February 24, 2020 - Twice Nuked
In a book called The Last Train to Hiroshima, Charles Pellegrino wrote about a newly married Japanese man who, somehow, survived the Hiroshima bombing though his bride didn’t. However gruesome the process, he gathered her charred bones and put them in covered bowl to bring to her parents, who lived in Nagasaki. He got there, with bowl of bones, just in time to get nuked again. And, amazingly enough, he survived again, only—just as the first blast turned his wife to bones, the second blew open the top of the bowl and these bones vanished.
“All this way! All this way,” he cried out, “and her bones are scattered who knows where—and to what purpose?”
To what purpose? Who hasn’t, at times, asked themselves the same question? To what purpose all that we go through, or to go all this way—and then what? Utter, at times, utter futility—or at least that’s how it seems.
How do we make sense of the evil around us? The answer is we don’t make sense of it because it’s not sensible, rational, logical. It’s evil; it never should have been here to begin with. There’s a fancy theological term called “Theodicy.” It means the justification of God amid so much evil. But the term is important: theodicy is the justification of God, not the justification of evil.
And the only place we can find this justification is at the cross, where the greatest evil ever occurred, for there the sinless Son of God died for the sins of everyone else. Or, as Ellen White wrote near the end of The Great Controversy: “Never will it be forgotten that He whose power created and upheld the unnumbered worlds through the vast realms of space, the Beloved of God, the Majesty of heaven, He whom cherub and shining seraph delighted to adore—humbled Himself to uplift fallen man; that He bore the guilt and shame of sin, and the hiding of His Father's face, till the woes of a lost world broke His heart and crushed out His life on Calvary's cross. That the Maker of all worlds, the Arbiter of all destinies, should lay aside His glory and humiliate Himself from love to man will ever excite the wonder and adoration of the universe.
As the nations of the saved look upon their Redeemer and behold the eternal glory of the Father shining in His countenance; as they behold His throne, which is from everlasting to everlasting, and know that His kingdom is to have no end, they break forth in rapturous song: ‘Worthy, worthy is the Lamb that was slain, and hath redeemed us to God by His own most precious blood!’”
