The Lord taketh?

"The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away." It was Job who said that, I think. Dude was having a hard go of it, what with all his kids dying and all. And he says, The Lord did this!

No attitude can be farther from modern evangelicalism in America than this. We're all about the Lord giveth, but it is not possible, apparently for the Lord to taketh away, at least he wouldn't do that to good, praying Christians.

We just don't go there. It seems to indicate a lack of faith.

That the Lord takes away is a very hard lesson. We want to say that it is the devil who takes away. We live and pray as if the verse said, The Lord giveth, and the devil taketh away (that is if we don't pray enough, obey enough, go to church enough, etc.).

Just listen to the way we pray for people who have life-threatening conditions. The language we use often reveals that we believe that there is a battle between God and the devil for the life of the person in question. The devil brought the life-threatening condition, but we're praying for God to win the battle and restore health to the person. Moreover, we're to believe God will do this, because that's what faith is all about, right? Believing God will do the good thing that we desire.

It's as if we see ourselves as under God's umbrella, which protects us from the rain of hard things. But if illness and death are threatening, that must mean that for some mysterious reason (owing no doubt to the devil) the umbrella wasn't protecting us.

Of course all this sets us up for a major faith crisis when a loved one dies. Instead of God taketh away we cry, How could God let this happen!

I am not, by the way, arguing for stoicism. Job was no stoic. But I'm wondering aloud how the truth that it is God who takes life away (as well as gives life) should affect how we think and pray and live.

In Genesis 3 God actually ordains hardship and mortality for Adam and Eve and their descendants. Which means us. Jesus didn't rescind that order for believers, but his mission and ministry, his life and death and resurrection, taken together, shows us the ultimate context of suffering and death in this world. We see death in a new light. The context is not a battle between the devil and God in which sometimes God wins (and we live) and sometimes the devil (and we die). We need to see our own sorrow, pain, hardship, and even our dying in the context of the God's unfolding redemptive plan, which by the way defeated death as an enemy (for those who "look to Jesus") back about 2000 years ago, on a hill called Calvary.