Why Tragedy? Series

Elie Wiesel, who survived Hitler's blood bath for the Jews, as

devoted his life to telling the world of this tragedy that he feels

surpasses hell in its horrors. His books have motivated others to

write so that there now exists a holocaust literature. There are books,

plays, articles, and poems, about history's most unbelievable tragedy,

which is the brutal murder of six million Jews. Wiesel did not see the

entire million children who were killed, but he saw enough so that he

was never the same. He wrote:

"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has

turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven

times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget

the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into

wreathes of smoke beneath the silent blue sky."

In another place he wrote that people tend to think that a

murderer weakens when facing a child. The child reawakens the

killers lost humanity and he can't go through with it. But it didn't

happen. "Our Jewish children had no effect upon the killers. Nor

upon the world, nor upon God." The result was that Wiesel did not

respond like Job, but like Satan expected Job to respond. Wiesel

wrote, "Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith

forever. How can a Jew say anything religious thereafter?"

Wiesel survived the tragedy but his faith did not. He could not

understand how God could allow evil to be so powerful, and so he

concluded that God does not care. This is the test that Satan put Job

through many centuries earlier. All ten of his children were wiped out

in one blow, and all of his wealth was destroyed the same day. Job

also endured a holocaust. His dream world was shattered by a

nightmare, and his ideal family was instantly reduced to no family at

all.

There is obviously something wrong in a world where things like

this can happen. If tragedy was just an isolated incident here and

there, and limited to the bad guys, we could go along with Job's

friends, and the problem of suffering would be easily solved. But

tragedy does not have any respect of persons. The Jonestown

massacre was not a mafia convention, but over 900 mostly innocent

people. They were women and children, many of whom were good

and godly. The worse airplane crash in American history did not go

down with a load of pimps and prostitutes, but with respectable

citizens, some of whom were God's children. War, famine, and

terrorism are snuffing out the lives of thousands every year, and

disease takes a terrible toll, and in all cases the good guys as well as

the bad are victims.

If the problem of suffering in this world does not bother you, you

are yourself suffering from hardening of the heart, or softening of the

brain. Those who study Job's sufferings, and the tragedies of the

world are forced to consider the subject called Theodicy. Theodicy is

the justification of the ways of God to men. There have been many

books written on this area of theology. Joni's second book, A Step

Further is a Theodicy, and it is a good one. Many feel that the book of

Job itself is a Theodicy. A Theodicy strives to show that as bad as

things are, God is good and He is in control, and evil is not winning the

battle. A Theodicy is the defense of God in a world where evil often

seems to dominate.

The book of Job opens up the window of heaven, and enables us to

see the problem of suffering from a broader perspective. Job himself

did not see what we can see. He had to go through his tragedy

believing that God was the sole cause of it all. Life is so much harder

when you have only a partial perspective. Most of the ways we explain

suffering are only partial, and none of them fit every situation. A wife

comes to consol and you are not long in listening to her story before

you could watch her husband hang with a smile on your face. Then he

comes in and tells his side, and you wonder why there is nobody taking

a collection to hang his picture in the hall of fame for endurance. The

point is, when you see life only from one side you have a distorted

view. We have a distorted view of most of life, and especially life's

tragedies.

The first thing the book of Job does for us is give us an insight into

the conflict in heaven that explains some of the tragedy on earth. God

gives us a wider perspective so we can avoid the partial perspective of