My son and a few of his little friends spent a couple of days last week putting together a 6-minute film. They worked on it 48 hours straight, in fact, as part of the I-48 film fest in Boise. Last year, their team actually won an award, and they had high hopes this time around, but alas, all their hard work was overlooked on Saturday. But it was definitely a good effort in the sci-fi category.Afterwards, we went out for Mexican food downtown, planning to go see the Boise Burn play arena football later. The weather seemed fine went we went in; not so much while we were leaving. I don't ever remember it raining quite as hard as it did then, and I've lived in Boise almost twenty years now. We were completely soaked, and I mean drenched as if we had taken a 10-minute shower with our clothes on. The football game was over by the time we started to dry out.
In the midst of the downpour, I got to thinking about something Jesus said once about God: "He sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous" (Matthew 5:45). Maybe this seems like a stretch, then again maybe not, but it occurred to me that there's just no way to tell from outward appearances the difference between the "bad guys" and the "good guys," at least not all the time. We had a discussion in class not long ago about this point as it relates to "cosmic justice." On the one hand, eastern religions often tend to weigh in on cosmic justice in terms of karma and reincarnation. By looking at one lifetime, it may not appear that justice is somehow served: seemingly good people get hurt, and seemingly bad people get away with hurting others. But if the big picture includes multiple lifetimes, then justice is ultimately met because everyone gets exactly what they deserve, nothing more and nothing less, according to this view.
Judaism and Christianity provide a different perspective here. In our class, I mentioned the familiar story of Job, and how, in spite of all his suffering, God never exactly gave him a straight answer as to why he had to go through the ordeal. One way to sum up the story is to say that no answer (for now) is better than the wrong answer. With all due respect to those who embrace reincarnation as a fitting answer to the question of cosmic justice, in my opinion it is too neat and too simple. H.L. Mencken's famous quote may apply here: "For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, elegant...and wrong." As I see it, all Job had been hearing from his friends at the beginning of the book were answers that were "simple" and "elegant." Job had sinned, his friends believed, and therefore he was getting exactly what he deserved. But in the end, God's silence was to be preferred to their wrong answers. "I know that my Redeemer lives," he said (Job 19:25), and even if appearances may seem to totally contradict that belief, trust that God ultimately will bring about justice (but he may not provide easy answers in the meantime) is what matters most.
