Security check: does God protect us?

SOME PASSAGES in scripture seem to promise God's protection for the good and the faithful. For example, Psalm 121 says: "I lift up my eyes to the hills--from where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber." And Psalm 37 says, "Trust in the Lord, and do good; so you will live in the land, and enjoy security."

Jesus speaks in similar ways when he tells the woman with a hemorrhage, "Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease" (Mark 5:34). Because she has faith she is healed (but does that mean the converse also applies--if we are not healed, it is because we did not have faith?).

If we were to take these passages alone, we might come to believe, almost as a guarantee, that if we trust God, God will protect or heal us from all harm. While there is a strand of thought in the Bible that implies this, it is hardly the dominant strand, and on its own it does not give the whole picture. Indeed, on its own it can have terrible theological consequences.

Think, for instance, of the story of Job. After Job has lost his livestock, his children and his health, his friends come to give comfort. After seven days of silence they begin to speak, reiterating the common wisdom found in Psalms and Proverbs--that the good will flourish and the evil will suffer. Job, however, has not sinned. Job is innocent, yet he suffers. The friends have no theological categories to make sense of such innocent suffering. At the end of the book, God vindicates Job and tells the friends, "My wrath is kindled against you ... for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has done" (Job 42:7). The book of Job complicates the issues of suffering and divine protection. Clearly, God does not always deliver the good from suffering; indeed, sometimes it is our goodness itself that leads us to suffer.

Dave, a friend of mine from graduate school, lost his twin brother, Steve, to cancer. While struggling against the aggressive disease, Steve received a letter from a Christian woman telling him that she knew it was God's will for him to be miraculously healed. All he had to do was believe. Far from providing comfort, the letter struck Steve like a hot iron of judgment. If he were not healed, she implied, it would be his own fault. This woman thought of divine providence in terms of control and protection. Because she assumed that God controls all events, she had to create a justification for God's apparent inaction in this case. Her attempt to keep God blameless led her to place blame on Steve--God was ready to do the right thing if only Steve had enough faith. Though he had become very weak, Steve wanted to write a letter in response, so Dave recorded the words that Steve slowly struggled to express:

I share your faith in the almighty power of God to heal and sustain us. There may be times, though, when God's greatest miracle is not the miracle of physical healing, but the miracle of giving us strength in the face of suffering. Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 12 that he prayed God would remove a thorn in the flesh, but God answered simply, "My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness ... for when I am weak, then am I strong." Also, Jesus prayed in the garden that he might not suffer, but it was God's will, and he faced that suffering with a perfect faith.

As I read the Bible, God's promise is to remove all our suffering in the next life, though not necessarily in this one. In this world, we will sometimes weep, suffer and die. But in the New Jerusalem, "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away" (Rev. 2:14).

I sincerely hope that if my cancer continues to grow, no one will see it as a failure of my faith in God, but that perhaps people can see me as faithful even if I die while I am still young. I do not claim to understand God's will, but I do know that I am in God's hands, whether in life or in death.

The woman's letter to Steve was an exercise in bad theology, though it may have been written with the best of intentions. She mistook God's promise to provide for a guarantee to protect, and once she had done that, she could only lay the blame for Steve's cancer at his own feet. Once she had ruled out the possibility that the cancer could result from chance or misfortune (and her understanding of providence left no room for contingency), she assumed that someone had to be blamed for the illness. This perverse theological form of adding insult to injury results from misunderstanding the connection between providence and security. Providence does not guarantee protection; rather, it assures us of God's provision (making a way for us to go on) and redemption (restoring what is lost along the way).