Up to Something Good?

Trying to make sense of the hairpin turns of life... I took this picture last month in the Columbia Gorge"My days just keep getting more and more interesting. God really must be up to something good to make Satan oh-so-angry."

I spotted the status update on Facebook recently, written by a student who dropped out of our university to go door-to-door witnessing. I have been musing ever since on the view of God represented in her comment. Some assumptions lurk there that make me really uncomfortable.

First of all, is God always up to something in our lives? Many of us like to think that God is in the mundane, but sometimes the mundane is just that--washing the dishes, scrubbing the toilet, pulling weeds out of the garden, cooking rice for supper. Sure, it can be done with a prayer in the heart and a song on the lips (or the other way around), but it's still mundane. God doesn't tend to be up to anything "interesting" when I'm doing these things. At least, not anything more interesting than the miracle of life going on in every cell of my body, and the ability for my neurons to fire off in connection with my thinking patterns and ideas.

Once you accept that God may not be active--but always present--in the mundane, you open the door a crack to a deistic view of events. God's there, but He may have set us ticking and gone off for quite a while, intervening only on rare occasion, if at all. I don't believe that, so that puts me somewhere on the continuum between "God in everything" and "God afar off." Where?

Then there's the issue of Satan. In the old testament Satan doesn't show up much. God gets the blame for blessings and the ills of life. People weren't saying, "When good is happening, God is doing it," or "When something bad is happening, Satan is doing it." This put God on the hot seat for a lot of blame. Then again, God still gets a lot of blame from people who believe that if there is a God, He has an awful lot of ugliness to answer for.

Another bothersome thing about the God-and-Satan thing is the picture most kids pick up; at least, my friends and I picked this up, and I think my former student whose quote provoked me to this post has picked up the same picture of God. This is the belief that God is strong, and Satan is strong, but God's at least a tiny bit stronger than Satan, so we needn't worry in the end. From there it's a little jump--supported by scriptures--to the idea that God is active in our world, and Satan is active in our world, and everything that happens to us (or in this world) is just one more event in the cosmic struggle between the two. People become quite intrigued with this concept of a "shadow war" between good and evil forces going on all around us. They don't see it, but they look to place every event into the context of this unseen battle.

Is every event really part of "the war?" When something is falling apart in my world, is that an indication that "God is up to something good to make Satan oh-so-angry?"

I don't believe that when I stumbled in the deep drainage ditch as a 12-year old and gashed my shin down to the bone, that either Satan was oh-so-angry, or that God was up to something. When I get the flu and I can't give as much to my work in a crucial time, does that mean that Satan is oh-so-angry? If something is going really well and my spiritual life is just popping with insights, does that mean I should watch out because God is up to something good, and I'd better be prepared for Satan to do something oh-so-angry?

I'm trying to put my finger on what it is that doesn't connect for me about this: "God must be up to something good to make Satan oh-so-angry." So let me put the logic of my former student's statements in bullet points.

• If bad things happen, Satan is angry.
• If bad things don't happen, Satan must be comfortable, and therefore you must not be close to God.
• If bad things happen, God must be at work.
• If God is at work with good things, watch out, because Satan will start to wreak havoc.

I have a really hard time accepting these inherent views of God and Satan. I think there are lots of reasons why some days "just keep getting more and more interesting," seeming like evil is threatening to destroy. Here are some of them:

• It's a dangerous world. You can get hurt by all kinds of things (speeding cars, drainage ditches that you don't see, walking into a chair in the dark and getting a bruise). That's just the nature of a physical world where things move...or won't move. It's not necessarily a supernatural act.
• It's a sick world. Cells mutate. Cancer spreads. Embryos experience incidents that cause them to develop abnormally. While I would buy the idea that something introduced sickness into the universe, I think illness has a way of taking on a life of its own without directly rising from a supernatural act. In other words, it can just show up without being a tool of Satan deciding in this particular instance to smite you.
  
• It's a world in which one act causes another. Load the top drawer of a filing cabinet or bookshelf first, and it's likely to fall over on you. Be mean to someone and they're likely to be mean back. Leave the milk products out too long before putting them into what you're cooking, and you may get food poisoning. These are not the results of supernatural acts.

Before I pick up some kind of ill-fitting label, let me say that I do think there are times when God intervenes. And I think there are times that evil intervenes. I just don't think we can say for sure, or even state a likelihood, as to when that is happening. Explaining this universe is not that simple. I hang on to the hope that someday, going into eternity, all will become clear. Because frankly, just like my former student, I'm ready to get some explanations.