mom wouldn’t buy it for me, so I resorted to the tactic that most kids resort to when they don’t get their way: I cried. I wailed. I bawled. But my mom didn’t relent. She dragged me screaming through the store, gathered what she had come to buy, and checked out. Listening to me, you would have thought that I was being tortured to death (and I probably felt like I was). We left the store and I got nothing, not even the two dollar toy.

How could my mother, who claimed to love me, allow me to suffer like that? And how could she break her word about allowing me to have a toy? If we thought that her job as a mother was simply to make me happy, then we would think that she was a total failure. But we know that a parent’s job is not simply to make their child happy. If that were a parent’s job, no child would ever grow up. Sure they would grow up in the physical sense, but they would never mature into real adults. (We’d have nothing but adults who behave like this.)

So, why would we think that God’s job, if he existed, was simply to make us happy? C.S. Lewis put it this way in The Problem of Pain:

What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, ‘What does it matter so long as they are contented?’ We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven—a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see young people enjoying themselves’, and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all’.

God’s purpose is much grander than “a good time was had by all.” His work and glory is the “immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39). Why should his methods of accomplishing that purpose conform to the methods of a senile benevolence who only wanted us to be contented?

Getting back to my mother, she also had a higher purpose than my mere contentment. When we got out to the car and I had calmed down, she looked at me and asked a few questions. Was that fun? No. Did I get anything? No. Did I learn something? Yes.

And that was the point of her cruelty (from my perspective). I don’t intend to minimize human suffering or say that me not getting a toy is the same as people dying from disease and starvation. What I intend to say is that just as I had to change my perspective to understand — and even appreciate — my mother’s actions, I suspect that we need to change our perspectives in order to understand God and his actions. Because as God himself put it, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways” (Isaiah 55:8).

At the very least, we should try to understand the world — and the suffering so prevalent in it — from God’s perspective before we dismiss him completely.