A marathon effects more than the city it’s in. My friend
Kohon mentioned this marathon effected more people and countries then anyone
can imagine. Boston has a strict time guideline in order to qualify for the
race, some marathoners spend their whole lives trying to qualify for one of the
races on their Bucket List. People from all over the United States and the world
come to Boston.
Before two reconstructive knee surgeries, I had the goal of
running the Boston (Boston is the one of the only marathons that require a
qualifying time, I could not make the time cut yet). My time for the marathon
was about the time the explosion went off. Long past my marathons days as I
look at this tragedy as a minister of Jesus and see the hurt that people post
from this. It’s a sad state and often people ask why would a loving God allow
this to happen?
Throughout my time as a minister you see a lot of bad things
happen to people. Sometimes it’s when people are already down and something
worse happens. Haven’t they been punished enough? Then a tragedy like the Marathon
happens and people without understanding call out to God, why God why? To
answer this I am going to spend the rest of the time talking about suffering
and choice.
We all have a choice. There is something called the free
will defense that people a lot smarter then I came up with to explain when bad
things happen. The free will defense is this…
1. God is
absolutely perfect.
2. God
created only perfect creatures.
3. One of
the perfections God gave some of his creatures was the power of free choice.
4. Some
of these creatures freely choose to do evil.
5. Therefore,
a perfect creature caused evil.
Every day we have the choice to do good or bad. Which do you
choose? Today do you choose to go to work/school or the bar/or skip? It’s a
choice an individual makes that can affect other people. We make thousands of
choices every day that directly affect us and the people around us some
directly and some indirectly. The people that chose to do this in Boston, chose
to do evil. Their choice affected people all over the world for this
international event.
Even with free will, why do people have to suffer? This is a
tough question that you can look at with other questions. If God stopped all
evil right now what would that look like? If God destroyed everything that
caused unjust suffering and evil – what would survive? We can all do evil and
that is where we struggle with sin. Suffering might cause us to be protected
from an even deeper evil.
Not all suffering can be bad or evil, it can be pain.
Sometimes in life we have to suffer to experience something great. I haven’t
met a women who has cherished child birth but you love the result when you get
that awesome gift of God in your hands. You sometimes have to suffer and endure
hardships to get where you want to go in life (School, strict training, unpaid
internship etc).
This doesn’t explain the event in Boston but hopefully you
would understand a loving God does not want tragedies like this to happen in
the world he created. While things like this do happen, sadly. God gave us
Jesus to comfort us during these tough times. God is a loving and just God who
cares about the people and I am sure is sad over this tragic event.
Through our lives we have a loving God who sacrificed his
only son Jesus for us. Jesus took all of our sins and died for us. Through the
bad things in life Jesus loves you cares for you and is sad when you are down.
Through the suffering Jesus is always there with you. You can always go to him
with your problems.
